Question about trans women cycles

[Borris]

I have a genuine question

I have a new ish work colleague who I get on well with and enjoy her company. She's a lesbian. Except that her girlfriend is a trans women. That's fine. I'm happy to refer to her by her chosen name and pronouns.

But what confused me is my friend saying more than once that their cycles had synched up and so they had one week a month when they were both super emotional.

Can this be a thing? Do trans women take different hormones at different times of the month? Genuine question, not being goady

Obviously only asking out of sheer nosiness. The first time she mentioned their cycles I didn't know that the partner was a trans woman and so now feel it's too late to ask!

Yes. There is vaginal bleeding and/or spotting that is not necessarily a period. If ovulation did not occur first then it is not medically considered a period. If you have no ovaries in the first place then you are medically and scientifically incorrect!

I have wondered about this so thank you for the explanations.

I'm a woman who had a hysterectomy and ovaries out for medical reasons. I take a constant level of oestrogen through HRT. I no longer have a cycle, no PMS and no cramping.

The Billings Method is decades old. And uses the body and knowing your body’s cycles to addit with either fertility or contraception. What you describe sounds like it has been finally put into measurable numbers with modern technology to give more accuracy.

it is very interesting

Yes I really love practicing it. I plan to teach my daughter when she is older how to track her fertility. Even if she chooses another birth control method later which is totally fine I think it’s good practice and has given me a much deeper sense of understanding and control of my body in ways I never thought possible!

I would be really happy to see natural family planning improve and see more accurate non-partisan research on it and more awareness raised about its existence because I think many women are getting sick of putting pills in their bodies and would like more natural alternatives.

The amount of transphobia on here is appalling. How would you feel if your child was a trans woman and this was the way people spoke about her?

Have you reported the transphobic posts, mnhq will delete them. if you press the report button under the transphobic posts, mnhq will take a look and delete if necessary.

@Itismeghan

If I had a trans daughter, I still wouldn't pretend she had periods.

I would be telling my child to stop being so ridiculous, that they did not have a menstrual cycle and to stop being a dick to their partner who actually really did.

The original post is a perfectly reasonable question.

Colleague could have been using the word "cycles" to refer both to her own menstrual cycle, and to some sort of cyclical medical treatment her partner takes, which results in being "super emotional" at certain times.
And she said "more than once that their cycles had synched up" which suggests it happened by co-incidence, (on more than one occasion, but that on many occasions they were not synced) not that she's claiming their "cycles" naturally converge.

Perfectly reasonable to wonder whether transwomen might take a hormone treatment which varies over a time period such as a month.
(I think there is, or was, a contraceptive pill for women which had slightly different doses or proportions of hormones over the course. It was very important to start the pack with the correct pill, and made it more complicated to take two packs' worth of pills to delay a bleed- as I recall you had to waste some of the pills).

Thank you. Expressed wonderfully.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

So would I.

@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

🍫

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 😉)

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

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’?

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.

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.

@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.

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.