Oh - don’t why, thanks @SimonBridges: here’s the text instead..from an article published by FairPlay to Women:
^This bucks the trend of my usual single issue fact based articles, I'll get back to that because facts are powerful, especially in the context of the current insanity. But you know what? I don't feel like politing. I don't feel like pleasing and thanking. I don't feel like considering how I might engage people on the edges of the argument.
I just feel angry. So, so angry.
It's prompted by the attacks by TAs on a woman in London, prior to a debate about the Gender ID bill. That has been covered in detail and with by passion by many, including the wonderful @VictoriaPeckham and @GenderTrender and Meghan Murphy.
The rage I feel about women being silenced for refusing to accept that cocks are part of the female anatomy has made me look at myself. How do I know I'm a woman?
I'm not having an existential crisis, I mean it literally. How do I know? Because I don't 'identify' as a woman...I just am one.
There have been clues, along the way though.
I started my period during an episode of Bergerac. My mum was at work and my dad was pissed. The rust brown womb scrapings in my knickers weren't the gush of righteous ruby I'd been primed to expect by whisperings at school. The mattress sized pad seemed like overkill, to be honest...
Transactivists: I knew I was a woman then.
When I was about 13, we had some work done on our roof. There ever a gang of builders swarming the house like sweaty, swearing, singlet wearing wasps. They left copies of The Sun in the kitchen, with Page 3 and pages of sexlines. As a stroppy, budding feminist I would bin any copy I found. One day, as I was leaving the house, one of them wolf whistled at my disappearing, stone washed denim clad arse. Then he said : "I'd do you if you weren't jail bait".
Transactivists: I knew I was a woman then.
One summer, I got a job in a bar. A bar in a shabby, down at heel seaside town. The 'interview' was with a sleazy man in a shit suit with his shirt open to the naval. He said I'd be a bar maid. And hostess. My job, essentially was to flirt with men to get them to spend more money. I was really good at it. Then one evening I was dancing with one of the regulars and he got a bit gropey. I told him to back off. He called me frigid. Then, in a fine piece of male logic, he called me whore and complained to the manager. I got the sack.
Transactivists: I knew I was a woman then.
I can't list all the times I've been touched, uninvited in a sexual way. All the times men have run their hands across my arse, stroked my arms, touched my face, for crying out loud. Pretty much, if it's a body part above the knee, it's been fondled by a man who has not asked if it's ok first. I'll add in all the uninvited comments from complete strangers here too. From 'cheer up love' to 'wanna give me a blowjob'. All men. And all felt they were entitled to do this because I'm a woman.
The feeling of my rapist's semen running down my inner thigh as I ran, naked, into his bathroom? Knew I was a woman. The terror when I was pinned against a wall by my "boyfriend"? Knew I was a woman.
When I was pregnant, I vomited for the whole time. The hormones my female body produced to keep my baby safe and attached to my magical placenta made me vomit violently. I carried a water bottle in my car so I could seamlessly throw up mid gear change. I grew my child, in the same womb that had disturbed my Bergerac viewing with its rusty flakes. I grew a child. Quite how, given my diet of very little followed by not much, I don't know. Kneeling over the toilet, dry heaving but bizarrely comforted by the smell of bleach, I have never felt more like a woman.
Giving birth, nearly in the hospital foyer? Knew I was a woman. Meeting my waxy, bloody, dark eyed baby as he snuffled for my nipple? Knew I was a woman. Managing my lactating, massive, painful leaky breasts? All woman.
Having my first post birth shit, sobbing at the blood and shit covered porcelain? Yep. Knew I was a woman.
I have never bought an item of clothing and felt like a woman. I have had short hair, long hair and in between hair, made no difference to my feelings of womanness. I feel like a woman with sore feet in high heels and a woman who can run in converse. I have never applied false eye lashes or lipstick, but my BFF assures me that red lipstick or not, she's a woman.^