As you have all heard by now, beloved children’s book author who wrote a whole series without any gay characters but a whole industry of rape drugs has firmly put her foot into her mouth over the weekend  by throwing a hissy fit over the term “people who menstruate”:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate https://t.co/cVpZxG7gaA

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 6, 2020

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

 

Now, there’s two immediate and obvious points: First of all, the article does actually use the word “women”, as one sort of people who are affected by menstruation and need access to hygiene. Second, there’s a pandemic going on, her own government failing its people so badly that now the number of daily deaths in the UK are greater than in all 27 EU countries combined and a world on its feet to protest racism and police brutality but you have to scroll a long way down on her Twitter feed to find one single Tweet about Breonna Taylor. If the phrase “people who menstruate” gets more outrage from you than the killing of black people and your whole population being failed by the government we see you in your socially distant and probably well protected mansion. That’s not even the dog that didn’t bark but a whole pack of wolves that has suddenly gone silent.

I’ll explore the misogyny of this argument from a cis perspective. Others have written more and better from the perspective of trans men and non binary folks and I’ll leave some links below. Check out their words, they know better.

But now for the larger point: Transphobes like Rowling insist that people who menstruate are to be classified as women. While most of them will gracefully allow that not all women menstruate (though I have seen the occasional transphobe insist that post-menopausal women are no longer women), they insist that all people who menstruate are women, adult human females (long ee as in bee), to use their favourite “definition”.

If you know me you will probably guess already where I’m going. The crowd who insists that their definition of “woman” is pure science and absolutely rooted in nature starts out with the word “adult”. Can they please define what adult means? Here’s a little story: my mum got married at 18, only back then you became an adult at 21 and therefore my grandparents basically signed over their guardianship to my dad, which is creepy as fuck if you think about it. But in the year my mother turned 21, the age was lowered to 18, which poses a few interesting questions:

Was my mother a child bride between the ages of 18 and 21, but then became retroactively not a child bride when the age of adulthood was lowered? If we change the legal definition of “adult”, does that change the biological reality? Obviously not, so what unchangeable definition of adult do transphobes use? Given that they insist that all who menstruate are women, and declare that’s “basic biology”, the only other option is the onset of menarche. We have that creepy notion in a lot of popular culture. We call it “becoming a woman” when a girl has her first period. And for ages that has been and often still is the point at which a girl is considered old enough to get married and have children. I was never a big fan of Game of Thrones and got bored somewhere in the second or third season, but I remember that one scene where Sansa Stark wakes up in some bloody sheets and now everybody is excited because that means she can now marry the king and have his babies. Except for the poor girl, of course, who is terrified at the prospect of being raped by a psychopath.

Insisting that people who menstruate are all “women” means to include literal children as young as nine or ten into that category, declaring them adults. Again transphobes take the worst and oldest definition of “woman” as “baby making machines” and run with it, declaring their nonsense to be “rooted in science and biology”, just as men have always done. They reinforce the notion that girls become “mature” at an early age and that fertility is some defining element of womanhood. In short, they reinforce ideas that leave girls vulnerable to sexual predators and without protection from a society that declares them responsible for their own rapes. Of course, Cis Feminist transphobes will be abhorred by those ideas. They will be genuinely upset when a judge says a thirteen years old girl looked very mature, what should that poor adult man have done? Or declare that a teacher didn’t abuse his position of power because that girl dressed very sexy, but in fact they are sharing the same cis sexist and heteronormative mindset that dictates that cruel realty of cis girls’ lives and bodies. Yet they are too invested in hurting the small percentage of people who menstruate who are not cis for them to actually and adequately support the huge percentage of cis girls who menstruate and whom they claim to protect from the evil trans cabal.

 

Links:

Twitter thread from Jay Hulme about transphobic assault for being a trans man on his period

Article by a non-binary activist on their first period and that fucked up notion as a gate to “womanhood” I mentioned above 

Article about an initiative in Australia that provides period products for homeless people and that had to cope with backlash for being inclusive. Yes, those people prefer to actually attack a young cis woman who started her own fucking charity in her teens, jeopardizing said charity and thereby access to period products for poor cis girls and women just to hurt trans folks.