Room 2
PHYSIOLOGY IS ALL OR NOTHING
The sport environment simultaneously erases and overemphasises women’s physiology, creating a gap in meeting women’s needs.
“Pandora’s Box”
Your periods are a problem.
Go on the pill so we don't have to sort that.
Open a Pandora's box.
Mass produced to try and get everybody to perform
without actually looking at the individual.
Just go on the pill
but then
the niggles and the injuries come off the back of it.
Having a period as a woman was really tricky in that environment,
it's not like things really move around you,
it's more like you're given a timetable and you've gotta stick to it.
If I'd been like, ‘oh, I'm on my period, I need a break,’ they wouldn’t have let me.
Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point.
I feel like I had a choice but
it was either go on birth control or suffer through periods.
That was the choice.
It wasn’t go on birth control or maybe we can make accommodations.
A lot of the time they would ask me, ‘and is it the time of the month?’
But they came with preconceptions blocking their view.
If an athlete is reporting pain, it means something.
They decided that it might be something to do with the new fad:
female reproductive stuff.
It was almost like they were trying to find anything but looking at the structure of the joints.
ACL tears are so common in women,
that was immediately what their minds went to when I was having knee problems.
I knew it wasn’t a torn ACL, and I wasn't listened to.
They assumed that's what it was gonna be.
It wasn't.
Our training was
you're just a small man.
Not designed around a female body.
My gut was telling me that my period was a good thing and
that my hormones were part of me and
I got to where I had as an athlete, partly,
because of my hormones.
I felt like I lost me,
my parts of me that make me strong.
I came off the pill quite quickly and
that was frowned upon.
I'm a woman and my hormones and my body are special.
So why aren't we working with it?
