I grew up with a modest, fragmented knowledge of my body, as if it had been deliberately designed to remain incomplete.

The first thing I learned about was menstruation. I did not learn it at school, nor from my mother, nor from anyone who was supposed to give me information that might spare me confusion. I learned it from my classmates: how to buy sanitary pads, how to hide them in a black bag so that no one would see the only sign that my body was functioning as it was meant to.

A heavy silence accompanies a simple biological event.

The second thing was what is commonly called in Arabic “the age of despair,” a term loaded with stigma that reproduces a demeaning view of the female body. The medical term is menopause. Yet society prefers to repeat the stigmatizing expression rather than the clinical one, as if the end of menstruation were an ending rather than a natural transition in the body’s life cycle.

Language is not innocent. Language shapes social attitudes before we even become aware of them. In the stigmatizing term, a woman is reduced to what she has lost, not to what she is transitioning into. To lose rather than continuity. To reproductive function rather than selfhood.

What no one told us is that there is a phase that precedes menopause. A phase called perimenopause.

I only heard this word recently. Not in Arabic, not in French, not at school. My mother did not say it, nor my aunts, nor the women who passed through this gray zone without a language to explain what was happening to them.

Then, suddenly, everyone started talking about it: podcasts, Instagram posts, doctors, headlines saying, “Let’s open the conversation about perimenopause.”

As if we had just discovered a continent that had existed forever.

Perimenopause does not arrive noisily. It does not announce itself. It enters on tiptoe. It unsettles sleep, mood, and one’s relationship with the body. You feel that you no longer recognize yourself. And because there is no commonly used name for this transitional process, the problem is assumed to lie with the woman herself.

You’re sensitive. You’re tired. You’re exaggerating.

Worse still, what you are going through is portrayed as a personal weakness rather than a natural hormonal change.

What is truly shocking is not the absence of the term from our culture, but the absence of the belief that women deserve knowledge in the first place.

Why was this never discussed before?

How did generations of women pass through this phase, believing they were losing control, while medicine knew and remained silent, and society saw and chose to ignore it?

Biologically, during this phase, the body, specifically the ovaries, begins to change its pattern of hormone secretion in preparation for the cessation of menstruation.

It is a natural stage, with no illness, no failure, no malfunction. It can begin in the late thirties or, more commonly, in the forties, and may last from two to ten years.

Women do not experience it in the same way: some with mild symptoms, others with severe disturbances.

Genetics, lifestyle, mental health, and social support all play a role in how intense the experience is.

But the bigger question remains: why do we know so much about the stages of male aging, his desires, performance, and hormones, while the hormonal life cycle of women is relegated to the margins?

Why is the male body studied and its changes explained, while women are left to invent explanations on their own?

In our Arab world, we learn modesty before knowledge, endurance before understanding. You bleed in silence. You grow in silence. You hurt in silence. And you are asked not to ask questions.

This is how menopause shifted from a medical fact into a form of social exclusion.

A linguistic mechanism that tells women: your existence no longer carries weight, your role is no longer needed.

As long as this is the framework, it is no surprise that no one bothered to explain the years leading up to it.

No one told us this was a transition. No one prepared us for the hormonal chaos, for the reordering of emotions, for grieving a version of ourselves that would leave us. No one said: This is normal, temporary, and unrelated to your value as a human being.

Instead, we were raised to fear becoming “that woman”: invisible.

I am angry. Not only for myself, but for my mother, my aunts, and every woman who thought she was falling apart while her body was simply doing its natural work. Angry because knowledge arrived late, wrapped in trends, as if it were a discovery rather than part of women’s history since time immemorial.

We deserve to know before we collapse under the weight of ignorance.

We deserve things to be called by their names, not by society’s illusions.

The real question is not: why did no one talk about perimenopause?

It is: how many stages of women’s bodily lives will continue to be erased linguistically, scientifically, and socially, as long as the patriarchal system sees women only as something to be consumed… and then discarded?