Reclaiming Femaleness
My own struggle with patriarchal body shaming, recovering from vegetarianism as an eating disorder, and understanding the roots of body dysmorphia & gender dysphoria
When I was 16 years old, I encountered my rebellious nature. My parents were fighting over custody, I was deep in puberty angst, and I was under-inspired in school. So, I snuck out, I drank, I smoked weed, I had sex, but the thing I did that was the most harmful to me, was becoming a vegetarian.
This choice came partly from wanting to rebel against the ‘unhealthy’ Midwest-American meat and potatoes diet, because the industrial meat farm industry horrified me, and cow farts were bad for the environment. Under the surface though, I didn’t love my body. I didn’t know how to love my body, and this was an attempt to become more lovable from the outside.
Not long after, maybe a year into vegetarianism, I started having violent periods. I couldn’t do anything for three days while I bled, barely made it to school, my sports suffered, and as a result, I got angstier. It was just part of being a woman, everyone told me. I went to Planned Parenthood to see if getting on hormonal birth control could help me, as that’s what everyone suggested.
They put me on a drug rollercoaster that lasted a few years, trying this one, and then when the side effects were worse than my symptoms, we tried that one. No one spoke of the period as a gift to women, or suggested we look beneath, to discover the underlying problem. I was at the mercy of gynecological ‘professionals’ and everyone around me trusted them. It felt like experimentation, and it was.
I continued being a vegetarian athlete, and eventually, my periods just went away. I thought this was brilliant at the time. I could ski and bike like the boys without that miserable week of complications. No one else seemed to think there was a problem with that, so I carried on.
It was in my 12th year as a vegetarian that I finally realized that this way of eating was harming me. This was the year I lived in Utah at a ski area at 10,000ft elevation, backcountry skiing every day, which was an extreme level of physical exertion for my malnourished body. I started having intense pain in my abdomen. It would hit me miles away from civilization in the mountains and put me at serious risk several times. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and didn’t have a net of health professionals I trusted, so I just pushed through. I was in a very competitive phase of my life, where I was doing a lot of extreme sports and trying very hard to prove myself as a female athlete. I was keeping up with the boys, I was, but it was costing me.
Eventually, I found a TCM practitioner who discovered I had severe gallbladder deficiency. This makes sense now because I wasn’t eating enough protein and healthy fat to support my athletic endeavors. My periods had been missing on and off for a few years, and this was the first time any provider shared that this was an alarming indication of poor health. All this time, I thought having no periods meant that I was a better athlete but it didn’t. It meant my whole system was spiralling.
Because growing and birthing babies are the most important functions in the survival of the human species, the female reproductive system is at the center, and all the other systems and functions in the female body bend to support it. When there is something dysfunctional with uterine health, for example, the body puts all its resources into fixing the imbalance. My body had been in a severe bending phase for some time, and it was catching up with me fast.
It was here in my early twenties, up against this wall, that a miracle book came to me. You know how that happens, at the pivotal moment when you need it most. It was a feminist book called Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio, and this book changed my life. I bought 10 copies and gave them to my sisters, mom, and friends. Finally, I found an elder who was speaking about being a woman without normalizing the suffering I was in.
In it, Inga said:
“It takes a lot of time, focus, and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'cross de tundra of our senses.”
I had never read or heard anyone speak about menstruation like this before. It lit something up inside me, something I knew to be true. Being a woman wasn’t about being punished by our biology, it was about reclaiming our innate bleeding power, and with it our freedom.
“The main freedom involved in using hormonal birth control is freedom from thinking about -and ultimately facing- our reproductive power. This "freedom" essentially results in an ignorance of our bodies which costs us, individually and collectively, dear, dear, dearly. We cannot love ourselves if we do not know ourselves.
There is bliss, but no freedom, in ignorance.”
At that moment, I realized how I had been unkind to my body, about the systems and industries that taught me to hate myself. I stopped taking birth control and started getting to know myself. I dove into learning about my body and how it actually worked. It was immediately absurd to me that I didn’t have a clue, and was not even able to identify the phases of my cycle or the organs in my pelvis. I started reading all the books I could find on the female body, pelvic health, feminism, and the feminine.
Eventually, my period came back but I was again going through a whole rotten week of pain and extremes. I was what I now call a carbotarian, meaning, to feel ‘full” I ate a lot of bread. This spiked my blood sugar and gave me a rush of energy right after eating, but it messed with my hormones, and I would find myself miles out in the backcountry, without reserves. It became clear that I had to face the way I was eating, and that meant facing what was at the heart of my choice to be vegetarian.
That health decline was the key that unlocked my curiosity about my body, and how it truly worked. I saw for the first time the way I was self-harming through vegetarianism. When I started eating meat again, within a few months my periods became healthier, and the pain in my gall bladder subsided. It took many many more years to unpack all the underlying trauma, and then learn how to eat and exercise in a way that supported my female physiology, but this was the beginning.
In my work today, these are still the biggest conversations I have with women about their pelvic health and fertility: how to live, eat, move, and heal in a way that centers the unique needs of our female physiology. The biggest lesson I learned back in my 20s was this: women are not small men, and since our reproductive cycles dictate everything about our overall health for the majority of our lives, we need to center our femaleness to thrive.
I have had many conversations with mothers in my office, about how their daughters are struggling with their cycles since they went vegan or vegetarian. I know that struggle personally, and I have a lot of compassion for these young ideals. I have a soft spot for young feminists and environmentalists because I was one too. But the truth is that women and girls need to eat animal muscles, organs, and fat to maintain reproductive health. Especially young women who are budding into one of the most impressionable reproductive moments of their lives. These moments are called Golden Opportunities in TCM.
The patterns we put into play as young women dictate how our reproductive cycles will unfold at other Golden Opportunities - affecting our fertility, postpartum and menopause experiences directly.
Now that I’ve outlined why it’s important to look at cycle health as a life-long game of borrow now, pay interest later, I want to go back to the beginning, to unpack what started all this in motion.
Growing up I never saw a woman who was thriving, easefully inhabiting her body. Why wouldn’t I believe that these reproductive rites of passage were meant to be horrible? Why wouldn’t I brace for the worst, to accept it?
For me, and a lot of women and girls, growing up female and having a female body was enough for me to dissociate. There is trauma that I associated with femaleness, including fear of my periods, fear of childbirth, fear of rape, feeling the weight of the male gaze everywhere I went, all the history of oppression of women, and a future of disproportionate opportunity and equity… it was enough to create less than loving relationship with my femaleness and female body.
I’ve observed in my own experiences and in working with women around their reproductive traumas, that when we dissociate and lose connection with our female body, we begin to resent our femaleness. We blame our periods and our bodies for how the world is. We feel so helpless, and there’s a deep desire to do something. Inevitable coping begins, consciously or unconsciously.
I believe my vegetarianism was more motivated by pain and coping with my female body than for some noble cause. I believe it was a form of eating disorder, and it’s no surprise because eating disorders are one very treacherous way in which girls and women struggle.
Here are some stats from the ANAD (National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders)
15% of women will suffer from an eating disorder by their 40s or 50s
Female athletes are twice as likely to engage in eating disorder behavior than male athletes
Overall, LGBTQ+ youth are three times more likely to have an eating disorder when compared to their straight peers
About 75% of transgender college students with eating disorders attempt suicide.
32% of transgender people report using their eating disorder to modify their body without hormones, such as to reduce curves or halt menstruation.
At age 6 to 10, girls start to worry about their weight, and by 14, 60 to 70% are trying to lose weight.
77% of children and adolescents as young as 12 dislike their bodies, and 45% say they are regularly bullied about how they look.
22% of children and adolescents have unhealthy eating behaviors that could lead to or indicate an eating disorder
A study found 8% of 15-year-old girls diet at a severe level, and their risk of developing an eating disorder was 18 times greater than her non-dieting peers. 90
About 12% of adolescent girls have some form of eating disorder.
These stats are staggering to me. What is going on here? The feminist in me points to patriarchy.
I have a theory, and I’m going to walk it out with you now. It’s a theory that goes against much of the current thinking about how to help teen girls. I care about them deeply, so I’m going to risk it, and share my thoughts here. I’ve seen greater women than me being publicly annihilated for sharing such views, but I cannot stomach not saying anything here, especially in light of sharing my personal story above.
Patriarchy is woven into every aspect of our culture, so when girls begin to go through puberty and their breast buds begin to develop, and all of a sudden they are looked upon by men and boys in a different light, often in a way that is threatening, how else to deal with this strange unnamed Predatory energy then to dissociate or resent their femaleness. A young woman or girl not wanting to be in the body she was born into because it inherently means trouble, is called by a fancy name: body dysmorphia.
However, it’s not described as a very reasonable response to a sick phenomenon, no. It’s isolated away from the source, labeled, and given a name that lessens the emotional response to the trauma that caused it. Imagine if we called it like it was: female body evacuation due to predation by males and systems that males built. Make no mistake, there is no other cause.
I have seen in my practice a sad turn as of late. Body dysmorphia like this leading to gender dysphoria, where girls don’t want to be girls anymore. As a result, they desire to be boys instead. My point about gender dysphoria is that it's often rooted in this very common experience for girls - of becoming second-class citizens at puberty, of being the object of the hungry male gaze, of diminished rights, and of sexual abuse and trespass being threatened (or occurring).
Exacerbating their lived experience of being barely free or not free at all, is exposure to pornography at devastatingly young ages, where they are shocked to learn what society truly believes about female bodies’ uses. I wrote more about this here.
Gender dysphoria is often interpreted as an antidote, an explanation for body dysmorphia, stating that they were innocently born in the wrong body, and that’s why they are sad or suicidal. I don’t believe that is true. It’s my belief and experience that what’s really going on, is girls are alienated from their femaleness before puberty even begins.
When a young girl is exposed to pornography, she learns that women are reduced to orifices to be used for sexual pleasure by men. With the overwhelming prevalence of pornography on the Internet, it’s nearly impossible to control. Today, most kids are exposed to porn by age 13, with 84.4% of males and 57% of females ages 14-18 having viewed porn, which means they have already received this very potent interpretation of womanhood by the time they get to puberty. (This is a very amazing documentary series to watch with you're kids if this concerns you.)
And so how do they cope? They diet, starve themselves, overeat, purge, want to be boys, numb out, are suicidal, hyper-sexualize... because they are terrified of connecting with their female bodies.
In my journey to coming back into my living pelvis, one of the most challenging pieces was to feed myself, and feed myself well. Not only is there a cultural trend for females to be vegan or vegetarian, which I bought into for a long time. There is also a trend in that it was conventional, ignorant, and not earth-conscious to eat meat.
In my practice, I work with women every single day who are struggling with amenorrhea, menstrual cycle irregularities, or difficulty conceiving, and one of the most challenging pieces of our protocols is always about how they eat. I am often met with resistance whenever I suggest that women should be eating animal fats, organs, and muscle. When I suggest that healthy fertile female bodies have 20% to 25% body fat, and show them what that looks like, it brings up extreme discomfort.
The healthy human female is not the model in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. She is in fact, starved.
I want to change this, I want to normalize healthy fertile femaleness, and to support women and girls embracing their bodies as THE REFUGE from patriarchy. Because being a woman is amazing, and I think it’s meant to be sublime to be in a female body. It’s not the female body that is the problem, it is the societal constructs that I’ve named in this essay.
It’s taken some work for me to overcome my own struggles with body dysphoria. To dress how I want to, to prioritize what feels good over how I look. To eat what brings vitality to my body rather than eat for a body image ideal. And I feel more in love with myself than ever, I feel beautiful and healthy and vital. I am becoming an example of a woman who feels easeful in her body.
To celebrate this, for my 42nd birthday this year I did a photoshoot with my dear sister Peyton, at a time in my body where I felt the most full. I was at my heaviest weight, but feeling the most fertile and vital. It was really beautiful, I cried several times. This image made me really struggle at first, to observe my softness and to accept that this was the way my body looks when I wasn’t starving her, over-exercising, and getting proper nutrition. Looking at it today, I’m enamored.
Healthy human females are the ocean, with their very own tide. This natural world connection anchors us to the earth and moon. Women are the earth, we have the heavenly waters within. Embodying this calls for a miracle that is a spiritual awakening as much as a physiological one.
It’s my biggest medicine on this earth to help women reclaim their femaleness from the maws of the patriarchy, the reproductive technology industry, disembodied medical gynecology and the newest trend, ‘gender affirming’ technology. Soul work is required now more than ever to face these massive influences.
I have so many resources for where to start, whether you’re a mother of a teen girl, or a woman wishing to reconnect with your holy vessel, or both. I love you and I’m here for you.