"women are people who menstruate" oh fuck OFF, even IF you're only looking at cis ladies that's dumb as hell. You gonna say a little cis girl isn't female until she bleeds? That menopause kills femininity? That medical conditions preventing menstruation take away womanhood?
It should honestly be a pretty short fucken leap from "not every woman menstruates" to "not everyone who menstruates is a woman," and yet here we fucking are.
next thing you know, you've fallen down the rabbit-hole of "taking the pill to stop periods makes you Not A Real Woman," "not giving birth makes you Not A Real Woman," "having a c-section isn't the same as giving birth, "mastectomy takes away womanhood" and all KINDS of nonsense
listen. LISTEN. we are electric meat with feelings. everything about biology is fundamentally fuckin absurd if you think about it for too long, I don't wanna go all goedel-escher-bach Brains In Vats here but for chrissakes, bodies are not the be-all, end-all of selfhood!
"human being are bipedal" okay yeah a lot of them are but amputees exist also!! and they are still human!! fucking work with me here karen sometimes the brief generalisations we make with our made-up mouth-sounds before we knew what germs were don't encompass all of humanity!
I'm gonna go full diogenes at a TERF conference one day, just throw a fully plucked chicken at whoever's speaking and yell BEHOLD A MAN! and wait for them to check its fuckin cloaca
ALSO if you're a white able-bodied person in particular who thinks menstruation = womanhood then I'm gonna need you to sit down and think about the extremely long history of forced sterilisations performed on WOC and disabled women EVEN INTO THE MODERN DAY, LIKE RIGHT NOW
because I just KNOW that some smartass white lady is waiting to respond to the whole "the pill can stop menstruation" argument with "but oh HO, you CHOSE to take the pill, your BODY still has the FUNCTION to bleed" bullshit, so: consider who your beliefs unwoman, here.
returning to the"some women have medical conditions that stop menstruation" thing, a lot of those conditions can be intersex conditions also! it's an area where medical science is still learning a lot! but I'm guessing TERFS don't want to consider intersex stuff as common!
and yet, shockingly, a woman doesn't magically become intersex or nonbinary by going to the doctor and learning about her lack of ovaries or non-functional uterus!! HOW ASTONISHING IT'S ALMOST LIKE IDENTITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAN THAT
don't even get me started on object permanence around oophorectomies/hystorectomies!! "ah yes, a woman is someone who has these internal bits, and she can stay a woman even if they're removed because she's clearly unchanging, except when she's a child b/c puberty doesn't count"
"oh, but it's different if you CHOOSE to use the pill/have a hystorectomy, because then you're DELIBERATELY unwomaning yourself" oh so medical necessities just have to be tragedies now?? ladies just gotta feel sad about not being Real Ladies anymore if a bad thing happens??
here's a fun fact, did u know that trans women who take oestrogen experience basically the same hormonal cycles that drive the menstrual cycle in cis ladies, just without the bleeding? did u also know that men have hormonal cycles too from testosterone?? HMM..
I do not know how to explain to u that every word u know is a tiny circle someone drew around a concept with a mouth-sound way back when, in ONE culture, not an Absolute Truth. sometimes we learn stuff and have to eraser that shit out, or draw new lines, or make new mouth-sounds.
