Red Rainbow & Sunflowers (Part 2)

A Tale of Navigating Queerness and Neurodivergence in Indian Reproductive Healthcare

As I grew up, I drifted further and further away from my body. This body, with its prescribed functions and expectations, felt foreign and wrong. Every glance in the mirror was a jolt, a stark reminder that the person staring back didn’t quite match the real me inside. My skin, instead of being a home, felt more like a mismatched outfit I couldn’t take off. Only much later would I learn, this was gender dysphoria.

The monthly ordeal of menstruation was a puppeteer’s string, yanking me into a performance of femininity that scraped against the grain of my being. It felt like I was being forced into some kind of role I never signed up for. I mean, really? Enduring all that pain and discomfort every freaking month for a lifetime, just for the slim chance of having a baby, an experience I never even wanted?  The more I tried to fit into the mold, the more I felt a profound dissonance, a disconnect that rippled through my very core. The pain, the bloating, the relentless tide of red, the sensory discomfort of sanitary products—it was a biological betrayal, a stark declaration that my body was not my own.

Using sanitary pads was not the norm at the start of my ordeal when we lived in the village. My mother taught me how to tear out pieces from her old cotton sarees, fold them and stuff them in my panties. Most importantly, how to keep it all discreet. I would be hurting, but I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone or ask for help. I never understood why. Those makeshift cloth pads would shift and bunch with every step, giving way to those blasphemous stains on my white school skirt. The rough edges of the torn cloth chafed against my thighs, the dampness lingering, making me feel unclean and uneasy. The fear of leakage haunted me, and I moved with exaggerated care, each step a calculated risk, each movement a potential disaster.

And then there was the washing—the gory, grotesque ritual of cleaning the blood-soaked cloth. I would stand by the tap, staring at the red blood flow out of the fabric, a macabre stream that seemed endless. The metallic smell of blood mixed with the water, creating a scent that would forever haunt me. I scrubbed the cloth against the floor with my foot first, and then with my hands, trying to erase every trace of the crimson stain. But the blood never truly disappeared; it lingered as a faint, brownish shadow, a permanent reminder of my monthly bout of dysphoria.

After washing, came the drying. I would hang the cloth to dry. The sun was both an ally and enemy; it sanitized but also made my shame public. The shame my mother had diligently passed on to me.

Later, I was introduced to pads. The sticky side was a game-changer, holding the pad in place, unlike the unreliable cloth. Some even had wings that provided extra security. No more shifting, no more embarrassing stains on my school skirt. It had reduced my chores a lot. No more washing off blood from cloth and drying– a boon to my executive dysfunction. It seemed like a small miracle.

But over time, pads grew into a sensory nightmare. The constant crinkling sound with every move, the bulkiness that made it hard for me to ignore its existence– all of it often pushed me to the brink of breakdown. I hated my hyper-awareness of that feeling of sitting in my own blood, the dampness and the synthetic scent of the product that only heightened the overwhelm. And that cringe-worthy pink floral packaging? It was like a billboard, declaring these products were designed with only feminine cis-women in mind, excluding all of us others who didn’t fit that narrow definition but still needed them.

Then recently I discovered tampons, and it felt like a revelation. They were easy and convenient. I could push one in and forget about it for hours. No more worrying about stains or bulky pads. I felt freer, more comfortable, and less tied down by my period. Tampons gave me a sense of control that I had never experienced before. I could even take a shower with them! “Tampons are such a lifesaver”—I posted an Instagram story. 

But replies started pouring in urging me to consider using a menstrual cup or cloth pad instead because of the environmental impact of pads and tampons. They contributed to pollution, taking hundreds of years to decompose—people pointed out. The media fed me big dollops of guilt too, because, of course, it boiled down to individual responsibility to save the planet and not the big corporations. Consider this: just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since ‘88. These corporations continue to pollute our air and water with impunity, pushing the narrative that the onus is on us, the consumers, to fix the mess they created. Massive plastic waste, unchecked oil spills, and industrial dumping continue unabated.  Meanwhile, we're shamed for using a tampon or a straw and guilt-tripped into buying more and more newer, ‘greener’ products, filling the pockets of those same capitalists. As if our individual choices are what will tip the scales of climate change!

Yet, I started to think about alternatives. Should I go back to the cursed cloth pad, despite the trauma it had caused me as a child? Or should I try menstrual cups, which are more environmentally friendly? I did my research and realized that using a menstrual cup would require boiling it. In my Indian household, where just moving to tampons was hard for my mom to digest—something going up the pristine temple of my vagina—how on earth would I explain boiling a menstrual cup on my mother’s holy gas stove?

But not to worry—capitalism had a solution! There was, of course, a separate pricey product: a cute pastel-coloured discreet sanitizing gadget just to clean the cup.

The search for a balance between personal comfort and capitalist environmental responsibility became another layer of the complex relationship I had with my body and my period. 

I thought a lot about it. I already had rampant body dysphoria around my period, plus crippling executive dysfunction with PMDD symptoms that made just getting out of bed too much to handle. I wasn't ready to take up another task of sanitizing the cup. I decided at the cost of being canceled on Instagram that while menstrual cups might be great for those they work for, and I genuinely want to try to make the shift in the future when I feel more functional, it is not on my disabled neuroqueer body to single-handedly solve climate change with a menstrual cup.