Some people see their period as a Hell Week of epic, bloody proportions, while others relish that time to be in touch with the natural processes of their body. However you feel about your period, though, you should have the freedom to talk about it and the very real ways in which it affects you without shame.
Maybe you already feel super comfortable talking to your friends and family about your period, and that's great. But it's not that easy for everyone—even advertisers seem to struggle with being straightforward about it (can we talk about that blue liquid used in commercials that is most definitely not menstrual blood?).
That's why a new campaign from U.K.-based tampon subscription box service Pink Parcel seems so refreshing: it's aimed at helping people normalize periods, and it features several women plus a trans man—a perspective we don't often get to hear from when it comes to menstruation. The campaign centers around a new line of shirts with slogans like, "I'm on cloud nine," and "I'm on. Period." And £5 (about $7) from each purchase will go to Bloody Good Period, an organization that provides period products to refugees and others who need them.
"In terms of my period experience, it's definitely different from most other people," Jones says in a video about the campaign. And in an interview on the Pink Parcel site, Jones says his periods were sometimes rough. "I’d be really aggressive and agitated, I just couldn’t wait for them to stop," he says.
But he also says that getting his period helped him understand more about his evolving relationship with his body. "I didn’t want my period and there was a lot of confusion within myself," Jones says in the interview. "It did make me realize that periods weren’t something I wanted to happen to me and it motivated and pushed me to further my transition.”
“During my transition, I did have to deal with experiencing periods each month and many of the negative stereotypes that can come along with it,” he told The Independent. Now, although Jones says he "no longer bleed[s]," he does still feel period pain sometimes.
As SELF wrote previously, your anatomy doesn't determine your gender—and neither does the biological process of menstruation. But because we erroneously tend to think of periods as integral to the experience of being a woman, those women who don't have periods as well as men who do menstruate (or have at some point in their lives) are often left out of conversations about period stigma. Ironically, that just furthers the silence and shame around their experience. That's why recognition of that experience on the level of the Pink Parcel campaign is both unprecedented and necessary.
When we say we want to normalize periods, we mean normalizing periods for everyone—regardless of gender. Because we all deserve to be able to speak about our experience with this bloody and (often) painful time of the month. And no one should have to go through that alone or ashamed.
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