I don’t even remember when my mother first handed me a pair of shorts because she realised my discomfort with wearing skirts, when I climbed trees and jumped over walls. Since then I have lived in shorts every day of my life. Even when I wore a skirt to school, the shorts stayed under them.
Growing up I was a pretty gender non-conforming child. My parents were not super bothered about ingraining the norms of gender into me. I passed as a little boy at most places and I enjoyed it.
But much of this came to an end when one day I noticed that I was bleeding while peeing. I was about 10 years old and nobody had prepared me for this. I was scared and thought I had hurt myself. I managed to find some cotton and stuff into my underwear. I managed to hid the bleeding for a day. But the bleeding wouldn’t stop and the next day I was forced to tell my parents about it. My mother quickly showed me how to fold a piece of cotton cloth and use it to collect the blood. I come from an Assamese household where Periods is not a hush hush affair. The fact that I had got my periods was announced to the entire family. The family came with gifts and food to celebrate.
Everyone around me was happy. They kept saying that I had become a big girl now. I was on my way towards becoming a woman. It was the first time my relatives wanted me to wear a mekhela chadar (Traditional dress worn by Assamese women) and jewellery. But I felt like my whole world was crashing down. Suddenly I was being told that I was a girl, a woman. Until that day I had convinced myself that I would one day grow up to have a deep voice and maybe even some facial hair. Suddenly, I realised that it would perhaps never be possible.
The next two years I worked hard to put on a façade in front of my classmates and friends in school. It meant taking extra care so that no one ever saw a sanitary napkin in my bag, being careful never to stain my uniform, never complain about stomach ache and do every physical activity with regular vigour. Everyone else in my class had started menstruating and they often asked me if I had started menstruating. I would reply, “No, definitely not. Boys don’t menstruate.” My friends would laugh but not react to it. One day, a couple of years later, one of my friends came to hear from my relatives that I had been lying about this the entire time. She confronted me in front of the entire school bus. But by this time, the façade had become my truth and I had managed to convince myself of it. I still remember the shame and guilt the confrontation led to.
When I look back at it, I wonder if putting on this façade month after month had a long-term impact on me. Perhaps it did and perhaps it continues to do. Today, 20 years later, as a 31-year-old transmasculine person, I am still trying to understand and work on the impacts it had on me. I wish when I was growing up somebody had told me that menstruation is not equal to becoming a woman. It would have saved many people like me a lot of trauma that we carry into adulthood.
If we think menstruation is a women’s issue, maybe we need to think again. It is time we re-imagine menstruation.