Genderqueer Menstruation: A Queeriod?

In June 2020, J.K. Rowling tweeted the following in response to an article detailing the work of a period poverty charity group, aiming to create greater inclusivity for people who menstruate:

Rowling’s response clearly indicates a mindset that is inherently transphobic and entrenched in patriarchal society’s conditioning of language into strict gender categories. Rowling’s tweet is a product of the way in which heteronormative society designates certain discussions to particular groups: i.e. men talk about sex, women talk about periods. This conditioning is part of our education systems, our workplaces, our relationships, our infrastructure. We build different spaces for different people, and we filter our language accordingly. If we only put sanitary bins in toilets for ‘women’, we only designate the need for sanitary bins and items for ‘women’.

I had my first period on a school trip to France when I was twelve (I know, harrowing). I thought then that I was finally growing up and I had a delighted sense of pride as I quietly announced it to my friends. This was what the older girls had talked about with an air of earned sophistication, something I had been green with envy over. The idea of having my first period made me giddy with the hope of finally gaining access to that sense of femininity that I always saw in the girls around me, but felt I inherently lacked.

But starting my periods didn’t do that for me. Sure, in some ways I felt a bit more connected to my friends and classmates whenever we talked about our pains, shared funny stories or asked for tampons. But, there was that feeling, gnawing away at me constantly. A feeling of disconnect, of dissonance between ‘Their Periods’, and ‘My Periods’.

We are promised, as female people, that our bodies operate in regular, specific ways. We are told that our period will come every month, that it will last 3-5 days, and that anything outside of those prescribed experiences is a ‘problem’ in a multitude of ways. I have had irregular periods since they started on that school trip. Two years ago, I decided to go to my GP and get some answers as to why. It has been a long and arduous process, still with no clear results. However, a surprising result of seeking medical help was that by finally addressing my irregularity, something finally clicked for me and my gender identity.

The thing about my body not behaving as I was promised it would, meant that something always felt off about my body in relation to being a ‘woman’. I remember looking at how girls around me seemed to interact with their femininity and their female bodies. I remember girls in the school year above me announcing that they had started their period like they had reached the summit of some mountain of achievement of girlhood. It felt like if I got my period, then I’d finally understand what it meant to be a girl. But when it came, and I continued to have extremely irregular and unpredictable periods, the feeling of displacement within my own body never really waned. 

When everyone was tracking their periods on an app and worrying if it came even a day late, I had a more will they/won’t they relationship with my periods. More of a ‘you up?’ text than anything more serious.

The highly gendered language around menstruation means that as we move through the various stages of development and education, we’re constantly fed a rhetoric of what ‘should’ be and who it ‘should’ concern. Therefore, when we encounter femininity that isn’t defined by menstruation, or masculinity that includes it, there is confusion, a sense of going against the grain. For some, this lack of understanding doesn’t go away by engaging with this difference; it instead morphs into something ugly and stubborn - an attitude intrinsically harmful and hateful towards others. 

And for those of us who are not a part of the cisgendered fantasy scape surrounding menstruation, this confusion, this hate, these strict binaries we continuously demarcate in our language and social practices, start to cause fragmentation and dislocation within the self. Because I menstruate, some would assume I’m a woman. But because I am not a woman, the discussions we have around menstruation often leave me feeling on the outside looking in. 

I’m not saying that mine or other people’s gender queerness is at all intrinsically related to period irregularity or something inherent in physical biology. It's just that, by stopping to consider the variations across every person’s experience of menstruation, and the way in which we discuss it, I started to think more deeply about my own relationship with my body and what makes me ‘feminine’. 

Not all cisgendered women menstruate, or in regulated ways. So if there is such variance among the very people who J.K Rowling is ‘defending’, why uphold these unreasonable boundaries of what gender is and who menstruation concerns?

Graphic Designed by: Maria Hallewell-Pearson @bluemalloo