Only women bleed

.. so sue me!

Let Women Speak rally, Melbourne, March 2023. Photo: Natalie J.Russell

The women of my bloodline bleed for longer than is normally the case. A gynaecologist once gently chided a relative, still menstruating despite pushing 60, “really, for a woman of your age this is just unseemly.”

I’ve inherited this tendency to enduring monthlies: turning 55 this year, and technically still in play where most of my peers are fully retired. (Warning: yet more oversharing ahead.)

Last year I found myself ambushed at Singapore airport, the bleed having arrived slightly earlier than expected and my stash of sanitary products low. Bleary-eyed and dizzy after a long-haul flight from Europe we were forced to navigate endless luxury malls and erupting volcanos to find a store that sold pads. 

I felt like a teenager, almost like it was the first time — which, by the way, was a traumatic experience. I was 12: not only do I bleed late, I started early. We were at the family beach-house and my mother could only provide me with a napkin thick as a surfboard, as we used to say back then, and one of those ancient menstrual “belts” that fastened around the waist to keep the pad in place. And that day we went to the beach with friends of my parents who for the first time brought their teenage children: three boys. They larked about in the water, unselfconscious in their Speedos. I sat curled on the towel, conscious of only the sea water glistening down their lean bodies and the terror of one of them detecting the bulging wad in my bathers.

I’ve shared that story before. Storytelling becomes repetitive when you’re 50-something.

I’ve also shared the anecdote about my standard convo with the doctor at the breast clinic I attend once a year for a battery of tests in the hope of outsmarting the grim odds of family history. She asks: 

“Any menopausal systems?”

“Like what?”

“If you have to ask,” she says, “the answer’s ‘No.’”

In the medical lingo women’s bodies are often benchmarked for virtue or efficacy. A cervix can be “incompetent,” a vagina “depressed,” a uterus “hostile.” We could say this is all a bit sexist only that would mean conceding that only women possess a cervix, a vagina, a uterus; and we have moved on from such small-minded bio-fascism. 

For instance, this month is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month: I know this because a research outfit called the Australia New Zealand Gynaecological Oncology Group — acronym ANZGOG! — put out a statement. “Approximately 2,200 individuals are diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year,” it read.  

“That is why for over 20 years, ANZGOG has been advancing research, saving lives for everyone with a lived experience of ovarian cancer.”

I tried to absorb the information, but I had nothing to hold onto, unable to glimpse myself in the parade of anyone and everyone with cancerous ovaries.

You get what I’m saying? The word “women” and “woman” was severed from this health missive about ovaries. Such is the language of gender identity ideology; a political fad that blurs the truth of biological sex. 

So, in an attempt to be inclusive of women who don’t see themselves as women, and maybe also to be inclusive of men who see themselves as women, an organisation concerned with women’s reproductive health disavows the very existence of women such that their message becomes inscrutable to the women they’re trying to help, thereby undermining their raison d’être. Which is to cure women of a cancer only women can get. 

How are we supposed to fight for women’s rights if “woman” is rendered a dirty word? If women are reduced to amorphous beings with ovaries? The simple answer is: we can’t advocate for sex-based rights. Each week brings new evidence of the cost to women from phasing out “women.”

Belgium’s Flemish film and TV awards went gender neutral; this week, in the best lead and supporting actors categories, the men cleaned up. The British awards went gender neutral in 2021: last year the nominees for best artist were similarly all male. 

Not that having all-women categories solves the problem of societies weighted towards men (otherwise known as The Patriarchy): not when anyone and everyone can be a woman. And it appears the male of the species is just naturally better at the whole woman caper.

Hence, the iconic Aussie surf-wear brand, Rip Curl, last week launched their campaign for women’s surfing with a female surfer who happened to be a male, as in a transgender woman. (After the inevitable backlash, the company backtracked and apologised.) Not to mention the males who win women’s sporting competitions, too many trophies and medals to keep track of; golf, Jiu Jitsu, surfing.

Women can’t even own their objectification anymore. Last year, men’s mag Maxim couldn’t even find 100 Australian women for its “hottest 100” list — one of them, Dani Laidley, is a male. Nor did Laidley just scrape in; the former footballer comfortably made the cut at number 92. And look, I’d be cheering if Laidley were to blitz a dedicated he-to-she category; the individual scrubs up decently as a woman. Just not decently enough — and I’m not trying to be nasty here — to be up there with the best of the species. 

But, hey, I’m hardly best-of-the-species material myself. Late middle-aged me and my stubborn ovaries — over-working themselves out of what? Vanity? At times my persistent periods seemed emblematic of all the meaningless, repetitive, never-to-bear-fruit labour of my waking hours. Other times I saw myself clinging, pathetically, to a simulacra of useful womanhood, of, as Hags author Victoria Smith memorably puts it, “femininity-fertility-fuckability”. Recently, I googled the world record for the oldest woman to ever naturally conceive, apart from the biblical matriarch Sarah, knocked up at age 90. (As far as I can tell, the honour belongs to US woman Dawn Brooke at 57.)

But lately, I started to prize my late bleeding, and female bleeding altogether, as a mark of authenticity. Even as resistance to a political ideology that’s hijacked all our institutions; hijacked, erased and colonised the state of womanhood. 

After all, we live in a world where some males, albeit a tiny number, insist on breastfeeding — males who have transitioned to female can sort of lactate — and where if you suggest this may be less-than-ideal to the infant’s health and anyway, a somewhat gross display of male narcissism, radio presenters on Australia’s public broadcaster (where else?) will imply you’re a right-wing bigot.  

We live in a world where saying only women can give birth will get you hauled before a disciplinary tribunal — it’s happening to Canadian nurse Amy Hamm — and in any event may soon be sort of contestable. One of Sydney’s top hospitals for women is considering transplanting wombs into biological males so they can one day “carry” a baby.

In such a crazy world, menstruation emerges as virtually the one female thing that can’t be faked or simulated. You can make a man a tampon ambassador — and they do— but you cannot make him bleed. 

I bleed therefore I am woman. 

Is there a twist to this story? Of course there is: I have not bled since November. I’m cramping in expectation— but nothing to date. This is not the end of the matter; menopause only officially arrives once a woman has gone a year without a period. Nothing has Changed yet. 

Nothing except a slow-rising panic. Life feels unbound; time has lost definition. I have lost definition. My flesh seems to hang, bloated and inert. Definitely not best-of-the-species material.

What month is it anyway? 

I rush out and buy a large 2024 paper diary. I have it open on the desk, like an exec from the 1980s, to give the days and weeks some bloody shape. Today it is February 7. It is February: Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month.

But who am I, this anyone and everyone moving bloodlessly through the world with her soon-to-be-redundant ovaries?

In the brave new world of gender identity ideology I am nothing. I dissolve into the generic. I am an open category devoid of borders. 

Only women bleed. 

I once bled, and maybe I will again. 

So I’m a woman, right?