WTF Menopause
A conversation with queer feminist sex educator and new personal hero, Heather Corinna
We are two journalists writing about family and caregiving from a feminist perspective. Research, interviews and personal stories connecting systemic issues and family life; also, 40+ mom humor. You can read past issues here. Follow us on Instagram here. Click below to get this newsletter in your inbox, free.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misgendered Heather Corinna. They use they/them/mx pronouns.
I learned about the work of Heather Corinna, a queer feminist activist, writer and sex educator, through one of my students. My student introduced me to Scarleteen, Corrina’s inclusive clearinghouse for sex, bodies and relationship education.
I wish, I wish, I wish I’d had a place like Scarleteen to go to when I was a kid, rather than the incredibly weird sex ed I got in school (consisting, most memorably, of being left in a classroom of 7th graders to watch the movie “Harold and Maude,” or the one or two incredibly awkward conversations I had with my mother. Hi Mom!)
But now, as another major body-mind transformation is well underway, how relieved am I to have purchased a copy of Heather Corinna’s newest book, What Fresh Hell is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities and You?
Corinna’s book is chatty and cheeky, with chapter titles like “The Menopausal Transition: When, Why, How, Where and What the Literal Hell?” and “Other People at Home, at Work, on Dates, and Other Places. How to Avoid Them When You Can and How to Deal With Them When You Can’t (or Don’t Want To).”
Corinna’s humor is the gateway into a deeply-researched book that describes the body and mind as it evolves through this process, one that – like puberty and pregnancy – was cloaked in mystery until it arrived at my door.
Corinna and I spoke by Zoom last week. This conversation is more about some of the big issues around this time in people’s lives, and less about specific tools for supporting yourself. For those kinds of details, order their book! I edited our conversation for length and clarity. It’s still long, but stick with me! There’s rich stuff here.
In your chapter, “Ya Basics,” you write, “My root concept of both menopause and myself in menopause positioned us both as burdens. When I did think about how I was going to manage it, my thoughts were focused on how I would keep our burden on others as minimal as possible. Sound familiar?”
This did sound familiar to me, and I’m wondering: How did you unlearn that concept of yourself and menopause as burdens. Or, did you unlearn it?
I'm definitely still in that process. I feel like from early childhood on, I was positioned as a burden, and felt like a burden. Of course, if we've grown up socialized as anything but cisgender men, we also are given very clear messages that unless we're alleviating somebody else's burden, we are a burden.
So, a lot of it is just setting a ton of boundaries, all the time, and holding the boundaries myself. Being like, “No, I said that I needed this day or this week to take care of myself.”
It’s things like, how many hours I'm supposed to work in a week and holding myself to that, instead of being like, “Whatever, it's fine if I work more.” I'm going to not make it fine for me to work more.
You write in “Ya Basics” that to take care of ourselves we should: Reduce and manage stress, improve your sleep, get active, hydrate, quit smoking, get social support. So…how do we do it?
There's something I find deeply irritating about like, “Honey, you need to sleep more.” No shit. But when you look at the studies, it bears out that this is the stuff that helps. The extra bonus is that you don't need a prescription for this stuff, unlike something like hormone therapy, where there's just some people that just can't have it, period.
But something like movement or figuring out what to eat for yourself in ways that make you feel better: All of these things, you get to tailor them to you.
The biggest thing about the basic stuff is that it is really universal. The way you do it is not universal, but we can all do these things to some degree.
One of the things that I was so aware of reading this book is your exceptional ability to work in a really inclusive way, as a writer and as an educator. The systemic biases that exist in our healthcare system leave so many people behind. You point out many times in the book, the more marginalized you are, the more likely it is that the existing healthcare system is just not going to work for you, and may actually do harm to you. So how do you recommend folks best prepare themselves to work within the healthcare systems, and when not to?
The unfortunate reality is that by the time that any of us gets to the age that we’re in perimenopause – separate from if it's menopause that’s surgical – is that if you've experienced bias and discrimination in these systems, it's been lifelong.
It's not new to us.
If anybody has any expectation that they're not going to deal with the same kind of discrimination they always have, they should probably put that to bed. Because probably you are. It's extra hard and frustrating, because you know, you're sleep deprived, and you're stressed out and scared.
So, certainly, I would put a big focus on doing a great job of screening your health care providers, as much as you have the ability to do that.
Or maybe you're a cis person, so you don't think that trans healthcare is for you. But maybe a trans healthcare system or a queer healthcare system is better for you.
One of the interesting things that's happened in this book, and the kind of support group we have around this book, is that there have been quite a lot of cisgender women that have come in saying, “I don't need this kind of inclusion, but you know what, I don't want to be called a lady. And I don't like this thing where everybody's called girls, and I don't want my experience to be gendered.”
This goes back to taking care of ourselves. So many of us are so used to talking ourselves out of accommodations that we need. We’re like, “You know, I'm not special. I don't need this particular thing.” But if you want it, why not? You're not hurting anybody else by giving yourself quality care.
If anything, you're modeling for other people around you that they can do the same thing.
What were some of the big myths around menopause that you really wanted to bust?
One of the big ones is this idea that there's any one approach that takes care of the whole thing. Even people who can go on hormone therapy and do really well, if they have the expectation that they're not going to feel any of this and everything will be sorted by that one thing: No.
It really comes down to finding the things that help us the most, and accepting that, for most of us, we're going to have a hard time for a little while, at some point, even when we're doing all the things. That's just just how it is.
You say this a bunch of times in the book: This is a whole system issue. So how could there be a silver bullet to address the needs of a whole system?
If there was, we would have found it by now.
What are some other menopause myths?
The other myth is the idea that this is short.
It's funny, working at Scarleteen – almost every day, the whole almost 25 years that I've done this – I've had to correct someone who thinks that puberty lasts five years.
I'm like, “No, puberty is like 10 years and change.”
It's almost identical here. We have this idea that it's going to be a couple of years at most, and then we'll be done.
Even if maybe you don't feel impacted the entire time, your body is taking that time.
We can have whatever feelings we want about that. But I think it's just about preparing yourself for it and seeing what you can do to adapt to your life.
That comes back to another big myth, which is that, for forever, from back in the awful history of the horrible men of menopause that we have to read, talking about how their lives are so disrupted by the women in their lives. And how everything has to be done to make menopause less of a burden.
Not to make the person experiencing it more comfortable, but to make everyone else more comfortable.
The problem isn't menopause, and the problem isn't us. The problem is the world and its systems, and the people in it not making room for this and not making room for us.
That still doesn't mean that laying in your own sweat will be your favorite thing ever. It probably won’t.
But it's less of a big deal if you don’t have to keep to a rigorous schedule, if it's not a big deal what time you work, or if you can take days off.
So when you're not sleeping, you could just stay up and be like, “Okay, I'm just going to stay up and do whatever I do in the middle of the night with no one to bother me. Not the worst.”
Think about something like your desire for sex changing in frequency. I mean, if your desire for it actually changes in frequency, it's not really you who is bothered, right?
If I don't want a thing anymore, I don't want a thing. Or I want it less.
A lot of menopause can change your wants. Many of us are so scared of change. But at the same time, if we don't want something anymore, there's no agony in not getting it.
Can you say more about menopause as an experience that’s been “pink-washed”?
It is almost identical to how breast cancer is treated. It is very, very strongly branded as a women’s issue. From a capitalistic point of view, there's a lot of money to be made in this as a women's issue. Anything you read will tell you that this happens to all women. It doesn't, because it doesn't happen to all trans women.
And it's tricky, because, like a lot of things that are women's issues, when it comes to cisgender women, this has not been adequately researched. Women very specifically have not been properly cared for in this. That's real.
It's just like not to the exclusion of everyone that this can happen to.
That's how capitalism works. It divides people.
Well, also, who's going to spend money on this, right? A lot of non-binary people are not as concerned, for instance, in making sure that we look 30 years old for the rest of our lives. It's just not really part of our frameworks, and it's not usually an issue in our communities, if we stay with our people. The queer community and the Black community cares less about the weight gain that happens in this.
I think in a lot of ways, you know, middle-class, married, white, cisgender straight woman of some means have been centered in this expressly because that's who can be profited off of, and who can make themselves the profit.
What are ways that Black women, women of color, or trans people, aren't centered enough when it comes to the impacts of menopause?
People say menopause hasn't been studied enough, and that's absolutely true. And also Black women's health hasn't been studied, and trans health hasn't been studied enough.
And it just compounds and compounds.
And for anybody that can make money off of it, the inclination is that they need to study the biggest group that is impacted by most things. Because, of course, if you're going to sell pills to somebody, that's the way to go. But, instead, if we think, “No, actually, maybe we should study the people that are having the hardest time.” Is it the biggest? No, because that's part of why they're having a harder time.
We should study the people who are having the hardest time, both because they're having the hardest time, but also because whatever you learn from that is going to help everybody.
Yes, if we do extra studies on heart health and Black women in menopause, than that benefits everyone in menopause with a heart.
You write about how the second biggest risk group for eating disorders after adolescence is people in menopause. Can you talk about diet culture preying on people in menopause?
I am one of these writers that could stand to look a little less at how well my books are doing on a given day. But because I look at this more than I should, I see what books constantly rise. With menopause, it's diet books, e-books, the Keto diet for people over 50, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a new one that’s called “Menupause.”
Oh my god.
Yes. The diet books are always rising to the top.
It’s concerning, because it may be for our benefit that we gain some weight in this. None of the frames of weight loss are ultimately healthy, especially emotionally. But if you’re taking something away from your body that your body's trying to do to help you out, that's not good.
And, as is the case with eating disorders with people at any age, when everything feels out of control, it's something that you can try to control. It's something that we continually get the message – even though this is completely false about body shape and size – that we can control it.
For all of the inconveniences that menopause and the transition in menopause can create for us, one of the opportunities that it gives us is to check things that we're changing for now, and look towards changing them for good.
So now is a really great time to stop chronically dieting. I'm not only not going to do this now, I'm done. Let’s let this stop forever.
There's a way to flip the script on not being included in things. Which is to be like, “Okay, well, if past X age, I'm not going to be included in beauty standards period, then let's just opt out.”
Let’s talk about sex. You write, “Queering things up goes a long way, whatever your sexual orientation or identity. I mean centering sex on pleasure, joy, freedom, experimentation, and exploration, not reproduction, obligation, or rigid gender of sex role. I mean sex that’s about all kinds of pleasure and the whole of our bodies and selves.”
As a sex educator, I know that heterosexual scripts are so wrong when it comes to sex. It's also not just wrong for people with vulvas. It's one of these things where maybe you're dealing with what you have accepted as fine, but you don't have to accept that as fine. It could be better. Who wants to a fine sex life? I mean, sex carries risks. So why do it at all, if it's just fine? Just don't. Go do something else. Go jet skiing.
There are a lot of things that, while they've never been great for people at any age, once you get to menopause, it can be particularly bad. Maybe you never use lube, and it wasn't great without lube, but you could still do it. You could perform what you needed to perform.
Whereas for some people here [at menopause], it's like, literally, nobody's getting in there. You, anybody else, with anything else, without lube. Or it's just not going to feel good.
Or, people rushing into penis and vagina intercourse without any kind of lead up. And by lead up, I don't even mean another kind of sex. I mean, like, a good date. Or some sleep the night before, and not a terrible week at work.
Especially for people who will go through menopause, there's been a lot of obligation built into their sexual frameworks. “I have to do it if I want to have this kind of relationship, I have to do it this way to make this other person satisfied and happy. I can't ask for these things without making this person uncomfortable.“
But it's going to work less and less. It's not like it's going to still be “meh,” and stay that way.
Which is why sometimes you see or hear older people, especially people who aren't of our generation, saying that they just stopped. Even though all the research that we have on sexuality so far on older people lets us know that actually can be some of the best sex of your life. So to just stop because you don't want to do all of these pleasure-based things is really unfortunate.
The cultural message that we get is that sex is as good as it's going to get in your 20s and 30s. But it's just like anything that we practice doing, the more that we practice, the better we get at it, the more experiences we have with it, the more information we have.
If that was the best sex of my life, that's so sad. I got better with me, not just sexually, but with me.
That's a big piece of it too, that self comfort. With sex, it's so tied up in your insecurity about your bodies, and what other people think about you.
Something you can do in menopause is that you have got to amp up your body acceptance, because shit is happening, and some of it is weird. Just like in puberty, it's weird. You’ve just got to go with it.
You can try and just kind of adopt a devil-may-care attitude about it. That attitude that, you’re like, “My body's going to do what it’s going to do,” is a great attitude for really good sex.
So let’s talk about brains in menopause. I really feel like I’m losing my brains sometimes. I could just cry thinking about it.
Especially when this is such a central way that we value ourselves. If you grew up raised as a girl, especially in our era, you still had to deal with people acting like it was a surprise that girls were smart. It would be like, “Oh my goodness, you're so smart!”
When that changes, or it looks different, it's really hard. That's another place where we have to often ask people, including ourselves, to adjust our expectations.
I'm not writing an article a week anymore. I probably couldn't. I can't rely on my brain working in that way to capacity, the way that I used to. And that's just how it is.
I have all of the feelings that I have about that. It's not like it's bad for me to have the feelings that I have.
But why am I trying to still make my brain work that way, much like what we weigh, or what our bodies are able to do physically? Why am I trying to keep it working that way, instead of being like, “How is it now? How do I need to make things work now?”
I've been really trying to learn more about neurodiversity among kids. And it as you're talking, I'm thinking, oh, you know, if we all had the understanding that we are all neurodiverse, then my attachment to my mind working in a certain way would loosen up. Like if I could unlearn the idea that there's a normative way of thinking, that maybe this in itself wouldn't be so traumatic for me.
You know, GenX never gets the credit that we should, but I do think that this is one more thing where we are doing the work in these kinds of things. So that, for instance, when somebody 20 years younger than us is coming to menopause, hopefully, these frameworks will be wider.
Things like neurodiversity will be more accepted as diversity, rather than as ability and disability. So they're going to come to this and be like, “Oh, my brain is different again. Okay.”
Is there anything that I didn't ask you or give you space for that you want people to know about this book, and your work?
I think it is really important for everyone to keep banging the drum of being included in this, in whatever way that they're not.
If enough people just keep making enough noise, and don't buy this stuff that doesn't include them in any way, whether that stuff is a book, or that stuff is a conversation or that stuff is medicine or a certain kind of health care, then you can force systems to change and adapt.
I always try and remind people that, statistically, we are in and at the head of the biggest menopausal and perimenopausal cohort that has ever existed, in the history of the world.
Gen X and millennials are really close in age. There are millennials just going into menopause, and that's some of why this group is so big. When you're a big, ginormous group, it is much easier to get a system to change. More and more of us are agents of or within those systems. So we do have some power.
When I hear people with privilege being like, “I feel bad because I have privilege,” I'm like, “Don't feel bad. Use it.”
It does not help anyone to feel bad. No one benefits from you feeling bad. Everyone benefits if you take what you have and you use it to make things better for everyone.
Follow Heather Corinna on Twitter, here.
WTF Menopause
"For all of the inconveniences that menopause and the transition in menopause can create for us, one of the opportunities that it gives us is to check things that we're changing for now, and look towards changing them for good. So now is a really great time to stop chronically dieting. I'm not only not going to do this now, I'm done. Let’s let this stop forever."
Yes! This feels so freeing. I feel like this is the "Sex Ed: Menopause Edition" that we all deserve, and none of us got.
I learned so much from reading this. There's a lot to sit on and digest; the interview helps illuminate how the medical field so often frames and approaches women's health in problematic (and belittling) ways. Thanks for helping men like me better understand female experiences (and for challenging us to not think of them as issues that have nothing to do with us).