A pantomime of womanhood: Women’s pain is not a novelty to be impersonated
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
The author, instead of going "Wow, the human body is incredible" and moving on, proclaims all of them are lying on the basis that they do not have a uterus (which is a non-sequitur). Then she spends the rest of the article alternating between bringing up unrelated topics and insulting trans people.
What a sad and incurious person.
Transwomen are male. Anyone who is male does not have a uterus, by definition. Therefore, no male can get contractions of the uterine muscle, because it doesn't exist in males. No uterine muscle, no uterine cramps.
Whatever these males who are dosing estrogen are experiencing, it is not premenstrual syndrome. This is a female-only experience, one that males will never endure.
I'm not gonna pretend to know what's going on here regarding the cramps. It doesn't look like there are any studies about this phenomenon yet. But assuming every one of these women is lying and calling their pain a "pantomime" is unwarranted.
A transgender woman taking HRT is hormonally female, and many of the symptoms of PMS are believed to be hormonally driven and don't directly involve the uterus. If hormonally female people are experiencing symptoms of PMS, a condition known to be linked to female hormones, I don't think it's a leap at all to suspect that they may be experiencing PMS.
They're not "hormonally female" either. The hormonal profile of a male taking high doses of a single exogenous hormone is nothing close to the same as that of the natural female experience: a cycle of multiple hormones, mediated by the female reproductive system.
Trans women typically take multiple hormones, not just one. If their hormonal profile is close enough to "female" that they develop female secondary sex characteristics, as it is for trans women on HRT, then it is not implausible that they may experience certain hormonally-driven symptoms that are usually experienced by cis women, including the symptoms of PMS not directly involving the uterus.
Whatever side effects transwomen are getting from their hormone medication is a male experience, not a female one. Just as women can't know what it feels like to be a male dosing estrogen, transwomen don't have insight into the natural female experience of the menstrual cycle. It makes no sense for them to misappropriate the terminology of female reproductive health.
Trans women can learn what the symptoms of PMS are by reading or hearing about it from medical resources or personal accounts of cis women. They have done so, and have found that the symptoms described resemble something which they also experience. As a result, they believe that their experience and PMS are the same thing; in other words, that they experience PMS. This is a testable hypothesis, and its confirmation or refutation would likely create useful medical information. This is science.
What is not science is learning of this hypothesis, assuming the people proposing it and those claiming to have these symptoms are lying, and calling their physical pain "a pantomime", "insulting", and "a mockery", and implying they are faking it for attention, as the article has done. That is bigotry.
If these transwomen claiming to have premenstrual syndrome had looked at any medical resource, or even just the Wikipedia article, they'd have read that it precedes menstruation, that it involves contraction of the uterine muscles, that it isn't experienced during pregnancy or after menopause, and would have realized that, being male, absolutely none of this applies to them.
Plenty of people have told them all of this since that video was released, and instead of being grateful for the correction, they have instead doubled down. So it's not even a case of being ignorantly mistaken, this is an intentional appropriation and trivialization of a uniquely female experience.
"Intentional appropriation and trivialization"? You seem to be taking other people's cramps as a personal insult. Consider empathy instead.
Does she have prostate cancer? Can she have prostate cancer? No, because she is female and does not have a prostate gland.
Same principle applies to these males pretending to have premenstrual syndrome. It simply does not and cannot apply to them. That they claim otherwise is just part of their sad effort to roleplay as female.
Whatever the case may be, submissions like this boil down to drama and personal conjecture rather than intellectual gratification. I'll keep flagging them until their submission quality improves.