One day in 2012, the entire fifth grade of my elementary school was on edge. All day, students had been pulled out of class, split up into girls and boys, and brought into an empty classroom to have a conversation, the topic of which they were not allowed to disclose to their peers until everyone had been in the room. There had been whispers and giggles all day, and we wondered what it could be. Finally, I got answers when my class was split up, taken into separate rooms, and sat on the floor. We were shown a video presentation about something some of us had heard of, some of us were already dealing with every day, and some of us had only imagined after hearing implicit jokes writers snuck into the shows we would watch every day once we got home. The presentation was about periods.*cue ominous end of the world music*

I hardly remember the presentation itself. If I were to guess, a femme cartoon character with a perpetual smile on her face told us what a period was in all its bloody, gushy, yet still PG glory. She probably told us what happens biologically when someone gets their period, something about how once a month your body’s uterine lining sheds and leaves your body through the vagina (something our families at home had always called some other silly word; I wouldn’t be surprised if the first time I heard the word “vagina” was that fifth grade presentation). To be clear, there was no mention in this presentation of reproduction—I remember that much. This cartoon lady never told us why our bodies were shedding their uterine lining, just that they were. Just that if you were a girl, you were bleeding. To be clear, there was also no mention of the fact that plenty of women don’t get periods, due to a hormonal issue or a condition or, of course, the fact that gender and biology are not inherently linked. There was no mention of the fact that plenty of boys get periods for the same reason. I know that, not because I remember noticing a lack of information, but because my total lack of comprehensive education meant that I didn’t know trans people existed until middle school.

After the presentation, we entered a Q&A portion in which not a single girl raised their hand to ask a question. Instead, the teachers pulled questions written on notecards and placed in an anonymous box before the presentation ever began, as if they knew we would all carry some secret shame about the very idea of acknowledging menstruation out loud. I remember my question: How can someone keep track of their period so that it’s not obvious? Thank you! :) Excuse the enthusiasm, I was in fact the biggest teacher’s pet up until college. Don’t excuse the shame about being “obvious,” it points to something massive. The teacher listed off some answer about how I can be discreet by putting a little dot on each day of my period on the calendar, that way no one will know what I’m marking.

Finally, at the end of the Q&A, the teachers told us all to get up and we danced to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” That is not made up and really, absolutely happened. I also remember not really dancing, just swaying side to side in the background, confused as to how any of this was remotely fun. We were bleeding for god's sake!

When the same group of us got the sex talk a few years later in eighth grade, the format was different. We were old enough that all the students were allowed to be in the same room. The presentation used accurate language and diagrams (though by then we all knew the word vagina, thank god). And on the inverse, this time the presentation was all about reproduction. The sex talk was less a sex talk and more a pregnancy talk, in which the teacher more or less explained how a mommy and daddy love each other and come together to make a beautiful baby out of their love. Note: there was nothing about non-reproductive sex. Note: there was nothing about non-heterosexual sex. Note: because the majority of the presentation was about reproductive sex, there was no mention of, you guessed it, contraception. (let that sink in) I’d like to note that I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and so I’m sure this talk differed for others depending on where they were schooled.

Regardless, in many ways, this talk differed drastically from the one I got in fifth grade. But there was still a common theme: shame. There is some implication in this middle school sex talk about how sex is something that happens to women, not something they can and should take equal pleasure in as their sexual partner does. This talk says that women get penetrated and then the video goes into a close up biological shot of the diagram of a pregnant uterus, decentering the body holding the uterus and painting women not as people but as incubators. Sex is for reproduction, and to find sex pleasurable is to be wrong. Reproduction is for women, and to not fit in this binary or to be on a different side of it is to be wrong. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the psychological effects on queer and trans youth getting this kind of talk. I didn’t even know how one could have queer sex and avoid an STD until I got to college. Not to mention, this kind of talk categorizes reproduction as a requirement and therefore makes sexual intimacy inevitable, completely isolating students on the ace spectrum. There is a message here for queer and trans youth: this is not for you and anything that you do or don’t do is once again, wrong. The list goes on.

I think now about how taboo the subject of bodies was growing up. I think about how shocked I was when I heard people my age were starting to have sex (not because they were having it, but because they let people find out. Or worse, they told people themselves). I think about how nauseous my 6’4” tough and confident father looked when he asked me “Did you get your…girl thing?” I think about the time in highschool when my pad (unused, clean, still in its wrapper) fell out of my coat on the way to the bathroom and when I got in the stall and realized the glaring bright yellow packaging was sitting in the middle of the tenth grade lounge (IN FRONT OF EVERYONE), I had a panic attack so severe I had to stay in the bathroom through assembly.

We’ve all heard the same speech about how half of the world has periods, how it’s a natural part of life that so many people deal with for decades and that there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve also heard the speech about how so many people have sex, and how if you do it safely and you protect yourself physically and emotionally, there’s nothing wrong with it. But if that is so true, then why have so many of us spent our adolescent years heading to change our pad with the new one tucked so tight under our arm no one could possibly see it, or being ashamed at the very idea of someone seeing our body, of wanting to be pleasured? Why didn’t my household call a period a “period,” and why do I to this day sometimes feel like I’m going to hear sirens and helicopters if I say the word “vagina?” What’s the truth? Are our bodies something to be ashamed of or not?

I recognize that this shame is not the reality for everyone. Even just talking with some of my friends and hearing how explicit they are in conversations related to bodies, I recognize that we have different experiences. But how many of us can say, at one point or another in our life, we’ve heard that voice in our head telling us our bodies were embarrassing, that its natural functions and needs were taboo? Especially for people who are marginalized in some or multiple ways, how many of us have hidden away because of a lesson we had been taught all our lives, that our bodies were something to hide? I am still not 100% convinced I shouldn’t cover up.

There is an additional dimension in this, which is the way in which systems decide who is allowed to perform these bodily functions and desires, who is allowed to be seen as imperfect, and who is allowed to have desire. If you’re a man, especially if you are white, wealthy, able bodied, neurotypical, and/or cisgender and heterosexual, you can carry out whatever functions you’d like to in regards to your own body. The same is not true for marginalized people, especially gender marginalized people, especially gender marginalized people who hold other marginalized identities such as being a person of color, being disabled, being poor, being queer, being trans. Having a body at all as a marginalized person is deemed problematic by the world at large (how dare you take up space and show us how we’re oppressing you), and when you add onto that body with functions and desires that a conservative or “morally pure” society deems as inappropriate to name out loud, your body is a site to express disgust and shame. It took me so long to stop feeling shame over my period. It took me even longer to stop feeling shame over having desire and acting on that desire. What is required of us as a collective society to wash away shame, to make sure children learning about their bodies don’t experience the same weird obsession with purity and punishment that we did? When does it end?

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