J.A. alerted us to the fact that Science Friday on NPR was about menstruation and went big on the “people” who menstruate bullshit. Let’s read their summary:

Saying the phrase “menstrual blood” or or the word “period” can feel almost dirty. That’s because in the western world, people with periods are taught not to discuss this exceedingly normal biological process. Half the world will menstruate at some point in their lives, and yet menstruation remains exceedingly under-studied. 

Sure enough – they tactfully bashfully ashamedly hide the fact that it’s women who are subject to this association with dirt and failure to study. It’s intensely ironic (and of course enraging) to hide women even on this subject, because how can you possibly talk about taboos and disgust and loathing around menstruation without talking about disgust and loathing directed at women? And how can you talk about that without talking about menstruation? And how can you talk about menstruation properly while pretending it’s not connected to women? And here’s Kate Clancy, who is rightly outraged by the taboo thing, yet goes along with the new mandate to pretend it’s not disgust for women. I hope she wakes up in the middle of the night every night sweating with shame for doing this.

Biological anthropologist Kate Clancy dug into the history of menstruation research, and the myriad misconceptions about it, while working on her book, Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. What she found was a lack of basic understanding of the biological process, from physicians and menstruators alike. 

Do we call cancer patients “cancerers”? Do we call autistic people “autistickers”? Do we call people with disabilities “disabilityers”? Duh, no. But somehow it’s ok to call women and girls “menstruators.” To be sure, the point in that sentence is to underline that the people doing the menstruating lack basic understanding just as doctors do, but it’s laughably easy to do that by saying “from physicians and their female patients alike.”

NPR posted an excerpt from Clancy’s book:

There were a few key things I learned about periods as an adolescent. From fifth-grade health class, I learned that menstruation signaled a failed menstrual cycle with no baby. From my pediatric nurse practitioner Dr. Debbie, I learned that periods make you iron deficient. And from the world around me, I learned that I must hide all signs that I menstruated or face deep, crushing shame. 

What does that tell us? That women are seen as disgusting because they are the ones who make new humans. It’s very odd and perverse and it’s horrendously destructive – and Kate Clancy must be aware of that, yet she bows to the new imperative to pretend men also menstruate.

She bows to it even though she knows that it’s women who are shamed and marginalized for menstruating.

I noticed an assumption about periods that, with even the gentlest of prodding, completely disassembled. And I could not help but also notice that underlying these assumptions was a certain belief about what people, organs, or processes carry scientific importance, especially in my discipline of anthropology…I had one professor who only assigned women anthropologists in his one “feminist” week of the semester, but we had to read these works alongside scornful critiques. In my reflection assignment that week, I wrote that it seemed like he was setting up these authors to be mocked. In response, he read my comments aloud to the class and laughed. That moment created in me my own personal spite project to prove a different type of science is possible—that someone like me, asking the questions I ask, could be a professor.

Someone like her, i.e. a female person, yet she avoids saying it.

When I decided I wanted to write this book, I was years deep into a different spite project that had grown to epic proportions: someone dared to tell me that uncovering discrimination in the sciences was a “witch hunt.” It started with a collaboration to study sexual harassment in the field sciences, which led to additional projects in astronomy and the planetary sciences, then undergraduate physics, and then a major consensus report, testifying in front of Congress and flying all over the country for a year disseminating the results of the report.

And yet, and yet…”menstruators.”