Where is this public changing of sanitary protection happening? It's just, I menstruated for over 40 years & never either did that or witnessed it. #PeakTERF https://twitter.com/helenstaniland/status/1336087123485749248

It's like they never go outside the house & have never heard of cubicles.

TERFs are now flocking to my mentions to say how I am lacking in compassion & how I've obviously never experienced heavy bleeding in public. On the contrary, I had irregular (& therefore unpredictable) heavy periods for 40 of the 45 years I menstruated for.

Things I have experienced:
1. Carrying extra sanitary products at all times.
2. Carrying spare underwear at all times.
3. Hunting out bathrooms with a private sink in the same room as the toilet.
4. Having to buy or borrow a complete change of clothing from the waist down...

5. The age-old expedient of tying a jumper or jacket around the waist until I got to somewhere private.

6. Walking home/back to work/ to a friend's house by a circuitous route.
7. Having to dispose of underwear in a sanitary bin.
8. Walking around with enormous impromptu pads of toilet paper, socks, on one occasion a ball of wool (!) precariously balanced inside my clothing...

9. Standing on a bus, with blood trickling down my legs into my socks, in pain, but unable to sit down as I would bleed everywhere.
10. Begging, borrowing & yes, stealing sanitary products.
11. Leaving the table at a meeting to use the toilet, then sneaking out of the building.

12. Having to carry soiled underwear in my pocket or on my person, because there was no bin in the toilet cubicle & I think it's a bit disrespectful to other people to leave bloodstained clothing just lying around.

13. Lurking inside toilet cubicles for ages, waiting for a lull outside, because I've done all I can in the cubicle & am covered in blood & am hoping for some privacy to wash my hands.
14. Leaving without washing my hands, because there is no privacy.

Here's a good one:
15. Being in this urgent need for a toilet & having to stand, with blood running down my legs, arguing with some gatekeeping wagon who thinks I look like I belong in the gents.

Things we absolutely need: More & better public toilets in gender-neutral private rooms with private sinks & preferably showers. Also disabled access, big bins, somewhere to hang your clothes up off the floor, room for prams & shopping bags.

Things we definitely don't need: people who police toilets just in case a person with the wrong kind of genitals happens to need a piss at the same time as an unusually uninhibited person needs to rinse out her smalls in public.

Even with our current inadequate public sanitation, it seems to me that both these people would be too focused on their own immediate need to be unduly bothered by the presence of the other.