welcome to menstruation nation

on PMS anxiety, period stigma, & advocating for menstruaters

It’s a dumb meme at this point. Someone online mentions they feel moody or intensely angry or wildly sad or (in my case, wildly anxious) out of nowhere and think they are going insane only to go to the bathroom and see…oh, right. It’s That Time of the Month. Duh. Of course.

I know from tracking my own symptoms that my anxiety spikes during That Time. It doesn’t make me anxious about things that are irrational— rather, it heightens my physical response to whatever makes me anxious. I’m more prone to getting shaky, or ruminating, or laying awake during this time. It helps to know this is coming, but it doesn’t exactly make things easier. All of this made me so much more self-conscious: especially at work, but in any situation where I had to be out and about. And even when I did act like a hermit, it’s not like the anxiety went away.

And don’t get me wrong. I love that we are talking more about anxiety generally, but the strange silence around menstrual anxiety seems simultaneously predictable and outrageous.

I felt this most strongly recently while listening to several of my students who were proposing a solution for women’s PMS and period cramps for a class project. I found myself getting emotional. These young people wanted to make it easier for menstruaters to participate more fully in society in the name of equality, one uninhibited by so-called biological imperatives.

PMS has been used as reasoning for why women wouldn’t make good presidents (I could make an entire substack post JUST documenting times male politicians were too emotional but let’s save that for…some other time). It is what people assume when someone seems angry, enraged, frustrated, sad, or on edge. It is the root of that godawful joke I remember from my teenage years: I don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die. PMS is very real, and it can be disruptive to daily life. And that’s just PMS—for those with endometriosis, PMDD, or other hormonal disorders, this can cause a severe disruption each and every month.

But despite all of this, there’s little innovation to help those of us whose emotions spin wildly out of control a few days each month. And what little innovation there is doesn’t guarantee safety (looking at you, Thinx). So-called “women’s products” are seen as luxuries rather than necessities, and a moment each month that we all ought to just power through.

what i think people who don’t menstruate imagine periods look like

And instead of focusing on engineering and developing decent options to make menstruation more comfortable, advocating for menstrual leave, or solving actual problems us menstruaters face, folks have instead recently zeroed in on trans women and non-binary folks who have received sponsorship deals from brands like Tampax. Look no further than the case of trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who said she carries tampons in her purse not because she menstruates, but because she said wants to be an ally to those who do. She was met with backlash from anti-trans activists who accused her of “contributing to a tampon shortage” (and dear reader, we all know that that is a stupid as hell argument).

There’s bigger conversations to be had about Mulvaney and trans rights right now that I won’t dive into for the sake of brevity (but more on that to come), but what I’d like to say is: you don’t have to menstruate to try and make the world better for those of us who do.

And it should not solely be up to trans women to be good allies to menstruaters.