My Experience With Perimenopause as a Nonbinary Human

I’ve looked androgynous my whole life. Felt it too, long before I had a word for it. My body and I had a working arrangement. It kept things ambiguous, and I kept it in clothes that told the truth about me. Then perimenopause showed up and started renegotiating without asking.

I went looking for information about nonbinary perimenopause and found almost nothing. What I found instead was an avalanche of content addressed to women. Women’s bodies, women’s journeys, embrace this new season of womanhood. Reading it felt like getting mail for a person who doesn’t live here.

For me it started in my mid 30s, and it started as weather. Every so often a mood would roll in that I can only describe as all the worst emotions at once. Fear, anxiety, sadness, and rage, blended into one storm system with no obvious cause. It came and went, and since it seemed to track with my period, I filed it under that and moved on. What I failed to notice was that it was getting bigger every year. Gradual is the whole trick of perimenopause. There was never one week where things were suddenly different, so I never stopped to ask why I kept having to talk myself off ledges that didn’t used to exist.

The night it finally clicked, there was no talking myself off anything. I woke up at some dark hour absolutely drenched. Not damp. Drenched. I had heard people mention night sweats and had filed that away too, as something mildly annoying that happened to other people. Nobody told me I’d be able to wring actual sweat out of my shirt like I’d been caught in the rain. Standing in the bathroom doing exactly that, it came together: this is perimenopause. And if the sweat was hormones, then the storm system probably was too. It had been, for years.

Once I knew what it was, a different problem started. Perimenopause takes all the hormonal biology I’d spent a lifetime quietly working around and drags it to center stage. Suddenly my body is having a very loud conversation about womanhood, and my doctor, my search results, and the pamphlet rack in the waiting room all want me to join in.

There’s a kind of dysphoria in this that I didn’t have words for at twenty, because it isn’t about how I look. It’s the feeling of my own biology insisting on a category I opted out of a long time ago. People who read the story of how this brand started know I’ve spent most of my life on the almost-fits side of clothing. This is that feeling, coming from the inside.

My doctor started me on estradiol and progesterone. The emotional hurricane went away that same month. I want to be precise about how big that was: years of intermittent fear-anxiety-sadness-rage, gone, from one prescription. The relief wasn’t only physical. It was proof I hadn’t been going crazy. There had been a cause the whole time, and the cause had a treatment.

HRT made me more emotional in a different register. I cry at romcoms now. Easily. This is new information about myself and I’m still deciding how I feel about it.

The bigger adjustment was my chest. I’d gone my whole life with a chest that barely registered, which suited me fine. On estradiol, it grew. Enough that I would say I now have boobs. Which is not a sentence I expected to write in my 40s. The same hormone doing all the loud talking about womanhood is the one keeping me sane. I know taking it doesn’t make me more “womanly” the same way avoiding it wouldn’t make me more nonbinary. Identity doesn’t live in a hormone level. Most days I believe that completely. Some days the bottle on the counter gets a longer look than it deserves.

This is my experience, not medical advice. Hormone decisions belong with you and a provider who sees all of you. The Menopause Society keeps a practitioner directory, and asking a practice straight out whether they have experience with LGBTQ+ patients is a reasonable screening question, not a rude one.

Identifying it helped more than I expected. Saying out loud that this is a mostly gendered experience happening to a nonbinary person, and that’s why it feels extra, took some of the air out of it.

Community helped too. Queer and nonbinary menopause spaces exist. They’re smaller and quieter than the pink mainstream and you have to go looking, but hearing “me too” from someone who understands both halves of this is worth the search.

A provider who doesn’t flinch. I can’t overstate this one. You deserve a doctor who can talk about your hormones without repeatedly handing your identity back to you wrong.

Your body changing doesn’t take your identity anywhere. Androgyny was never a hormone level, and nonbinary was never a body shape. It’s yours and it stays yours.

If you’re going through this and want to tell your story, or you just want to hear that someone else is standing in the same strange hallway, write to us: info@androgynousfox.com. You can sit with us.