"I am proud to be a man who menstruates": What it's like to be a trans man who has periods
When I was 11 years old, I got my first period on the bus ride home from school. I arrived home to find I had bled all the way through my boy’s Spongebob boxer shorts. Spongebob smiled up at me, seemingly drowning in blood, like something out of a horror film. I was devastated. I had somehow imagined that puberty was something that was just going to pass me by, that I was the exception to this rule because I wanted so badly to stay my tomboyish self. It felt like the world was forcing me to grow into something I was not and there was no other option available.
Being a tomboy was only acceptable until a certain age, and my best friend (who was also a tomboy) had already started to embrace her femininity. She was quickly becoming interested in different things and I was left on the sidelines clinging to my boyhood, while the bloody reality of womanhood stained my underwear scarlet. Pads don’t stick to boy’s boxer shorts properly, and so panties were adopted and my true gender identity was repressed deep below the surface.
I am still very much unpacking all those years I spent repressing my true gender identity. They weren’t always painful, but they were numb. I genuinely accepted certain concepts that I considered to be inherent truths. I thought that life was an unpleasant event that we all have to get through ,and anyone who was truly content was just ignorant to the reality of the human condition.
My misery and discomfort was a part of who I was so I learned to pick it up and carry it around with me. I adopted destructive coping mechanisms like smoking, drinking, and using drugs from an early age, but I also focused on my creative interests, viewing my body as a vessel for my thoughts as opposed to something that had any physical value. I read constantly, losing myself in the stories of other people, and wrote new ones for myself in which I was a boy and could run away into the wilderness and live off of the land far away from societal pressures.
Throughout this time I found menstruation to be deeply embarrassing, emotional, and physically limiting. I felt like I couldn’t do all of the things I wanted to do with the same vigour. I was also seen as irrational whilst on my period, which made me feel stereotypically feminine, yet I was notoriously bad at changing my pads, resulting in many leaks, which were viewed as proof of my inability to be a responsible woman. So I learned to hide my periods from those around me to avoid being judged. I wore black trousers and underwear on my period so that no one would be able to see if I leaked, not even my mother when she did the laundry.
I moved to London at 18 and came out as a dyke-butch-lesbian-masculine-queer and that ever expanding identity opened up a whole world of representation that I didn’t know existed coming from the confines of small town America. My friend and activist, Sheerah Ravindren, introduced me to the Queer POC scene which played a huge part in me finding my true gender identity. She also knew I was trans long before I did, so she just kept taking me to inclusive events and sharing queer content with me until I found the words to come out myself.
Immediately following coming out as a transgender man, my periods made me more uncomfortable than they ever had before. After ignoring my body, I was suddenly looking at it with more scrutiny than I had since childhood. It was like this dissociative veil had been lifted and everything was blatantly clear. I was a man and I wanted to present as a man, but my body did not seem to align with that and menstruation was a painful reminder of how far off from my desired gender presentation I was. Going to the shop to buy period products was also very stressful; I was so preoccupied with being read as a cisgendered man and it felt like I was outing myself every time.
Since I started to medically transition and the way I am perceived by others has started to shift, my ideas around what it is to be a man have also shifted. I am a man, so all of my body is a man’s body - even the parts that cause me gender dysphoria or that society wants to claim are something else. There has been a lot of unlearning, and it has certainly not been a linear or simple journey.
It has in fact been very difficult, and often I still feel bad about my body and invalidated by my period; society’s grain is not so easily dislodged. But menstruation is something that I am trying to reclaim as my own because it is not a 'women’s thing' to me. It is a trans thing and I see being trans as a gift unto itself. In that regard, I am proud to be a man who menstruates.
Vic is one of 11 voices fronting period-care brand Callaly's campaign, The Whole Bloody Truth, which aims to provide a safe space for honest accounts of menstruation from all people. For more stories, search instagram for #TheWholeBloodyTruth.
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