Genuine question - can trans women experience cramps during their ‘time of the month’?

[Picklemeyellow]

This is a genuine question as I am baffled.

I looking on Tik Tok last night (don’t judge me, I’m addicted lol)and I notice on my For You section there is often a trans women doing live Q&A’s. I stopped and watched for a while, out of curiosity tbh as DH has a couple of transgender people in his family and I do try to remain as ‘on the fence’ as possible with this subject.

However, this person on TT said something which does not make much sense to me.

They were saying they take HRT and this gives them ‘a time of the month’ when they experience a very emotional dip and have crying spells and feel low etc. I suppose that may make some sense due to the hormones they take but then they went on to say they also experience cramping during this time and started rubbing their lower tummy in the area where a woman’s uterus is located.
It was difficult to establish why this happens because anyone actually questioning this gets blocked and only those agreeing with them get to stay to ask questions! I appreciate they probably receive some very negative replies but blocking doesn’t answer the questions to people who really would like to know.

I genuinely can not understand where the cramps would originate in a person without female anatomy?

As someone who has been under the gynae department for 20+ years, has had to live their live around horrendous periods, has had endless hysteroscopies and uterine polyp removals, ovulation so painful I couldn’t sit properly, a failed uterine ablation, going through an awful perimenopause and now, at 50 only just discovering this is probably all due to the fact I actually have endometriosis and adenomyosis and have been gas lit for all this time having being told that some women just have awful periods etc, I more than understand where my cramps and pain come from. From my shit malfunctioning uterus and hormones which have never been my friend.

But where would a trans woman’s ‘time of the month’ cramps come from? What part of their body cramps due to the addition of female hormones? I’ve tried googling this but there’s very little. Can the hormones cramp the muscles or bowel in this area or something similar?

Clearly it’s a psychological issue, but harmless enough, like most Trans Women are harmless as well. Leave them alone to get on with it.

With admittedly limited experience hearing from the 3 or 4 trans people I know, getting hormone therapies and gender change surgery on the NHS is actually pretty much impossible. So it’s mostly just a lot of cos play/using different personal pro nouns for most people unless you buy the hormones/surgery yourself.

I think the moral of the story is TikTok is dross, feeds hate. Getting beaten up because they are trans is actually a very real prospect for most trans people. And I think that’s very sad.

I speak as a completely binary mother of two young people who both identity as their birth gender. But if they didn’t I’d actually very much stand by them because its my job to encourage them simply to be themselves. And what they are is KIND.

In what way similar to periods and not more similar to food poisoning or IBS?

Does the lining of their uterus get expelled?

Does their uterus cramp?

Do they bleed?

Similar to periods! In what way? What part of the body etc?

They believe it because just as they have redefined "women" to be something that can be achieved by a male person, they are redefining "periods" to also be something that can be achieved by a male person.

They feel entirely entitled to do this because they cannot conceive that their uninformed conclusions about something they have never and can never experience could possibly have less authority than the conclusions of mere female people.

And of course this "improvement" in our "understanding" of periods that their male insights have provided give no benefit whatsoever for female people. The only people who benefit by this "improvement" are male.

I don't think it's even conscious sexism. It's just the enormous blind spot society has about giving more weight to men's perspectives than women's.

Mmm, there’s a huge difference between what a relatively small number of internet weirdos claim and how most trans women live. Mumsnet would have you believe that trans women are a huge threat to the cis female population, but that’s simply untrue. (Another endo sufferer here, and one who has no problem with the idea that trans women are women.)

No womb, no eggs dropping

The cramps probably come from being a man and taking large doses of a hormone that their body never evolved for. It's their gut protesting, they don't have female reproductive organs to experience the type of cramps we do.

It's astounding how much purchase this absurd notion has achieved, though - Queen's university Belfast, which was in the news earlier this week for compelling pronoun use, has included male-born people in their menopause policy for the last few years.

I think it’s upping the game from ‘man flu’ 🤡

No.

absolutely not.

think logically about what you are saying. What are the hormones acting on? How do they replicate the quite remarkable and intricate interactions between hormones, fat, and reproductive organs?

just no.

Period pain is contraction of the uterus. They have no uterus, so it's impossible for them to have period pain.
anyone actually questioning this gets blocked - this is the reason why this nonsense persists. Until recently you would be thrown off Twitter for stating facts like "a TW doesn't have a uterus". Hundreds of people were banned from Twitter.
TikTok is full of this stuff. And some people believe it, or feel they should.

In all circumstances?

So man saying he's a woman is fine in:

• a women's domestic abuse shelter
• locked in a cell with a woman in a women's prison
• allocated as a female to provide intimate care for a woman who wants female only carers

Isn’t the more correct term I guess they experience symptoms similar to PMS?

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/can-trans-women-get-periods

In what way are transwomen women?

But it’s not similar to periods. TW take a consistent dose of cross-sex hormones, unlike the fluctuating levels of oestrogen and progesterone in women who menstruate. Therefore they don’t have any monthly surge of anything - quite apart from the fact that they don’t have a female reproductive system anyway.

While I can believe the wrong hormones for their body might have physical effects, they would be nothing to do with female menstruation at all, and they wouldn’t be cyclical. I’d list them as “side effects of cross-sex hormones”.

It’s like a woman saying a pain in her bum from internal piles is prostate pain. The piles pain might well be unpleasant but it’s definitely not prostate pain.

They're never going to menstruate. So how can they have PMS?

Period cramps/pains are from the uterus contracting to expel its lining - this happens monthly (or so) when an egg doesn’t implant, as the body readies itself for another cycle in preparation for pregnancy. Without a womb it is not possible to have period cramps, so whatever is going on for this person, it’s not that. I find that my own menstrual cycle is accompanied by bowel/intestine/hip pain (I also experience terrible hip pain if I take hormonal contraception), I think this is my body’s reaction to hormone fluctuations, so perhaps if a trans person is on HRT they may have pain caused by hormones in their lower torso . Not periods, though.

Exactly. They are poisoning their body.

Ugh my Christmas Day was largely spent curled up with a hot water bottle feeling sick and in agony thanks to my lovely gift of the period I woke up with. Why would anyone want to claim that experience? It’s bloody miserable and an insult to the genuine suffering of women to suggest men/transwomen experience this.

Well, they certainly have an increased risk of breast cancer, high likelihood of erectile dysfunction, increase in body fat, reduction in body hair, permanent infertility, increased risk of blood clots and depression.

Not sure about the symptoms of periods being a huge cross over.

The medical page I linked you to explains it?

it’s false language to say it’s period pain. It’s PMS aka the fluctuation of hormones. If you take those hormones you can experience those symptoms.

Sorry I disagree that it's harmless.

Indulging these people in their delusions has ended with females being raped in prisons, hospitals female toilets.

It has ended with our sports, prizes ,scholarships being taken by males cosplaying as females.

It has to stop. Now.

Great reply and absolutely true. These men are attention seeking misogynists and their narcissism is off the scale.

I’m sorry about your awful gynae problems and also that you were fobbed off by the medical profession for so long. I went through similar so I’m not shocked but I am saddened.

TikTok is toxic in my opinion and you might feel better if you ditched it. Sorry, just my opinion 😳

If you actually read that "article", it's very clear that it's only anecdotes in which there are reports of transgender people claiming to experience PMS/PMDD. So basically, TikTok videos again.

That article has not actually been researched, analysed, assessed or peer reviewed.

Also, taking a daily dose of hormones in a man's body does not create fluctuating hormonal levels - their bodies don't do that.

It’s a huge insult when you have a trans woman on social media gently rubbing their tummy and stating they get monthly cramps ‘as women do’, as though it’s just one of those things haha! When the truth is there are millions of females worldwide dreading the start of each period and feeling absolutely shit each and every month. It makes a mockery of our suffering and our pleas to medical professionals for help when told it’s just something we have to put up with because we are women!

@K4tM

Getting beaten up because they are trans is actually a very real prospect for most trans people. And I think that’s very sad.

Getting beaten up by a male person, often a family or partner, because one is female is everyday reality for many women. More women will have been killed this week than trans women killed this year, or even this decade.

And yet the resources, services, rioghts, even language we need to fight this is being approropriated by trans women to validate their gender identity because it's more important to them to not be excluded from their fantasy "womanhood" (yes, fantasy - this "womanhood" trans women believe in is so far from the reality of living as a female person as to be a totally separate thing, so different that if they hadn't insisted on calling it "womanhood" it would never have crossed anyones' minds to link the two in the first place) than it is for those resources to continue to be available to the people for whom they were intended and to whom they can be literally life saving.

So forgive me if accommodating trans people's desire to be perceieved as the opposite sex on demand doesn't seem like the most pressing issue right now.