Only women menstruate

Sue me or lock me up, I won't redefine 'woman'.

Sometimes I feel like I am repeating myself here but then I remember there are new people coming to this situation every day and that in an ideological crisis of this magnitude, things probably bear a bit of repeating. As a writer I also have to believe that, just as words and language have got us into this mess, words and language can get us out of it. So…here are some more of those words.

Yesterday a crowd funder was launched by Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley, lawyer in the civil service and co-chair of the SEEN network, who is being sued for saying, amongst other things, that ‘only women menstruate’.

You can read a full explanation of the case and donate to the crowdfund, via this link.

At the same time that this law suit is happening, the Scottish government is introducing new ‘hate crime’ laws on April 1st, criminalises threatening or abusive behaviour which is intended to stir up hatred against someone who possesses, or appears to possess, the following characteristics: age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics sometimes known as being intersex.

Race is not on this list because racial hatred was already illegal.

Sex is not on this list because…well, I could quote JKR here and say, “Times change, woman-hate is eternal”, but apparently it’s because the Scottish government plan to introduce separate legislation to cover misogyny.

In the meantime, critics of the new laws such as the SMP Joanna Cherry KC say it not only leaves women open to hate crime themselves, but potentially criminalises gender critical women who could be prosecuted for stating facts such as ‘trans women are men’ or ‘only women menstruate’.

Basic biological facts have now become ‘hateful’ because of changes to the definition of words - in particular the word ‘woman’ - that feminists are fighting every day to challenge.

These changes to the definitions of words are pushed for the loudest and hardest by male people who want to be accepted as women in a 100% literal sense. This acceptance then allows them to compete in women’s sports, access women’s spaces, be the ‘first woman’ to achieve a particular thing, and be asked to speak on panels about the female experience or make pop songs about their ‘girlhood’.

In spite of the fact that these changes to the definitions of words are all in the service of men who want to be women, the changes have had support in - at first glance - the unlikeliest of places, the female dominated worlds of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and menstruation.

I say ‘at first glance’, because it quickly becomes very clear why female biology is being colonised and erased - because it’s real, in your face, bloody, messy evidence that women exist and that men can’t be women. So it must be ‘desexed’ - in language at least - so that it no longer belongs to women at all.

A couple of days ago a New Zealand branch of the organisation The Big Latch On (set up in 2005 to mobilise large groups of women to nurse in public and normalise breastfeeding) published a social media post about ‘chestfeeding’ with the following image.

The accompanying text states that ‘anyone can feed a baby from their body’.

I guess this depends on how you define the word ‘feed’, since no male person, however they identify, has ever been able to produce more than a trickle of fluid from their nipple after extensive efforts with drugs and pumps, enough for them to feel ‘affirmed’ in their ‘gender’, perhaps, but nowhere near enough to ‘feed’ a baby. In fact, only this week, a case was documented in which a trans identifying male gave up his attempts to feed his baby after just two weeks, due to being ‘exhausted’ and producing just 1% of the amount of milk required.

The Big Latch On also state that ‘people who have had top surgery’ can also breastfeed. By this they mean women who have had double mastectomies to ‘affirm their gender’ - but you cannot feed a baby after such surgery, and to say so is both misleading and potentially cruel.

Over in the world of menstruation, the organisation Bloody Good Period have published this instagram re-post this week, telling us that ‘some men have periods’.

So let’s be clear what they mean. When they say ‘some men’ they mean the female ones. They mean female people who identify as male. So they are changing the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ here. No longer descriptors of someone’s sex, man and woman are used here as identities that can be chosen or discarded.

To say ‘only women menstruate’ in this context, becomes at best, unkind, at worst, a hate crime. This is where the somewhat baffling accusations of ‘denying the existence of trans people’ come from - because saying ‘only women menstruate’ is interpreted as a transphobic statement meaning ‘trans men don’t exist’.

In fact, the dispute is not about the ‘existence’ of female people who wish to identify as men. The dispute is about the meanings of words, with sex realists, like myself, preferring to stick to the existing definitions, whilst at the same time acknowledging that people can identify, dress, live and love, absolutely as they wish.

This doesn’t make me hateful or a criminal, it just makes me fucking excellent at holding boundaries.

Sex realists, gender critical feminists, TERFs - call us what you will - can see that changing the definition of ‘woman’ can and is having an impact on women’s hard won rights. We can see that you cannot protect what you cannot define. We can see that words matter.

Why these leading organisations for women’s health are unable to see the damage they are doing is something of a puzzle. Even as NHS England has banned puberty blockers, UK doulas, midwives and period experts seem to be marching on determinedly, erasing references to women from every social media post they can. I document this phenomenon every week, and you can read the ones I documented last week, here.

The Word is Woman #28

It’s ironic that many of these organisations promote all things ‘natural’, encouraging women to decline epidurals, formula top-ups, and medical interventions, and extolling the virtues of the naturally produced hormones of labour. And yet at the same time they’ve all fallen hook line and sinker for an ideology that happily gives complex and distressed children a pill to stop their puberty that will almost certainly lead to their becoming lifetime medical patients.

Even if women’s hard won rights were not at stake, I would refuse to participate in this ideology on that basis alone. The rapidly unfolding medical scandal that will leave so many damaged young people in its wake is something I am keen to vocally object to and play no part in.

And changing the meanings of words is playing a part. A big part.

Which is why I, like so many other women, just won’t do it. And if this fight winds us up in court or being treated as criminals, we are here for it, standing shoulder to shoulder. Because reality is not hate, and we are not afraid to speak the truth.

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