Early periods in my teenage years were always strangely painful. It was a pain that I saw but did not want to see as my own. I remember spending a lot of time lying on the floor at home with feet lightly treading around me, my people going about their reassuring business.
My periods recently got really bad. I faint. I struggle to eat or walk. I usually spend 2-3 days in bed. You will often find me in a hot bath at 3am with a wet towel held to my stomach. It’s a dynamic condition. I feel okay. I feel great. I feel abundant. Yet when I feel strong, healthy, here, I have borrowed these feelings from someone else. Being okay is on loan to me.
Adeno pain is like endometriosis pain – cyclical, chronic and acute, medically dismissed, feminised, difficult to describe. The pain is usually coupled with a lengthy diagnosis and lack of acknowledgement.
Since this started, I have desperately sought out some form of queer solidarity. Initially, I was working in Waterstones selling hundreds of hard copies of Emma Barnett’s It’s About Bloody Time. Period (2019). This followed an article from Cara Jones in 2016, where she spoke about endo pain as feminised and sexualised. Most of the stuff out there continues to follow Barnett’s model of depicting endo pain as an overlooked women’s problem. ‘Women’s health’ continues to be how mainstream journalism frames the condition. In an article published in 2018, Przybylo and Fahs attempted to speak about all dysmenorrhea (the medical term for period pain) as a crip experience. They refer to sufferers as ‘menstruators’ rather than ‘women’. They do so to ask how menstrual pain could become central to new kinds of solidarity, ‘based on alternate temporalities, cyclical experiences of time and performance’ (223).
I could not agree more that we need to deepen our solidarity around menstrual pain and strive for queer crip social time and performance. It is estimated that people with endo / adeno pain lose around 10 hours of productivity a week. If that sounds like a capitalist formula, it is! Because here we are, living in a capitalist world where cyclical pain = bad performance at work = sacrificing social time to meet unrelenting demands of waged relations = cumulative pressure across the month, year, career. With hope, an active and flexible support network takes a share of this burden of time; they return it as time you can give to relief.
Solidarity can be foundational to imagining time away from these constrictions, to performing in the otherwise. Yet before we build solidarity around dysmenorrhea, we need to vastly complicate how we see menstrual pain as a disability (if that is indeed a necessary step). We need to ask who remains centred in this proposed solidarity circle?
Thinking about all of this made me return to Jasbir Puar’s ‘triangulation’ of the disability/ability binary with “debility” in The Right to Maim (2017). The understanding of all dysmenorrhea as disability hides the way that feminisation can be capacitating. For ciswomen chronic period pain can be seen, care can be received, and adjustments can be made. Non-transgender adeno and endo women have capacities that are withdrawn for non-binary and trans people suffering with dysmenorrhea or related experiences of pain. Trans men, trans women, transmasculine people, and transfeminine people are all capable of experiencing period pain. Yet these people are not determined as capable of this chronic and cyclical pain within the feminised regimes of menstrual disability (again, see Pryzbylo and Fahs for more on this, or see Jones’s much more recent article where she argues that people with endo need to openly claim disability.)
Passing as a cishetwoman or as homonormative presents strong opportunities for solidarity within the healthcare system, in the workplace, and in social groups. In an early consultation, a specialist stepped outside her formal chit-chat with me to recommend having a baby as a treatment. In a recent phone consultation, a GP told me that her daughter ‘swears by her moon cup for her period pain.’ Sufferers are supposed to buy into these identifications, these moments of professional collapse. Such vacations performatively invoke some prior state that I am supposed to seek to get to, beyond this queer pain. Acts of solidarity shore up adeno gender performance, compelling this body further and further, further and further away from me. With disgust, I repeatedly sense and resist such opportunities to perform as more-woman-than-me, to heal pain by closing queerness down.