Should have also said the myth about women’s periods synching is also explained by pure statistics even when their cycles are way different- this article in BBC explains it well
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37256161

As someone who suffers from debilitating periods, this sort of thing would mean I couldn't be friends with your colleague unless they could see sense.

It's bad enough when other women scoff at things like how could a period possibly mean a sick day off but when a man is pretending they have a period to deal with it's even more shocking.

The only thing perhaps in your colleagues favour is my mood swings are probably also representative of my dh moods at that time of the month. But rather then be synced, it's more a case of my mood goes downhill at that time of the month and my dh mood goes downhill trying to sanely live with me thereafter!!

in love, not in live

in love is the irrational one, fortunately it wears off

I take your point ClaphamSouth, and am not sure how much good there would be in saying anything, since the victim is probably in live with the abuser and until that fog clears may will not be able to understand what is going on. But telling her that she's giving TMI and shouldn't overshare would be a start.

Pointing she is being gaslighted and that her relationship is not a lesbian one might be a bridge too far.

This. I’ve lived with quite a few women, including my mother. No synching . I’ve talked about it to SIL with 3 daughters - no synching other than overlap cos there 4 of them

but more importantly scientific research shows this is not a thing. There is a one in four chance, if you work on a period being 7 days on a 28 day cycle, that you cycle will correlate at least somewhat to another women you live with. That’s the law of probability and it’s pretty high . There is a difference between correlation and cause

so Op, maybe look up on internet for the research, print it out, and leave on colleagues desk with a note to say “innocently” , maybe this might help you to get to bottom of why you both have this awful week once per month 🤷🏼‍♀️😉

A person who does not (and indeed cannot) menstruate pretending to experience its effects in order to get attention from a partner with dysmenorrhea is one of the most cruel and cynical from of gaslighting abuse I have ever heard of. It would be bad if it was coming from a post-menopausal female who would at least know that they were mocking, but from someone born male it is monstrous.

I agree with this but I absolutely wouldn't be engaging in any conversation with the female colleague about their male partner because to do so would make me feel I was participating in the male's misogynist fetish

What did the subjects to be avoided in polite conversation used to be? Politics, religion and sex? Now it's politics, religion and gender

Yep.

I always found the pregnancy-book approach (‘she’ for mother ‘he’ for baby, regardless of actual sex of baby, if already known at that stage of gestation) to be mildly annoying, but the practicality of clear comms definitely outweighs the mild annoyance at ‘default male’ (in that very specific scenario)!

Sometimes communication requires clarity.

Good communication requires clarity.

I have no children and so am unable to answer your question from an actual real life perspective.

But I would think if I did have children my son would, by the time he decided he was a transwoman, if I'd have done my job as a parent well enough, understand no matter how much he wished it was the case he could never actually be a woman.

I'd support my hypothetical son as my child, the child of mine they had always been. I'd still refer to them by the nickname I'd no doubt have given them at some point. I'd also respect his desire to go by a more female name if he wished. I'd support him to live his best life.

I'd hope he wouldn't feel so bad about his existing and only body that he felt the need to cut bits off, add bits and take medication not designed for him that could cause who knows what untold issues in the future.

If he did decide that was what he wanted to do then I'd still love him, I would still support him. I'd sit by his bedside waiting for him to come round, after mutilating his wonderful body that had nothing wrong with it.

But no I wouldn't use she. And i wouldn't have a daughter. I'd use their name, or they when talking about them, and refer to my child rather than my son or my daughter. I'd use their new chosen name, family nicknames etc when talking to them.

And the reason? whilst anyone is entitled to believe anything they want, I'm entitled to believe there are only two sexes, you can't change and my hypothetical male child will always be my male child and I would never allow my own child to believe such a terrible lie as the one which would have him believe he could be a woman.

Sometimes communication requires clarity.

Sometimes communication requires compassion.

Parents of trans identifying children are generally very well-versed in distinguishing one situation from the other.

I do have a gender questioning/trans identifying teen (there are lots of them about at present!) but as mine is factually a daughter, our conversations about periods are pragmatic, rather than pretend.

@Itismeghan avoiding the obvious explanation that he is a he, there are so many unnamed characters in this scenario. If we called them all she, we'd have to keep specifying which she we were referring to. It would become unwieldy.

He's not here, I wouldn't worry about it. If he was my best mate, I'd make the effort or lose the friendship, depending on how deep and weird he got into the 'trans' thing. But since he's not, and he's the partner of a colleague of an anonymous poster on a forum I'm gonna go ahead and refer to him by his sex. He's clearly not showing his partner much respect by co-opting and roleplaying her pain, basically lying. So fuck him.

A person who does not (and indeed cannot) menstruate pretending to experience its effects in order to get attention from a partner with dysmenorrhea is one of the most cruel and cynical from of gaslighting abuse I have ever heard of. It would be bad if it was coming from a post-menopausal female who would at least know that they were mocking, but from someone born male it is monstrous.

That poor young woman needs support, but she also needs to be told what she is being subjected to is a form of coercive control, making her doubt material reality.

So many of you are referring to this trans woman as ‘he’.

If your offspring was a trans woman, would you really refuse to use ‘she’?

Wouldn’t have a single problem with anything that been said on here , on account that it’s factual.

Transition hormones are exogenous so it’s possible to emulate a cycle by varying doses (similar to the way HRT for menopause can be prescribed with oestrogen everyday plus two weeks of progesterone on and two weeks off or how the combined contraceptive pill has 21 pills followed by a 7 day break/7 days of dummy pills in order to create a ‘withdrawal bleed’) but obvs:

a) these is not the same as a natural hormonal cycle which is far more complex

b) ‘syncing’ would have to be done deliberately by timing the male human’s pseudo cycle to match the female human’s natural cycle

c) the NHS trans prescribing guidelines do not recommend prescribing any progesterone to males in transition because they don’t have wombs (prog is prescribed to menopausal women specifically for uterus health so women who have had a hysterectomy are able to do oestrogen-only HRT)

Some transitioners purchase grey market hormones from abroad or utilise private prescription services that will more or less issue prescriptions for whatever the recipient is willing to pay full price for so it is possible that your colleague’s partner is dosing themselves with a hormonal pseudo cycle, but any syncing is definitely not a natural phenomenon!

There are loads of strange menstruation myths and fantasies all over the trans-internet, some of which need copious amounts of eye bleach and some of which are bafflingly oppositional to the majority of actual female experience…

eg male transitioners often claim to have recovered an oestrogen-destroyed libido by taking large rectal doses of progesterone, whereas most women I know are angry, spotty and bloated when progesterone is at the highest monthly level thus they are far more likely to shout at you than want to shag you!

But then, progesterones/progestins can have androgenic actions so perhaps it makes sense that taking an exogenous version can raise an artificially feminised male’s libido but both natural/endogenous and synthetic or bio identical/exogenous can crash a female libido? 🤷‍♀️

(Of course, for the above to be true, there would have to be two biological sexes 😉)

@MeanCanadianLady I am loving your posts.

For many reasons, medical and hectic lifestyle at times, I wouldn't have been able to track like this. But I've always known from the symptoms and stuff I was able to identify that there it's a lot going on in a woman's reproductive system through the whole month.

So reading your posts are both fascinating, love a good informative overshare, and confirm a lot of the things that I've suspected, but never got around to tracking in myself.

Thank you

Boiled x

🍫

So would I.

OP, imagining menstrual cycles is part of the role play for many transwomen. There's a lot of stuff on social media from tw giggling about their premenstrual moods and food cravings etc, and bewailing their period pains. It's all just part of the role playing.

Nicely put! That's exactly what he's doing.

I absolutely love this! I now know more about your periods than my own 😀 absolutely love a detailed, scientific overshare - I'm wincingly more educated.
And I also back you up 100%. I used Persona natural contraception - "pee on a test stick" and stick it in the test monitor- green light, get snagging, red light- as before but with condoms! If you have a regular cycle, it is a miracle of chemical engineering. My deepest sympathies to our sisters with an irregular or evil cycle.

Fun facts - I could tell when I was pregnant by the smell of my wee. (Not the Persona's fault - we were trying for a baby so used it backwards)
Late burst of fertility is a thing - 3 live babies between age 36 and 40 - none before or since.

Its not transphobic to say trans women don't have periods. It's a factual comment

Everything anyone says is deemed 'transphobic' these days by some people!

I would be glad that people retained a sense of reality that transwomen cannot menstruate.

Nonsense. Trans women don't have menstrual cycles and it's not transphobic to say so. A man appropriating a woman's menstrual cycle? Now that's just weird - and gaslighting.

OP, I'd venture that your colleague is not a lesbian if she's dating a man...

But I don't think this kind of conversation is necessary or appropriate at work, and I'd say that.

Thank you. Expressed wonderfully.