Language matters

The way we speak about menstruation, and the menstrual experience, has a massive impact. Phrases like 'feminine hygiene' or 'sanitary products' carry the implication that periods are dirty, shameful, unhygienic. This is central to the stigma surrounding periods – the sense of shame behind tucking your tampon up your sleeve or the reason people call in sick and say they have food poisoning when they really are struggling with terrible period pains. 

This language also perpetuates the idea that the experience of menstruation is binary. But here are the facts: not all women menstruate, and not all people who menstruate are women. For some trans, non-binary and intersex people, period stigma heightens dysphoria and discomfort. 

Changing the narrative: breaking the binary

At Unfabled, we're committed to an inclusive representation of periods and the menstrual experience as a whole – from first period through to menopause and beyond. Unfabled is here for every body, and a safe space for all. Everyone's experience of menstruation is different and it's so important to us that we're sharing everyone's story. It's only through open conversation that we can begin to change the narrative and break the binary.

That's why we're thrilled to have partnered with the incredible Mild Peril, an alternative drag artist and East London fixture who brings camp, sex and satire to the stage, as they share their experience in an original poem, Fear the Old Blood.

Mild Peril uses their Asian, trans and AFAB identity as a backdrop to politically-charged performances and high-energy dancing. They are also host and producer of 101 Damn Asians, an all-Asian drag cabaret night. 

Fear the Old Blood

a poem by Mild Peril

Fear the old blood

That’s what I was told

Young girl, you’ll grow

Grow old but not bold

This impure filth, this will make you know

That God has made you his foe. 

Temptress, sinner and giver of life,

To be somebody’s maid or whore or wife.

Fear the old blood

And I feared what it meant

That I was trapped in this masquerade of womanhood

Defined by what I should, not what I could

In a body not mine, not by my design. 

And every month I spent days hunched in pain 

Wondering how I could make it go away

Wondering how I could make myself whole 

Feel as easy in my body as in my soul

Fear the old blood

Then I feared it no more

Testosterone holds a great deal back, for sure

And I began to feel that much more self-assured

That my body did belong to me for once

And dysphoria didn’t eat me inside out

I let myself believe I had a brief reprieve,

But then – to not conceive, to not give my body more to grieve

I had a coil installed, and now, again, I bleed

Fear – but why fear?

There shouldn’t be shame for what bodies naturally do

It’s only that anything feminine has been made taboo

And that for those who do suffer, the pain is downplayed,

Just ‘female troubles’, back to plague

The men who can’t fuck their partners during their periods

The patriarchy who says that cramping ‘isn’t that serious’

And anyone who explains menstruations to boys must be delirious

To think that it’s ever relevant or polite

To discuss what half of us live through most of our lives.

Fear the old blood

Fear what I was, what I become

A creature beyond gender, beyond capture

By your conservative drudge 

I hold no grudge

There is no shame to bleed

Only shame to be afraid to understand what it means

To be freed from restricting perceptions of gender

The others, the benders, the cistem offenders

And I’ll shout proud about the blood and that I bleed

Let no cis tell you what should be feared.