Last week, a transgender artist released a photo in which she insisted that she was a man who menstruates.
Cass Clemmer posted a picture of herself bleeding from the crotch captioned, “Periods are not just for women #BleedingWhileTrans.”
Below the photo, Clemmer inserted a poem she wrote for a spoken word event at a menstrual health conference last summer.
The poem read:
Y’all know I’m trans and queer, And what that means for me all around, Is something that’s neither there nor here, It’s a happy, scary middle ground. So when I talk gender inclusion, And I wrote these rhymes to help you see, I’m not tryna bring up something shallow, Periods are honestly pretty traumatic for me. See my life is very clearly marked, Like a red border cut up a nation, A time before and a time beyond, The mark of my first menstruation. So let me take you back, To the details that I can still recall, Of the day I gained my first period, And the day that I lost it all. I was 15 and still happy, Running around, all chest bared and buck, Climbing trees, digging holes, And no one gave a single fuck. I mean I think my ma was worried, So I went and grew out my locks, A sign I was normal, still a girl, A painted neon sign for my gender box. So, the day I got my period, My god, a day so proud, This little andro fucked up kid, Had been bestowed the straight, cis shroud. The relief got all meshed up in my pain, In that moment, I sat down and cried, Just thanking god I was normal, While mourning the freedom that had died. Everyone told me my hips would grow, I looked at them and couldn’t stop crying, “What’s wrong with you? You’ll be a woman!” They kept celebrating a child dying. See my body had betrayed me, That red dot, the wax seal, On a contract left there broken, A gender identity that wasn’t real. Most people deal with blood and tissue, And yet my body forces me to surrender, Cause every time I get my cycle, Is another day I shed my gender. My boobs betray me first, I feel them stretching out my binder, I send up questions, “am I cursed?” And wish to god that she was kinder. The five days it flows, I try to breathe, I dissociate, While my body rips outs parts of me, Leaving nothing but a shell of hate. The blood drips from an open wound, Of a war waging deep inside my corpse, The battle between mind and body, Immovable object; unstoppable force. #bleedingwhiletrans #menstruator #genderinclusion #mencanmenstruate #protectranskids #periodpride #genderdysphoria #menstruationmatters #ifmenhadperiods
The Huffington Post breathlessly described the photo as “an attempt to broaden the cultural understanding of the different types of people who experience menstruation.”
Clemmer told HuffPo that the photo was a reaction to critics of her coloring book, The Adventures of Toni the Tampon: A Period Coloring Book, which was intended to teach children about menstruation. She told HuffPo:
I remember sharing for the first time with a friend of mine that I wasn’t able to wear my binder that day because I was on my period and my boobs had swelled up so much that it made it hard to breathe. We had been friends for awhile and she’s a feminist activist, but when I realized that not even she had considered what it was like for people like me to experience bleeding on a (ir)regular basis I knew that I had to go public with my story to help shift the mindset around tying periods to womanhood and femininity. Not all people who menstruate are women, and not all women menstruate.
Okay.
There was more; Clemmer continued:
There are a lot of people who have never considered what it’s like to get your period while not identifying as a woman and I have seen a lot of educational and respectful conversations between commenters on my thread that give me a lot of hope for the future. My favorite reactions, however, are and always will be the response, I get from fellow trans and non-binary folks who have written to me to say that because of my poem, they feel less alone in the world. For me, there’s no greater motivation and honor than that.
Interviewed in 2016, Clemmer enthused:
Toni is not just a character in a coloring book – Toni has a whole Instagram account @TonitheTampon that features snapshots of the life of a tampon outside the wrapper. I take Toni, this little tampon with googly eyes, everywhere for a very different reason than most people carry their tampons. I take pictures of Toni at fun places I visit, or just at home wearing things like a mini elf hat to prepare for the holiday season. Since I started, Toni’s account has grown to almost 600 followers that follow me as I take photos of my tampon in public. It’s pretty cool to see people so excited about showing off a tampon in public, instead of hiding it up my sleeve on my way to the bathroom.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/18894/transgender-posts-photo-herself-apparently-hank-berrien