On: US Supreme Court upholds bans on transgender women in female school and college

They say they are protecting women’s sports. I ask: who is this woman you protect? Show her to me. Let her stand beside me. Let her tell me what she has done - what she has borne - that makes her more a woman than I am.

I have plowed fields men could not finish. I have borne children and buried them. I have stood before judges who said I had no right to speak, and I spoke anyway. Was I not a woman then?

Now they draw new lines, new rules, new boxes to put souls in. They say, This body belongs, that one does not. But I have seen this before. They said I was too strong to be a woman, too loud to be a lady. They said my body was wrong for their categories. And yet - here I am.

Where do they think women come from? Do they spring from the earth, fully formed, untouched by struggle? No. Womanhood is not a prize you win by fitting a shape. It is lived. It is proven in the labor, the love, the surviving.

Let them look at the girls they would turn away. Let them see the sweat, the effort, the heart. Then ask: Ain’t she a woman?

The court may rule, but the body does not lie.