The Guardian here we go agan

Here's a few reasons why I know I'm different as a woman/female -different from a male.

1. Periods - yes, I had them & I had to cope with the nuisance of them, as no man does. I'm also post-menopausal, so I've gone through all that.

1. Childbirth - no, I haven't gone through that. But I had to: decide whether I wanted children or not; take precautions which had potential impacts on my own health & never any on my DH's health, & I had to switch to something else when my body wouldn't tolerate the pill; worry when my period was late & start thinking very seriously when it was very late; after discussion with my DH, use the morning-after pill following a burst condom - again, my body not his. And always know that if anything went wrong, it was my body that was involved, not his.

1. Know that I might get pregnant if I were ever raped & worry about changes to the abortion law when some people were arguing that abortions should not be available even after rape.

1. Leaving aside physical things, I was treated differently because I was a girl, & I saw the way women were (in many ways still are) treated in society. I lived with trying to work out what I wanted to do & how to do it in a world which wasn't (still isn't) made for me & IS made for another group of people entirely.

That's enough to be going on with.

And as for the 'not all women have periods' argument, that's just really, really stretching a point. A female body which disfunctions is not the same as a male body. It's like saying a car isn't a car when it runs out of petrol. I mean you're right in that it won't go anywhere, but it's still a car.

"Are there experiences that make a woman real, anyway?“

Well possibly not seeing us as cartoon characters/stereotypes might help some people.

It’s was the sign off that struck me:

‘ Trans people are saying they are frightened and in pain because people are questioning their rights, and we’re not listening. Where will this end?’

Because all the insistence on ‘listening’ only goes one way? Why must we listen, when TRAs have no intention of listening themselves?

The Guardian has also published a piece in the wake of the Cumberlege report about how women - the biological kind - have been treated badly by the medical profession.

The cognitive dissonance is off the scale.