GenderbendingBeetle

They used to tell me how menstruation connects you to the women who came before you, stretching back thousands of years, all the way to the days of the Bible and having to bleed with the other women in a tent, unclean but still holy. I am stapled to this legacy by two x chromosomes I didn't ask for. I am drowning and the water tastes like copper and musk. Being a woman has been connected to pain since Genesis and I used to think that was because a man wrote that but maybe they were on to something, maybe they watched enough people die screaming, trading one life for another, or waste away slowly, the blood flowing like a river down someone's shaking legs. I didn't ask to be a woman and I'm afraid to ask for what would make me less of one. I cannot shed the label, because every month something else of mine is shed.  In my mind I am connected to the strange ones. The inbetween. The ones who were holy, connected to their gods in ritual, in prayer, in war. The ones born of the moon, the ones that men who thought they knew better could never truly wipe out. The ones who survived through words and stories and songs. The ones pathologized. The ones told to decide between two tightening nooses or else they would be tied to their genitals forever, the ones wondering if it was worth that to just not bleed anymore. The ones electrocuted and force fed vitamins, the ones who had their lives unrelentingly picked through like a puzzle meant to be solved when they are the answer. The ones who's parents will never understand. I am connected to the children crying in the bathroom as they wonder why they couldn't float in the space inbetween forever. The ones hiding their pads in boxer shorts. The ones called unholy, sinners, fools. The ones told they are going through a phase. The ones told to decide, because the blood coming out of them has decided for them. I am blood. I am water. I am inbetween and interwoven and alive. 

This poem is about menstruation while being transmasc.