Queer, neurodivergent and menopausal - when intersectionality means falling through the cracks
And finding the answer lies in daring to carve out my own path
I really never know where the day will take me; what flavour will permeate the texture of it. Mostly, the self I bring to each day is an amalgam of identities, blending into an indistinct and familiar me-ness. But I never know when the day’s events will stir up the internal ecosystem. I never know which particular bits of the Venn diagram of me will light up and take centre stage.
Before I knew I was neurodivergent (AuDHD), I saw out many a day in the company of a self with no name but plenty of descriptions: struggling to cope; easily overwhelmed and mysteriously out of sync with just about everyone around me. There is no doubt labels can be helpful when you don’t have the language to identify, describe and give shape to your inner experience.
I woke up today with every intention of taking my queer self to Fair Day, the event that kicks off the annual Sydney Mardi Gras Festival. Also in tow was a tiny emerging slither that is business owner and entrepreneur me; the one who takes business cards to foist on anyone who might be vaguely interested or even know someone who might be. Off I went, fuelled by an uncharacteristic flush of confidence and self-efficacy.
Neurodivergent me was ready for the sensory onslaught and had a plan.
Almost as an afterthought, menopausal me threw my HRT patch prescription in the bag to try my luck at any pharmacies along the way. But before long, it was the parts of me labelled middle-aged and woman were calling the shots. This is not what I expected.
By the third pharmacist’s story of supply shortages, it was clear luck was not on my side. I gave up and continued on my way, a sweating, seething, muttering mess. I felt any trace of queer joy evaporating.
It’s a supreme irony that my body is loudly reminding me that it is female at a time when I have let go of almost every social signifier I’m meant to attach to it. The older I get, the more gender has faded into the background. It’s just not something that is foregrounded in my day-to-day life.
An interesting thing happened during the Covid pandemic lockdown. No interaction with the outside world meant no performing gender and I ditched the corporate wardrobe. It dawned on me that any concept of myself as a gendered being was externally imposed rather than something inside me.
The link between biological sex and gender was always a little tenuous for me. And when I became a parent, I bypassed it altogether by not being the one who did the birthing. The package called “motherhood” with all its gendered connotations never arrived on my doorstep. I am not like the other mums.
But I cannot escape the fact of having a woman’s body and I cannot escape the passage of time.
In some ways menopause is a great leveller - it comes for all of us who retain the requisite body parts. But it is experienced in different ways and if you’re queer or gender non-conforming, you struggle to find a place in the dominant heteronormative narrative of menopause.
A few years ago no-one was talking about perimenopause at all but the voices we’re hearing now are skewed towards the privileged, hetero and non-disabled. As a woman whose life isn’t defined by reproductive status or their role in a relation to a man, you can feel invisible.
And yet the queer community and organisations have been slow to come to the party. It’s as though there’s no room for this very mainstream experience of being a woman within the multiple ways that we’re marginalised.
A leading queer health organisation had a collection of stalls and I noticed there was one for an LGBTQ women’s health project among them.
“What’s the scope of your project - does it include reproductive and menopausal care for instance?” I inquired hopefully.
“Not yet, but it’s coming within the next three years”. We’ve got the “Silvers” social group for older women though,” offered the friendly twenty-something.
“Thanks but I’m not quite there yet. I’m kind of caught in the middle it seems.”
Story of my life, it also seems.
How odd that on this day, my queer, gender non-conforming neurodivergent self felt most marginalised by the most mainstream things about me: my biological sex and my age and the fact that I am going through a physiological process at least half the population goes through at some point.
But it’s the failure to apply an intersectional lens to these experiences that is the problem. My experience of menopause isn’t queer + gender non-conforming + menopause. It’s a qualitatively different experience that weaves these things inextricably together.
Being neurodivergent adds even more heft to the weave. The impact of oestrogen depletion on the brain exacerbates pre-existing challenges with sensory sensitivities and executive function. In Australia, comedian and performer Em Rusciano is providing a much-needed neurodivergent perspective on the “Trifecta” of autism, ADHD and perimenopause/menopause.
I can’t quite explain the particular hell of feeling like you’re combusting from the inside and sweating rivers from under your arms with no way of regulating your body temperature. And low oestrogen messes with the brain’s dopamine receptors meaning the neurodivergent brain has even less of the vital neurotransmitter available to it.
I credit perimenopause with ripping a crack through my coping mechanisms to reveal previously masked ADHD. I no longer had the resources to hold it all together. It probably didn’t help that it coincided with a bunch of big life events. In just six months in 2022 (the year I was diagnosed), I left a job that had become intolerable, moved house, watched my Dad die of leukemia and my family of origin implode in the aftermath. Oh and I was responsible for a thirteen-year-old weathering her own tumult.
I’ve also got some very specific medical reasons for needing HRT: I have low bone density in the osteopenic range which puts me at high risk of fractures as I get older without an ongoing oestrogen top-up. It’s one thing to acknowledge that menopause is a natural process that happens to all women but it’s quite another to expect us all to suck it up particularly when in impacts on us differentially.
By the time most neurodivergent women reach middle age, we are damn sick of shoving down our discomfort and ignoring our needs to prioritise those of others. Perimenopause and menopause is when our bodies scream “enough!”
By the time I set eyes on the “Autistic Pride” stall, I did not feel a murmur of recognition. It was as though I saw a box to tick and my immediate thought was that I wouldn’t fit this non-autistic led organisation’s idea of what an autistic person looks like. I’ve become wary of the packaging of autistic identity into a neat list of traits as though it’s something you can prise apart from everything else: queer + autistic. It says nothing of the interaction of my ADHD, anxiety and the cumulative effects of trauma and maladaptive responses that have carved out the trajectory of the life that has made me who I am.
I just never seem to fit neatly into the boxes on offer. Either one foot in each or in the middle and nowhere near either. I might be a walking Venn diagram but life doesn’t work like that. People likes to put you in neat boxes. But intersectionality is messy and inconvenient and doesn’t want to be contained. Like not even a little bit spilling over the edges. In reality, intersectionality means falling through the cracks.
I’m becoming more aware that the complexities of my identity cannot be captured by a label. Labels are a beginning when language fails us but they only take us so far. In the end we’re left to find our own words to convey the uniqueness in the hope that it will be heard by whoever needs to hear it.
I struggled to find a landing place in this smorgasboard of queer identity that just felt fragmented and a bit one-dimensional. How disappointing that this big festival of queer inclusion failed to embrace me in my intersectional wholeness.
My lifelong need for belonging hasn’t gone away. Even as I learn to accept myself and settle into my authenticity, there is no ignoring the reality that I lack the kind of community that would provide the connection, mutual support and nurturing that I crave. It is more pressing now than ever.
And yet, it was business me that was able to cut through. Business me had a purpose and no need to doubt it. Talking about my business gave me a way to connect authentically and I had some great chats with queer domestic violence and legal services as I leaned into the riches of shared values and collaboration. Somehow I carved my own path through it all as I refused to be contained and dared to expand into the space.