I was here - the bearded woman by Kate Glass

Sixteen-year-old girls shouldn’t have to worry about growing a beard, but I did.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) slowly, quietly consumed my body when I was a teenager. Many people, including my pediatrician, denied that something abnormal was happening within my body. I lost half of my hair and gained eighty pounds, and developed cystic acne, hirsutism (male pattern hair growth), oligomenorrhea (infrequent menstruation), and other abrupt symptoms beginning at age sixteen. My pediatrician never mentioned PCOS to me, even though one out of every ten women are affected by this complex hormone disorder. It’s a common misconception that “negligent” weight gain causes those aforementioned symptoms, when in truth the hormone imbalance causes the weight gain itself and the symptoms. This causes most women to not get diagnosed until their thirties as PCOS is one of the most common, yet under-researched disorders that is regularly overmedicated, affected by bias, and mishandled by practitioners in the medical field.

On Christmas Day of 2022, I started my cycle for the first time in over six months. I had begun taking daily reproductive health probiotics that November, which corrected my biannual menstrual cycle that I’ve had since age sixteen. I was officially diagnosed with PCOS on March 2nd, 2023 at nearly twenty-two years old. I knew I had PCOS when I read about it on social media as a teenager, but the diagnosis catapulted me into researching and making art about it. As of May 2024, I have continued menstruating normally and have begun taking spironolactone to manage my symptoms.

My ongoing project, I Was Here – The Bearded Woman, is of menstrual blood gum bichromate and cyanotype prints. Since creating my own formula to hand-print with my blood as pigment, I’ve been harvesting my menstrual blood since early 2023.

This body of work is a metaphorical interpretation of my grief, frustration, isolation, and acceptance of co- existing with this body riddled with PCOS. In these images, I grieve the “socially acceptable, desirable” body I could have if I did not develop PCOS. I display my newfound body acceptance by making direct eye contact with the viewer as I photograph my body in vulnerable poses, forcing myself to no longer hide it in fear of being ostracized. I press the viewer to acknowledge my existence, unlike many doctors who ignore PCOS, by putting my own head hair, PCOS facial hair, and blood onto the images. I wrestle with my paradoxical chasing of stereotypical erotic, feminine beauty while being somebody who could be categorized as a freak circus attraction.