Cis Women Don’t Own Menstruation

What’s with the idea that every girlhood requires menstruation and everyone who menstruates is a girl?

by Evan Urquhart

In the Delco Times this morning, a strange little op-ed about menstruation written by conservative woman columnist Christine Flowers. The premise is that the trailer for new film adaptation of “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?” a book about a young girl getting her first period, made the writer sad because trans women are stealing girlhood from cis girls.

“So seeing the trailer for that film catapulted me back to a Christine who was happy, hopeful, a bit nervous and worried, and filled with questions,” Flowers writes.

screenshot from the Delco Times

If we take this passage at face value, a professional writer is saying that the trans movement has made the emotions of feeling “happy, hopeful, a bit nervous and worried, and filled with questions” over one’s first period irrelevant for young girls, due to their biological identities being erased.

How, exactly, would the trans movement come between young (cis) girls and the emotions associated with going through puberty? Why would they even want do this? It is unclear. (What is clear is that the author blames trans women, as trans men and boys do not make an appearance in the column in any form.)

The paranoia required to believe that girlhood itself could be threatened by the existence of girlhoods that involve all the same emotions of adolescence, but not the menstruating, is unfathomable. There are numerous conditions that can cause cis girls not to get their periods, either on time or at all, and girls have continued experiencing emotions all this time. But the erasure of trans boys and nonbinary trans folks from the picture is telling too. For some cis women, it seems that the frequent association between menstruation or pregnancy and womanhood itself needs to be definitional. Some cis women seem to feel, with genuine ferocity, that exceptions to this rule cannot be brooked.

There is no universal girlhood. There are clusters of experiences, pockets of similarity, but no single experience can be said to have been true of every single girl. This is true as much if we confine ourselves to cis girls only as it is if we widen girlhood to include trans girls, or narrow it so as not to engulf trans boys. Cis women don’t own menstruation. They never have. They never could. The insistence that everyone must resonate with the experience of one white woman who enjoyed a book written for and about white girls, in 1970, is bizarre. No one wants to take young girls’ emotions. They just want room to be themselves, something Flowers seems to have taken for granted that she was allowed to be.