“Periodic” is a monthly column by poet Franny Choi. Every month, she writes a short column on the first day of her period—a check-in that might cover issues of gender, queerness, writing, health, and/or love. This series is an experiment in occasional writing and an exploration of what it means to write about menstruation with a queer imagination. 

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Chrysanthemum Tran and I wrote poems together for the few years we overlapped in Rhode Island. You hold a special place in your heart for the people who were present while you were trying to imagine yourself into existence, and Chrysanthemum was one of those people. We were two queer, Asian American fem(me)s in our twenties, far from home in so many ways, and using writing to try to understand what it meant to occupy our bodies in the context of an Ivy League university built with slave trade money; in the context of a city like Providence; and in the weird world of poetry slam.

Chrysanthemum, who’s a trans woman, has been on my mind since I started this column, so I was excited to see a text from her after my July column came out.

“I love your interrogation of science vs. myths forged by anecdotes,” she wrote. “Of course I’ve never had anything in my life sync except my iTunes library, but there’s a huge culture of trans women on hormones claiming they experience period-like symptoms.” She talked about her fears about gender essentialism, internalized misogyny, and what she saw as “an immediate and uninterrogated dismissal of anything about periods” on the part of some other transfems.

After texting back and forth a bit, I asked if she would be interested in being interviewed for the column, and I was thrilled when she said yes. I called her on the second day of my August period. She picked up my FaceTime on the porch of the Rhode Island farmhouse she shares with her partner. We chatted for a while about therapy, open relationships, and our various escapades in woodsy gay corners of New England, as birds and cicadas made their sounds from somewhere in the trees above her. After catching up for a while, we got down to it.

“I’m not sure how popular what I say will be among other trans women and transfems…” she started.

“Oh, of course!” I said. “I mean, in no way am I interviewing you as, like, The Trans Woman. I’m interviewing you as Chrysanthemum.”

“Sure!” she said. “Well, recently, so many conversations about menstruation have become dictated by trans women. And there’s this continuous idea that something about menstruation is inherently transphobic…There’s a denial that some trans women express, a denial that biology does have some effect on how your physical reality is going to manifest.”

“I think… it’s a scary conversation for a lot of people to approach,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “But there is something about menstruation that is so taboo, and for trans women to stifle any talk about periods doesn’t serve anybody in the end.”

I heard my friend trying to reassure me that it was okay to write about menstruating; but rather than comforting me, it made me a little nervous.

“I hear you, and I appreciate that,” I said, “but it also does seem to me that yoking periods to womanhood, asking periods to be a symbol—that does feel trans-exclusive. Doesn’t it?”

Chrysanthemum paused, thinking. “In your work, how often do you approach womanhood with a symbol or an image that’s universal to all women?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I guess—I try not to,” I stumbled. “But also, we rely on symbols and metaphors because they’re bigger than ourselves, bigger than our own individual experiences.”

“I think, even if people are justifiably uncomfortable with equating periods to womanhood, it would be hard to deny that periods are still very much a gendered experience,” Chrysanthemum responded.

“This,” she went on, “is a way that sex and the body and physiology and medicine and business all come together. Imagine if those strings disappeared: would there be a way to approach menstruation as a non-gendered thing? Would it be a world without gender? Would it be that kind of utopian fantasy?”

What I heard Chrysanthemum speaking to was a difference between collapsing and connecting. That is, while brandishing menstruation as a stand-in for womanhood was certainly bad, attempting to leave gender out of it completely is, at the very least, a weird fantasy. And fantasy has high stakes for those whose status in America’s collective imagination remains precarious.

“Transition is something that requires a lot of fantasizing and dreaming. It’s—” She stopped suddenly. “Oh. I’m getting emotional.”

After a long pause, she went on.

“It’s trying to see the world for what it is, and knowing how cruel it can be, but how there must be glimpses of something worth living for,” she said. “When I transition, I’m trying to envision a future world that’s just like the world right now—I’m not asking for much. It can be this same world. But in this world, I’m not terrified by my reflection.”

The idea of the stakes of imagination work came up again later, as we were talking about how Chrysanthemum’s first year on hormones was going. She told me that she wasn’t experiencing any symptoms that she would identify as periods or PMS, aside from maybe crying a lot (“But doesn’t everybody?”).

Just before we’d gotten on the call, I’d been reading through articles on the subject of HRT-related period symptoms, including a number of TERF screeds about what constituted a “real” period. It struck me that having anything even proximate to a period—cramping, bloating, nausea, fatigue, mood swings—is a deeply visceral and affecting experience, whatever its origin point. Such an experience affects the way one looks at the world and relates to one’s own body. It becomes another language with which to understand one’s life, the power of which isn’t, I think, diminished by the fact that this language may accented, or a pidgin, or inherited through a violent history.

“Sometimes, I really do sympathize with this need to narrativize what you’re experiencing,” Chrysanthemum said on the subject. “It’s not exclusive to trans women—people make tremendous claims about bodies all the time. I’m having a heat flash. Oh my god, is that a migraine coming on? There are a lot of things that help us make sense of the moment we live in.”

A man started shouting in the alley by my apartment, filling my office with his loud, rhythmic announcements. I closed the window to muffle the noise.

“I would remind people that there are trans people that experience periods, too,” added Chrysanthemum. “There are intersex people who experience periods. And menstruation and the taboos around it are still a trans issue. The concern should be about how trans and intersex people navigate a healthcare system that already views their bodies as illegible.”

As the sun set, we talked about Jane Fonda and Ivanka Trump, about cultural appropriation and future alien historians and the lost political origins of the term “Asian American.” Suddenly, I was sad about the years I’d spent apart from Chrysanthemum, from all of my writer friends in Rhode Island. I missed Charlotte and Laura and Muggs and everyone else whose thinking had, for years, helped grow my thinking.

I asked: “What do you think it looks like for cis and trans women to reach towards each other in good, solidarity-building ways?”

“It can happen nominally,” she said, “but actually, it has to begin with genuine, realistic, safe relationships between cis women and trans women. And it’s really easy to think that there needs to be something that binds them together as women.” But what was it? And, if it turns out there’s no common binding thing—what then?

It reminded me of what it’s like to try to build a political identity across the wide swaths of peoples we call Asian and Pacific Islander Americans—who share no common language, religion, immigration history, food, etc. It’s always seemed to me to be the most difficult and the most beautiful thing about APIA organizing—the challenge to make an us out of a community where nothing can stand in to represent the whole.

“If I want to build toward liberation with you, I don’t think it serves me to say, ‘You shouldn’t say that, because it doesn’t affect me.’” said Chrysanthemum. “It affects a lot of people. It doesn’t affect me. And that’s okay.”

“But also, like, I care about you!” she said. “If you were bleeding out of an orifice and it was causing you pain, like, yeah, I think I’m a nice person—I’d want to console you! And likewise, there are different things that I could talk to you about, that you might not be able to relate to. But I love complaining. And I’m down.”

We talked for a while longer. The sky behind Chrysanthemum was getting dark; the birds, quieter. We decided it was probably time to hang up.

“Can I ask you one last thing?” said Chrysanthemum. “What’s your period like?”

“Oh!” I said. “It’s okay!”

I told her about my new menstrual cup (I’ve been trying out a MeLuna in the “Sport” firmness level). She talked about her tuck (“It’s basically shoving things up into a cup-shaped orifices and making sure nothing leaks.”). We compared the sensitivity of our boobs. The man in the alley stopped shouting and went off to wherever his next stop was.

“Okay, well I love you,” said Chrysanthemum. “Thanks for being vulnerable with me.”

“I love you too!” I said.

“ILY. LYLAS!” she said—shorthand, of course, for “Love You Like A Sister.”

I laughed and waved. “LYLAS!” I said.

“Periodic” is a monthly column by poet Franny Choi. Every month, she writes a short column on the first day of her period—a check-in that might cover issues of gender, queerness, writing, health, and/or love. This series is an experiment in occasional writing and an exploration of what it means to write about menstruation with a queer imagination. 

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In a rest stop parking lot somewhere outside of Erie, New York, I hauled open the back door of a U-Haul to look for a tampon among the boxes filled with all of my earthly belongings. Luckily, the tampons had been one of the last things I’d packed before Cameron and I locked the door to my old apartment and set out. We were driving to Northampton, Massachusetts, a city that Cameron calls “the white lesbian gift shop of America,” where we were planning to start something like a new life together. He’d flown out to Detroit a few days earlier to help me finish packing and drive my car for the eleven or so hours down I-90, in order to avoid the stress of trying to switch lanes with the two vehicles hitched together. So instead, we traveled along in a little caravan, listening to our separate podcasts and synchronizing our bathroom breaks along the way.

The U-Haul truck is, of course, something of a white lesbian gift shop item itself—punchline to that tired joke, mythic symbol of the “urge to merge” and whatnot. In researching for this essay, I was reminded that it even gets a mention in Stone Butch Blues. “Within a month, we rented a U-Haul trailer and moved into a new apartment together in Buffalo,” the protagonist Jess narrates in Leslie Feinberg’s canonical novel, which, like us, occupies that space where lesbian culture and transmasculinity meet.

Cameron and I stopped near Feinberg’s Buffalo, as well, to pee. In Rochester, we drank cocktails and ate vegan tacos at our friend’s bar before collapsing in a cheap-ish hotel. In Northampton, he got sweaty lugging box after box up the stairs while I moved furniture around, feeling a little obvious, sure, and also unspeakably happy.

 

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By most scientific accounts, menstrual synchrony, or getting on the same period cycle, is a myth. The first major study on the topic, by Harvard doctor Martha McClintock in 1971, followed a group of 135 women living in a dorm and found evidence that the menstrual cycles of roommates and close friends became increasingly synced. But most studies conducted since then have countered those findings. The largest and most recent of these, a collaboration between an Oxford researcher and the period tracking app Clue, even found that menstrual cycles were more likely to diverge, rather than converge, among the 360 pairs of participants studied.

Anecdotally, of course, it’s a different story. Most people with periods talk about getting synced up with family members, housemates, partners, etc.—70% according to a 1999 study. In a much less scientific inquiry, I texted the group chat I have with six women and non-binary friends from undergrad and asked if they believed that period syncing happened.

“YES,” said one friend.

“100000000%,” responded another, “I don’t care what science says.”

“Science says it doesn’t? That’s some BS,” another friend chimed in.

Many of the articles I’ve read suggest that women want to believe that they sync cycles because it makes them feel closer to others, though it’s mostly a matter of chance when our periods do overlap. The most progressive outlets try to leave a little room for those feelings, asserting that it’s not bad to want to merge, even if—poor thing—it’s not true. One article even told readers to rest assured that being “out-of-sync” with someone else doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your relationship.

I don’t know what to do with the disparity between scientific studies and the testimonies of people who menstruate. I want to believe women and trans people; and I want to believe in the actual possibility of synchrony, not just the existence of the desire to get synced. As a queer woman, I believe in all kinds of things that people might call magic; as the daughter of a scientist, I’m not very good at disavowing evidence.

Across the top of my paper, I write, “MYTHS: WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?” The rest of the page is: blank.

 

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I can’t help but delight in all the other ways that queer couples merge, aside from just moving in together. It’s awful when Cameron and I accidentally pick out the same denim shirt to wear, sure; and also, I love it. I pick up more of his speaking patterns every day. I start a sentence and he laughs at the punchline before I get to it. “Where’s the machine?” he says, and I hand over his water bottle without missing a beat.

I admit that I’m into the romance of it all—driving the U-Haul across the country, wearing a baseball cap low over my eyes, slowing after the toll booth to wait for my partner to catch up to me, my beautiful partner, who, I know, is mostly very nervous about driving on the highway and yet has chosen to do it for two days straight, all so that my books can live in the same place as his books. Throughout our relationship, it’s seemed both exceedingly obvious that we are supposed to be together and varying degrees of impossible for us to end up here, whether because of life circumstance or just all the ordinary ways that the world makes it hard for Black trans men and Korean dykes to love each other. Unfortunately, the star-crossed-lovers thing ultimately makes it all the more romantic, so that it’s nearly unbearable, the way we’ve decided to embark on becoming another stroller-pushing, bookish, queer couple in this town, both of our names on the co-op membership and so on.

Before we left Detroit, I made Cameron take a photo of me in front of the truck with my new Fujifilm instant camera—romance upon romance, which I put up on the fridge when we got to Massachusetts. It’s more than possible that, in the process of pursuing love, we’ve fashioned ourselves into a horrible stereotype. A stereotype is sort of like a myth in that it’s the imagined idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself. And yet, there I am, caught in the photo’s frame—actual and washed out and smiling too hard under the truck’s orange announcement.

 

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In the group chat, Fati says she and Angel immediately got synced on the first day of their writing retreat, and that they might even still be on the same cycle now, seven months later. Fati lives, most of the time, in LA; Angel, in New York. Others in our group chat live in Boston, in Chicago, in Mexico City. In fact, nearly all of my closest friends are plane rides away from their closest friends. Small wonder that we’re all into the idea of being on the same clock as our loved ones, even across time zones, even when there’s enough earth between us to shift whole hours apart.

In 1714, when British scientists were trying to figure out how to keep clocks synchronized on board their ships, one theory proposed using a pair of psychically linked dogs: one on land, one at sea. The theory went that you could wound a dog in London at noon each day, and the dog on board the ship would cry out, some kind of canine quantum entanglement. I’d like to think I’m entangled this way with the ones I love across our distances, synced up via pure empathic power rather than just our phones. I have a bad dream involving my younger sibling and call them, irrationally worried. In Detroit, I imagine I can feel Cameron’s Northampton anxiety, though it turns out it’s just my own anxiety, which, if anything, I simply transfer onto him by calling him.

I don’t believe in the satellite responsiveness of dogs, at least as solutions to problems of the British military. But I do believe that I love the people I love, and, in calling to tell them so, something of us starts to click along at the same rate. On FaceTime with Sam, I yawn. He, in Oakland, yawns back, though the window behind him is flooded with light.

 

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When people ask Cameron and me how long we’ve been together, we say, “Somewhere between 3 and 5 years, depending on how you look at it.” However you look at it, it’s been long distance the whole way through, as we each went from city to city, following our separate trajectories of grad school and work in strange tangent to each other. Though the distance stayed long, it was time that gradually changed pace and got shorter, as we went from occasional overlaps at conferences, to a semi-regular text chain, to FaceTiming a few times a week. It’s as though the first year of our relationship took three and a half years; the next, only two; and so on.

The other major reason for our years apart—the most major reason besides all the professional ones—is that I was with a man for much of that time, a cis white man who I loved very much, even years after it started to feel not exactly right to be with him. In other words, as Cameron and I were moving closer together in time, I was also moving closer to myself.

Unfortunately, this is another lesbian gift shop staple: the long-suffering wife liberated into queerness, ugh. Cue the U-Haul, cue Northampton, Massachusetts, cue the tote bag full of tote bags we’ve hung up in the closet. I hate this version of the story for the way it flattens everything: all the weird contradictions of our long, winding, polyamorous path to each other; all the complex dynamics of being Black and Asian and trans and queer in a town that imagines itself to be a lesbian utopia, though its definition of that is persistently white and middle-class. Even in writing this essay, I called us lesbians over and over again until Cameron had to gently remind me what we stood to lose by relying on such shorthand. This, after all, is the real fear: that, in merging, we don’t just disappear into one other, but also disappear into the only version of us that the white queer imagination has the means to imagine. That myth will block out the mess of truth until eventually we become synchronous with the idea of us, collapsed into the same cycle as the stereotypical version of our lives.

 

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There’s science behind U-Hauling, too, of course; theories to explain why queer women are said to cohabitate too early. You’re free to look them up, though I don’t care to recount them here. The studies about oxytocin levels in women, et cetera, feel just as as powerful tools for flattening as the mythologies they’re meant to explain.

So instead I’ll raise the point that the Clue study on menstrual synchrony was based on start date, and that going from a 10-day difference in start date to a 38-day difference may mean something more complicated than unilateral divergence, in the context of a 28-day cycle. I’ll mention that none of the studies were designed, say, to follow a small number of people who report always getting synced with others as they moved from one living situation to another. And I’ll emphasize that only a handful of studies have been done since the 1970s on the topic of menstrual synchrony, and that research related to women’s health has been overlooked for decades, not to mention the dearth of resources put toward studying queer and trans reproductive health issues. It’s far from a new point to say that the scientific conclusions we cite are products of a long history of mythologies about what is or isn’t important to understand—but it bears repeating, so I’ll repeat it.

Being not a scientist, I don’t actually have the intellectual means to critique these studies, only to imagine the possibility of better ones. I can imagine that someone else might eventually learn how to read the patterns better than I can, how to track the peculiar geometries of our bodies’ weird pushes and pulls toward and against other bodies. Those of us who have been asked to disappear into the simplified versions of our lives know the necessity of cultivating more robust imaginations, of continuing to write more complicated myths. We know what we stand to lose by assuming the straightforwardness of things.

Somewhere in the Berkshires, I called Cameron to let him know I was going to pull off at the next rest stop.

“Sorry,” I said, “I know we’re close, but I have to pee.”

Terrifying as it was, it would almost certainly have been simpler for me to just hitch the car to the truck and drive out to Northampton by myself, to deal with the panic attacks alone, my little burdens safely cordoned off from my love’s. I know that. Still, there’s that particular not-magic of pulling into the parking lot and emerging from our separate rooms to join each other in the same timeline again, however briefly. There’s the not-magic of realizing we’ve been listening to the same podcast after all. There’s the not-magic of losing him at the toll booths and panicking for the next mile, until I look up, and suddenly there he is in the rearview, not-magic and not-guaranteed, and still somehow, despite everything, having found me there on the road.

 

 

“Periodic” is a monthly column by poet Franny Choi. Every month, she writes a short column on the first day of her period—a check-in that might cover issues of gender, queerness, writing, health, and/or love. This series is an experiment in occasional writing and an exploration of what it means to write about menstruation with a queer imagination. 

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Thirty years old, and I’ve ruined another pair of underwear. In the café bathroom, I blot at my black jeans with toilet paper and tell myself I’m too old to keep staining all my clothes like this. It feels so middle school every time I fail to keep my insides inside, like I’m back in the 8^th grade bathroom, wadding up a makeshift pad and tying a sweatshirt around my waist. Those were dark, leaky years. I was always spilling, always leaving stains wherever I went.

In those early years, my period seemed, like everything else I was feeling, larger than life. I remember trying to lie perfectly still on my back at night, as my mother had instructed, so that the blood would fall exactly in line with the bulky overnight pad underneath me. I would hold my body in prone submission this way, training myself not to flop onto my side, in hopes of directing the bloody animal in me into some kind of order. I’d wake up stiff, groggy—and still, more mornings than not, I climbed out of bed to find a little burgundy proof of escape. A little wildness despite all my good.

It was a bit like the way I’d hold my body on the nights my parents would start up in the living room of our apartment—still, alert, listening for signs of danger. Whenever my parents fought, my father would whisper in Korean, so we wouldn’t be able to hear him; my mother would yell, in English, so we would. And I’d lie in bed, or crouch in front of the door with my siblings, or sit silently, afterward, across from my mother as she thought and fumed. What else could I do? Nobody does childhood; it just happens to us.

I didn’t realize that something of my home life had been leaking through until my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Aiello, brought it up one day after school. She’d noticed that I was having trouble in class; all I’d noticed was that I’d begun, vaguely, to hate her. With her prodding, I started, slowly, to talk. I was surprised that Ms. Aiello had been able to tell that something was wrong, and even more surprised when she pulled a plastic baseball bat out of her car trunk and handed it to me.

“Next time you’re feeling angry at your dad,” she said, “go out back and hit a tree with this.” Anger. So it was anger I was feeling. It had spilled out of me, onto her, before I’d even realized what it was.

That year was also the year of my most public period stain to date. It happened at church; to be precise, it happened in front of my whole church. I’d become an altar girl earlier that year, mostly to have something to do during the long Korean mass, which I only half-understood. Plus, I liked the ritual of it—carrying the candles, ringing the bell. I liked the word “tabernacle” and the crunch of the wafer as the priest bit into it. I liked the solemnity of the rope when I knotted it around my waist. Mostly, though, what I did as an altar girl was sit; sit for what seemed like hours, as the prayers and recitations passed through me, unheeded.

One Sunday, as mass ended, I stood from my chair as usual to join the priest and the other altar children at the front of the pulpit. As the choir sang, we turned, as usual, away from the pews and bowed to the crucifix before proceeding out. What I didn’t know—until a church mom rushed back to the sacristy to tell me—was that something other than the Korean verses had passed through me, as well. And so, when I’d bowed, the congregation had been greeted with a perfect red circle in the seat of my robes—perfectly red; perfectly unambiguous.

It’s strange to realize, now, that I don’t remember feeling particularly embarrassed when the woman fussed about the stain. If this had happened at school, I would have crawled under a desk and pretended to be sick for a week. But maybe there was something about it having happened during mass that made me feel a different kind of shock—one that felt a little closer to thrill. Maybe it was the fact that we’d just spent twenty minutes talking about drinking Christ’s blood. And there may have been something, too, about the way the priest had lowered his head as he bit into the wafer, in that silent moment just before the choir started up—how it had suddenly felt voyeuristic, to intrude on this moment of intimacy between his teeth and God’s brittle flesh.

And when he’d lowered his head, it hadn’t been out of embarrassment, but something more like a performance of submission; like showing us all how to hold still in order to let something large and terrifying work its way through you. So maybe a part of me was, without exactly understanding why, slightly proud of my own brief performance, of the little red sun I’d made as I’d sat, daydreaming about boys and death. I’d been told confession was a sacrament; and maybe, it turned out, I sort of liked the way mine had riled up the church moms.

In any case, it seems I’m still stuck on the confessional, here, at thirty. Still can’t keep my insides inside, can’t not spill my own secrets, either on the page or onto my jeans. At least I started carrying a Tide pen with me and wearing black jeans more often. And maybe that’s all it means to be an adult: to find safer ways to leak, so that you can still walk around and have a day afterward. It’s still embarrassing when I leave stains, when my feelings leave me without permission. But the days I feel most able to survive the work of making these little red suns are the days I remember how it felt, in those years, to be touched by something large and terrifying—and to rise in the morning to marvel at the evidence of what was wild in me.