Blood. Unwanted blood. That was the first sign I had that I was a woman.

For me, it was just a period. My mother referred to it as “the curse”. I didn’t put the tampon in properly, so it hurt. Tracking periods never seemed easy: I was too busy; it was always a faff. Thank God that bit of me has gone now. I became something else a while back. My oestrogen levels dropped. What so often defines gender no long defines me and now I wonder if it ever did. My insides don’t match my outsides, that’s for sure.

The feminist philosopher Judith Butler writes: “Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.” For her, gender is a simulation of a simulation. I knew this innately from day one. I liked the drag show myself: the heels, the lipstick, the clothes. I liked to confuse people. Femininity is a lot of work and fun; but it is dangerous work.

I got attacked, I got raped and I was considered to be asking for it, wearing that female drag. That can happen to all women, however they identify: cis/trans, straight/gay. I got put on a pill that I didn’t ask for. Hormones throughout my childbearing years, and then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are the joys of HRT, if you so desire.

Without those hormones, where would I have been? Pregnant for decades or dead in childbirth? Considered a crone who no longer cares about her dried-up skin and atrophying vagina?

I had an abortion. I woke up to Margaret Thatcher lecturing me on the telly. I wasn’t sad about a baby I didn’t want … but Thatcher made me weep. They gave me some paracetamol for the cramps. I couldn’t afford a taxi and I thought of my mum, who had gone to London for a backstreet abortion where they clipped the neck of her cervix. She was found haemorrhaging in the toilets at Liverpool Street station.

I thanked my lucky stars that now everything was lovely.

Except it wasn’t. I got pregnant again. My body grew another body inside it and expelled it – a real-life girl who has just had a child herself.

But I was aware that gender was a trap, a con, an ideology that I had rejected long ago. I read a lot of theory.

In her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler writes: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”

No distinction at all. How immensely freeing that it is. As Jeanette Winterson writes in her book Frankissstein: A Love Story: “I’m a woman. And I’m a man. That’s how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn’t do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.”

Who doesn’t want to be nearer to themselves? I would love to live in a world made only of discourse. But then a friend died of a cancer connected to the amount of IVF she had had, while another remained undiagnosed with severe endometriosis for so long she became very ill. I had to help section a woman with postpartum psychosis. I remain worried about the levels of distress reported by young women who hate their bodies.

My body is ageing and gender dissipates slightly at menopause because you are free. I want it to be true that sex is as fluid a category as gender, but that hasn’t been my experience. I don’t want smear tests and mammograms and anti-ageing creams. I don’t want to care any more. My gender now is irrelevant in ways my body can’t be, for it will deteriorate and cease.

The trans writer Julia Serano says: “In trans women’s eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.”

I wish everyone this raw strength, however they identify. But I ask one thing that the philosopher Michel Foucault also asks: is sex the shattering of yourself or the truth of yourself? You know, maybe it is neither. Maybe it is not either/or. Maybe the truth that I take to be self-evident because of the experiences I’ve described here – that the female body will always cause female trouble – is just my story. It won’t necessarily be yours and you must absolutely make your own story as you see fit. All I would ask is that you don’t tell me that my story and the stories of other women don’t matter.

I think they do. That is why we keep telling them.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist