I was assigned female at birth. One of the side effects of that in my particular situation is that I was raised not to listen to my body or my needs. I’ve been doing meditation and mindfulness practices in an attempt to learn more about myself, and I’m picking up on some interesting things.
For instance: on December 12th, at 5:30 am, I realized my uterus uses he pronouns.
I didn’t know uteruses—uteri?—could be cis men, but mine is. I keep thinking of him as “Chad”, even though that’s the name of the guy who screams in my brain about how worthless I am when my depression kicks up. Whatever, my uterus can borrow Chad for now.
Chad the uterus kicked me low with cramps last night. I took a bunch of painkillers to get him to shut up, and he quieted down enough to let my as-yet-unnamed stomach slide into my DMs in an attempt to get the bacon it knew was in the fridge. My stomach doesn’t seem to have gender or pronoun preferences, but if it was a cis male, it would 100 percent send me unsolicited dick pics.
But Chad, on the other hand, is a cis male feminist. He’s the kind of guy who says crap like “women are people too” and “equal pay” so you’ll have sex with him while you’re ovulating and too frisky to think better about it. And then, a couple weeks later, he punches you in the gut for a couple days straight and laughs while you accidentally bleed on your bedsheets.
The metaphor breaks down a little at the end there, but you get it.
By the way, Chad the uterus is also the ovaries. Maybe Chad the uterus is especially the ovaries. I’m not one of the ovary-havers that feels pain during ovulation—some people feel it when the egg moves around in there, which is yet another joy in the joys that is the menstrual cycle—but I do spend a week with the sex drive that remains after my antidepressants try to crush it into dust, and I spend nearly two full weeks with increased depression and general upset (one the week before and one the week of my period).
How much can Chad the uterus mansplain to me about my emotions? Enough that I wish I could have noise-cancelling headphones for my brain.
…oh my god Chad the rambling voice is Chad the uterus.
Cue the X-Files theme music.
It is currently 5:52 am on December 12th, and the painkillers I took shut Chad up for now. I’m going back to sleep until Chad starts blaring Hotline Bling on his giant set of speakers again.
