Meet the Men Who Menstruate
How sex, gender, and menstruating men were perceived by doctors in eighteenth-century Europe.
The postmodern world is either healing or going mad, depending on who you ask. “To be a man” is now defined such that a man can get pregnant, have periods, and have biological female chromosomes. To different people, this is either an exceptional mark of progress or a symptom of rabid social and/or linguistic deterioration. Regardless of what you think, the idea of menstruating men certainly strikes us as a pretty new one.
The history of medicine gives an interesting account on this front. The Italian historian of science and medicine, Gianna Pomata, has given a fascinating account of menstruating men through history. In all these cases, what was taken by the doctors to be “menstruation” was in actuality often something like bleeding haemorrhoids, schistosomiasis (where parasitic flatworms cause blood in the urine), or other sorts of infections. Nevertheless, they were commonly labelled as menstruating men, and this — as I will show later — leads to some interesting points in the history of gender.
The evidence
“Among the various and indeed almost numberless phenomena of nature, one should be considered as the most significant: the fact that nature assigned…
