Abolition is Necessary in Menstrual Health for People of All Genders
By: Period Futures
Tags: Gender Equality, Inclusion, Health, Menstruation, Menstrual Equity

Abolition is Necessary in Menstrual Health for People of All Genders

// What’s 1 issue surrounding menstrual health that you’d like to shine a brighter spotlight on?

For me, it’s not so much a question of “What issue is there?” but, “How do I pick only one?” Menstrual health today cannot be diluted to one flaw with its treatment and presence in modern society. A neoliberal or individualist approach might encourage me to reiterate a year’s-old line about how it isn’t just cis women who menstruate, but I believe allowing cis people to claim ignorance and focus the conversation on bare minimums is what contributes to people thinking fighting over the basics will be productive.

It is a fact that trans men, gender-variant, non-cis, and nonbinary trans people such as myself menstruate.

My issue with the state of menstrual health (or more accurately — menstrual healthcare) is holistic and cannot be summarized without looking at it from my communist analysis. It’s not just that the medical understanding of and regard for menstruation is abysmal in multiple ways, but that all of society does not understand that biological sex is a concept quantified and created by colonialist western medicine not out of medical accuracy but out of justification for subjugating any person who was not a part of the cis white patriarchy.

This is also true of the construction of race as a biological difference to justify racism. The result has created a society where even those affected by gendered marginalization and/or racism have thoroughly been taught to believe that their bodies have fundamental inherent biological differences that define who and what you are and how your body works. When that is coupled with a capitalist society where medicine is an industry — as opposed to helping people who need treatment — and the academy educates a workforce of primarily non-Black and cis doctors to uphold white supremacy and colonialism via medicine, you create a monster that kills patients.

Capitalism is also present in the environmental damage done by the production and disposal of menstrual products.

By protecting corporate interests, the logic of the free-market allows profit to take precedence over preventing environmental collapse. Corporations inform, lobby, and control huge portions of lawmaking in America. A non-profit politicians and corporations partner with — ALEC—protects corporations from environmental responsibility and works to restrict the vote to keep their legislators in power. Major corporations have also partnered with ALEC over the decades to create, boost, and preserve the Prison Industrial Complex as a way to legally utilize slave labor in the US.

By increasing criminalization and focusing on neoliberal feminist messages around girl power and pussies over abolitionist feminism, the rate of incarceration for cis women has risen 750% between 1980 and 2017.

Black cis women are incarcerated twice as frequently as white cis women, Native American cis girls are incarcerated four times as much as white cis girls, and Black cis girls three-and-a-half times as much. The more prisoners you have, the more people you have to farm Idaho potatoes, make jeans in Oregon, furniture in Georgia, Victoria’s Secret underwear, and many other products including Microsoft and Boeing electronics.

If the fact that some prisons publicly boast about the products their prisoners make on their websites wasn’t insidious enough, women’s prisons and jails are abysmal when it comes to providing menstrual products to their prisoners who menstruate.

Regardless of legislature passed, American facilities still debate whether or not menstrual products are a basic need.

Prisons also have a history of using women of color as subjects for experiments without their knowledge or consent and are still forcibly sterilizing inmates while posturing it as ‘voluntary’. When you realize that prisons and contractors don’t see themselves as rehabilitators but employers and industries allowed to abuse their workforce to boost their own profits, you begin to see that a society constructed around industries will never care about human beings. Menstrual products are a 15 billion dollar industry themselves. You can petition against the “pink-tax” all you want, but as long as industries exist they’re never going to allow people to access basic needs for free.

“Brands” and “companies” will not and should not ever be a hero to people who desire genuine menstrual care for people of all genders.

These same groups are the exact sort of people who send defective menstrual products to African countries because it makes them money. It doesn’t matter to them that these defective products burn people’s skin and cause terrible rashes, because manufacturers and providers only care about their bottom line.

People point to Always as “progressive” for removing the female gender symbol from packaging while this same company accounts for 62% of these burning pads in Kenya. (Where only 65% of people who menstruate do not have access to menstrual products at all). If recognition that menstrual products are not for cis women only nor are they “feminine care” must come at the cost of the health and safety of people in the global south, I don’t fucking want that. Corporations are a major contributor to the entire problem of why menstrual care sucks. They need to go, and prisons do too.

It was never designed to keep people safe or rehabilitate perpetrators. Prisons were designed to legalize slavery, strengthen police forces, encourage and increase decimation of Black communities, protect private property and corporations, and uphold white supremacy. They torture people to make money for anyone who knows how to cash in on the industry of imprisonment and do nothing to provide real justice for everyone.

Reformists will tell you improving menstrual health for people of all genders within prisons and without is a matter of passing the right laws, allocating more funding, or using the system to enact policies. Reforms cannot change the fact that imprisoning people is not an aspect of life which should be kept.

If we care about menstrual health for people of all genders, we have to abolish racism and patriarchy. We have to abolish transmisogyny and transphobia. None of those things can be abolished without abolishing capitalism and capitalism cannot be abolished without abolishing prisons and prisons cannot be abolished without abolishing capitalism.

When you watch or read science fiction, you will eventually come across someone giving birth and experiencing severe pain or even dying.

Did you know Black people who give birth are 243% more likely to die from childbirth-related issues? The futures writers imagine depict that in 400 years time we will be able to perform non-existent intensive neurosurgeries no problem, but childbirth?

Well, only women do that (false) and there’s just no way medicine will ever be able to improve sexual health. They often pretend menstruation and birth control don’t even exist. Not only that, but fictional and nonfictional analysis alike both refuse to acknowledge the lethal education built into the fabric of medicine, science, and the academy.

I see a doctor or nurse getting exposed as a racist or general bigot almost every day. The people meant to take care of everyone have been taught to believe that Black people feel less pain than white people do. Famous scientists and doctors often support population control (aka eugenics) as a way to save the Earth. These institutions are not without issues simply because they purport to be helping others and working to do the right thing.