Women’s rights

JK Rowling has been subjected to a barrage of offensive responses to her expressed views on women’s rights.

She’s just one in a long line of women who have been attacked for daring to assert their right to be protected from abuse – in all its forms, including vandalising her handprints by daubing them with red paint.

You can self-identify as anything you want, but other people don’t have an obligation to agree with you, especially when they feel threatened by your presence in an enclosed space, like a public toilet. When you’ve grown up as a female, with all the emotional, psychological and physical baggage which goes along with that, you know without a doubt that you are a woman.

How can menstruation not be a “woman thing” when the definition of menstruation is the process in a woman of discharging blood and other material from the lining of the uterus?

A trans man who has not transitioned and still menstruates is a biological woman who may hate the physical evidence which confirms this, but women don’t exactly whoop for joy every time their period arrives (unless they’ve had unprotected sex and fear the consequences).

This issue simply confirms what the author Virginia Woolf observed – women need a room of their own, but not just for writing in.

We need to feel secure wherever we are, and that right does not cancel out the rights of others, irrespective of their gender identity.

CAROLYN TAYLOR Wellbank, Broughty Ferry, Dundee