The price of our womanhood is paid in blood, a price men cannot pay

This is a guest post. The author wishes to remain anonymous.

“This is a cracking piece. It should be shared with everyone and shouted from the rooftops.” – RA

It seems to me that at lot of men out there who blandly support trans “rights” to women’s spaces and places, and their “right” to be thought of as women need a lesson in female biology, and what it really means to be a woman.

Trans women are women, apparently, because they feel like one. How can they know what it feels like to be a women if they are not one? Because they feel like one? How many times do we go around this circle?

Let’s look at what the trans lobby call a “full transition”, a state where we are told their body fits with their feelings of womanhood. This conversion is extremely rare. Even if trans “women” take hormones to grow their own breasts, very few also have their penises cut off and inverted and then stuck up into surgically created hole to create what they call a “vagina”. But those that do are considered by the trans community to have achieved full transition.

They have a man’s body, maybe manicured and shaved, with a pair of breasts and a penis-sized cavity for sex with men.

That’s it.

Well if that isn’t a misogynist’s view of what women are I don’t know what else could be.

Blood is an inescapable part of being a woman

Let’s talk about blood. Gentlemen, the path to womanhood is covered in blood – our blood – and it is involuntary. I know you don’t like talking about this and have made it taboo, but the result is that you don’t understand what a woman is at all, and you appear to believe that breasts and a hole for sex with men is all that we are. You need an education.

Blood is a fact of womanhood, biologically inescapable womanhood. There is no choice about this enforced entry into womanhood, and if there were most of us would not go through it. The Samaritans was created by the clergyman who officiated at the funeral of a young woman who killed herself when she started her periods. The self-descriptive term “flooding” can be an early experience of a young woman’s monthly cycle. This is horrifying and deeply embarrassing for any girl. It often takes place in a girl’s school toilet – those places which you want boys to share.

Womankind is not a “lady brain”, it is not a liking for dressing up, or playing with dolls, it’s not even a sexual attraction to men or a difficulty with maths. Womanhood begins with an abrupt, messy and often painful awakening to our biological functioning as fertile adults. 

For those that do not know, girls discover blood, usually on the knickers, sometimes on their trousers and skirts or bed linen, blood that has come from their uterus because the egg in it was not fertilised. The bleeding can be fairly light and last for three days or more usually for five needing the changing of sanitary wear (tampons, towels or a mooncup) three or four times a day, and maybe at night when heavier precautions can also be taken, or it can last for over a week and need a change of serious sanitary wear every hour. This happens on average for one week in every four for about forty to fifty years.

Many women experience pain as the uterus contracts to expel the blood. Some women who lose a lot of blood can feel faint and weak. Of course there are also many complications to having a uterus which involve more blood and pain – let us not forget God is a man.

Fertility is female

This is our welcome to fertility, a condition that is central to women’s lives – whether or not we find we can have children – for most of our adult years. From now on most of us have the privilege of being able to nurture life within our bodies. Pregnancy can be a dangerous and damaging process, and in most of the world, is also involuntary.  “Developed” countries now have imperfect methods of preventing and stopping pregnancy, but they are often under threat from the God-inspired and other people who like to keep women breeding for their own reasons.

So guys, women always have to think about our fertility, about the possibility of a life-changing and health- threatening pregnancy which can destroy our lives for a moments pleasure – and often not even for that.

So the lucky ones who live in countries where men allow it, take pills, or stick plastic caps up our vaginas or have bits of metal inserted into our uteruses, all with their own health risks, none 100% effective, to stop us getting pregnant.

Or we can get pregnant, and even if we can’t we fear it if we are not ready for it. Pregnancy can also end in death, life-long disability and damage to our wonderful, glorious female bodies. There is also a lot of blood, our blood yet again.  After a miscarriage, abortion or birth a woman can bleed for weeks and then immediately start her periods again. I bled for seven weeks after my daughter was born with the last week being my first post-partum period. This happened as I was leaking milk all the time. I bet you don’t want to know that do you? But the point I’m making is that women have no choice.

Producing and nurturing babies is an exhausting business. For those of you still reading, chests do not feed babies, only breasts do, and only after a woman has given birth. Women who have had their breasts removed cannot feed their babies from their own milk. This milk is produced by a mother, and every calorie that goes into growing her baby is taken from her milk-producing body. It’s just the third stage of a life of giving her physical and emotional energy to nurture others.

Because that’s what women do. Whatever the father of this baby chooses to do, the mother has a lifetime of care for her child, pretty much whether she likes it or not – considered a suitable punishment for sex in some circles, many of which blithely allow men to evade responsibility. In “developed” countries most mothers are also expected to hold down a paying job on the same basis as the men and women who are not giving of their energy producing or caring for their children.

Our reality will not be sublimated

After forty or so years of monthly bleeding, the giving of her body to nurture babies and the probable sacrificing of a host of opportunities for the sake of her children, post menopausal women really understand what womanhood is about. Is it any wonder that it is these women who are loudest in their protest about the absurdity of men’s claims to womanhood? After forty years of blood and pain and sacrifice Women Who Say No (or “TERFs” in the trans lexicon) are insulted, abused, silenced and threatened – so often with sexual violence – because we know, and we say, that womanhood cannot be gained because you have a desire for it or bought with a wardrobe of dresses, even if you choose to add a life of hormone pills and a penis-sized hole for sex.

Womanhood is not a set of behaviours that sets us apart from men, for lots of us never have gone along with these anyway. Womanhood is not a certain kind of clothing or a certain set of preferences, for again, many women have not gone along with these either. Womanhood is a body designed for the creation and nurture of children. A woman doesn’t have to have children and can even be infertile, but she lives in a body that is designed by nature to do that, whether she – or you – likes it or not.

Women bleed, involuntarily, because of their fertility. Women have pain and death because of their fertility. Women have fear generated by men because of their fertility. Women are imprisoned in marriages because of their fertility. Women give up the potential of their lives for their children because of their fertility. Fertility, whether you can have children or you can’t, is central to womanhood. Your man’s sexualised idea of “feeling like a woman” is superficial to the point of farce. It focuses entirely (and predictably) on the sex act and the preamble to it, which is all that many men see, and the misogynists amongst you refuse to listen to anything else. But the truth is that without a real woman’s biologically created body you cannot begin to know the full experience – and the most important parts – of what being a woman really feels like.

Whatever a male-bodied person thinks being a woman is, it is only a small fraction of true women’s reality, and cannot involve the forced acceptance of all the blood, pain, joy and wonder of women’s lived experience. We pay for our womanhood in our blood, our energy and our pain over decades, and it is not something men can take for themselves because they feel unhappy about their own bodies or the customs that male dominanace has forced upon them. I’m sorry, guys. Women get to know all too well that life can be hard and we can’t have everything we want: that’s one experience we can share with men who want to be women. 

You cannot be us.

We are so much more than you can ever know.