Thread by @HairyLeggdHarpy

I've given birth twice.

The first time, a 48 hour labour, unrelenting contractions over two solid days with scant few minutes reprieve in between.

The second, a fast and dramatic 5 hours, with so little time to catch my breath that I couldn't move an inch from beginning to end.

If you've been through this, you'll maybe recognise that feeling of utter desperation that hits between the waves, a particular point when you can't go on any longer and it's never, ever going to end.

And then another immense wave of pain body blows you full force again.

And yet you do carry on, with strength that you barely believe is yours, because there's no alternative.

Until it does, eventually, end.

I'm seeing women around me despairing regularly now, fatigued, demoralised, exhausted and frightened that these perpetual assaults upon who we are, and on what we may or may not say will be unending, and we will not withstand it.

And I want to tell you all.
We will.

I recognise the despair. It's familiar. It feels unbearable. Unending.
Yet, we will bear it all. There will be an end.

Sex exists.
We're the sex that was made with the capability to withstand immense, body shattering, life changing pain and yet still rise, still persist.

We will find the strength we need and we will withstand it all. I know you are tired, and I know you are depleted. I know. I see it. I feel it too.

We've survived through generation after generation of men taking our children, owning our bodies, denying our humanity, restricting our freedoms, marking out our lives and defining our boundaries.
It has ever been thus.

And we see them still today practising this on us, and we fight fiercely for our daughters to escape it.

And we will persist, just as women always have. Our mothers, our grandmothers and their mothers too, they had their grind in their generations.
We know and we don't forget.

That was their grind, and this is ours.

This barefaced, preposterous, male-fabricated lie, this ultimate denial of our very female existence, this outrageous pretence that men have redesigned us until they are us, can be us.

All their incessant, petulant, cajoling and all their threatening demands that we play along for them; all their punishments and chastising and hatred when we won't.

All of this, their assertion of their male control over us, over women; who we are, what we are, what female is, what men will permit female to be. Our very female existence contorted, fabricated and moulded into a grotesque parody to please them.

They'll fail.
We'll see to it.

This is our grind, and here we are facing it, and we will grind their stupid lies about us under our heels until they are all dust. We are an entire sex. We are women.

We are the female sex.
Remember who you are.
We will not be rewritten nor will we be redefined.
We resist.

They know exactly who we are, just as they always have done.
And so do we.
And we will never let their lies about us stand.

Their lies will not stand.

We're the female sex.
The despair will pass, because we will triumph.
Hold your heads up.
We will end this.

Keep going.