Transgender YouTuber Jamie Raines recently switched to a different type of testosterone and began menstruating again. In a video published last week, Raines explained what it’s like to get a period as a “man.”
“I worked hard to not let it affect me in a negative way,” Raines says in the video. “It didn’t make me any less of a man.”
“When he saw that his period had come, Raines says, he was frozen — after going for years without having a period, he had ‘kind of forgotten that my body could still technically do that,'” Refinery 29 writes. “While Raines says that his situation was very specific, it draws more attention to the fact that men can get periods — and it’s time we start discussing it more often.”
Uh, what? Men can get periods? This is apparently a talking point the trans movement has been pushing. You can read about how Thinx (a brand of super absorbent underwear women wear to catch blood and uterine lining during their periods, which seems super gross and too much like a diaper) has recently rolled out a campaign ad featuring a transgender “man.”
While Raines’s experience sounds sad and frustrating, the premise — that men can get periods, too — is absurd and totally false. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but here we go: Men can’t get periods. It’s biologically impossible for a man (an individual born with XY chromosomes and male sex organs) to menstruate, because the monthly cycle requires female sex organs.
My favorite explainer of a woman’s time of the month is this old-timey Walt Disney video entitled “The Story Of Menstruation,” which was sponsored by Kotex.
The best part of the video is when the narrator tells a frazzled and distraught-looking girl who is wailing in front of a mirror because she feels ugly while on her period to keep her chin up, and to “take it in stride.”
I’ve been getting my period for years, but my face still looks like this every single month. Because periods are not fun.
I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for an individual likes Raines, who has chosen to take testosterone in order to appear more masculine, to get a period. But his experience underscores the Achilles Heel of the transgender movement — no matter how hard one tries, biological reality is impossible to escape. Pretending the confines of biology and physics do not apply does not make it so.
