Male menstruation
Male menstruation describes a scenario where a man undergoes menstrual bleeding, a biological process typically associated only with female reproduction. Many individuals observed female at birth continue to menstruate after they transition to living as men, but the term is also applied figuratively to real or perceived anomalies in cisgender men.
In a medical sense, "male menstruation" colloquially describes a type of bleeding in the urine or faeces caused either by surgical infections, or by schistosomiasis, the latter reported in a handful of tropical countries and more recently en masse in countries where medical assistance is readily available.[1] In the context of antisemitic libels, it is the racist notion that male Jews are suffering of monthly menstrual bleeding, being part of the wider claim that Jews were collectively of feminine gender.
Schistosomiasis
Name
Affected locals, uneducated at best, thought that it was strange but not of major concern before modern medical knowledge, and so referred to it as the male equivalent of female menstruation.[1]
Causes
The symptom is actually caused by numerous different factors.[1] In first world countries it is often related to surgical infections, but is, in impoverished countries and massive tropical areas most indefinitely related directly to a parasite infestation of the urinary tract or intestines by Schistosoma haematobium - also known as snail fever.[1] A disease caused by the parasitic flatworms called schistosomes.[1]
Epidemiology and manifestation
Most commonly effected are farming communities that live and work in humid marshes and waterlogged places such as the rice fields throughout Asia, where most young boys unknowingly contract Schistosoma, where then the parasite begins to cause damage internally throughout their stomach and intestines.[1] The labour combined with parasites eating away at organ walls causes haemorrhage bleeding from multiple orifices (mainly the urethra, anus).[1]
In far more, less reported cases, it is found that boys in an affected area who work in a factory environment, instead of the teeming parasite habitat that is knee high paddy fields, are very rarely diagnosed with Schistosoma, which helps outline where exactly the problem emerges from and whether or not if it is affecting drinking water sources.
Use as antisemitic libel
In connection with the notions of Jewish deicide and later also of blood libel, "impure blood", and Jewish femininity as a collective marker, the libelous antisemitic concept of Jewish male menstruation developed in Christian thought from the end of the Middle Ages through to the modern era.