Is it normal that my girlfriend can squirt but needs a catheter to pee?

My anatomical knowledge is limited, so take this for what it's worth and do your own research if interested.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the autonomic nervous system (the system that controls internal organs). There are actually two nerves that run down both sides of our neck and then wander and branch off through the chest and abdomen. The fact that the vagus nerve doesn't pass through the spinal chord is why people with spinal chord damage may have no sensation or control over large areas of their body, but their heart continues to beat, they continue to breathe, they continue to digest food and so on.

The sphincter muscles that regulate the release of urine from the bladder are under the control of the voluntary (somatic) nervous system, and the spinal chord is the main highway for that system. So it's common for people with spinal chord damage to have no voluntary control over urination.

One of the branches of the vagus nerve goes to the genitals. It controls things like erections in men and vaginal lubrication in women. This is why guys can't flex their penis at will like they can flex their biceps or their six pack, and why horny sixteen-year-old guys can't make a socially-unacceptable erection deflate. (But wouldn't it be cool if we could do that? 😁). It's also why women sometimes find their vagina is lubricated when they really don't want to have sex, and why sometimes they aren't lubricated when they do want to have sex.

I'd never heard of anything like what you describe, and a bit of Googling led me to the page I link below. Interestingly, the third bullet point under the "Info For Women" heading mentions G-spot sensitivity and "a lot of liquid". That's obviously a family-friendly website, so they're going to be coy and avoid using the term "squirting", but how they say that women shouldn't worry about it being urine makes it pretty damn clear that's what they really mean.

What I find particularly interesting about your girlfriend's sexual response is that the liquid she produces is clearly _not_ the result of her deliberately or reflexively loosening her urinary sphincter. If those muscles simply aren't connected to her brain, she's unable to do that. There's a continuing debate about whether squirting is nothing more than urine, and I'm absolutely sure that most of the "squirting" in porn is just women deliberately peeing. But what your girlfriend does seems to me to be pretty good evidence that real squirting is completely different to urination. (FWIW, my wife squirts when she's already highly aroused and she has another orgasm, what she produces doesn't look or smell like urine, and so I've never believed that's all it is.)

https://www.backuptrust.org.uk/support-for-you/information-section/sex-and-spinal-cord-injury

How does the pee get past the tampon

Everybody? Pffft nonsense! I have never peed in my LIFE.

What even is that? Peeing? never heard of it. I am genuinely confused.

bruh

Is it because she doesn't have anyone to help for get to the bathroom?

*takes off reading glasses and rubs eyes

Ahhhhh

You should probably read about the female anatomy.