men·o·ver·gent

What it means

A word for the women who no longer fit the box they were in

We sort brains into boxes. Neurodivergent or neurotypical. Diagnosed or not. Perimenopause gets its own box at the doctor’s, and it holds hot flushes, an irregular cycle, maybe sleep. The shopping list that vanishes between the shelf and the till doesn’t fit in it. Neither does the email you have read three times without it meaning anything.

The unwritten rule is that without a label, you are not really allowed to say something is wrong. Menovergent covers the women that rule leaves out:

What all three lose is the same thing: knowing how they react, what they can take, who answers when someone asks “how are you?”. That isn’t in any box.

Trait · State · Load

Where the word sits

Symptoms appear where three things meet. A test or a diagnosis sees the result and gives it a name. It can’t tell which of the three has moved.

The transition moves the state while the load is at its highest. The woman who never had to compensate starts to struggle and blames herself. The woman who always compensated finds that her strategies, built on the old state, stop working. You don’t need the trait to enter the state.

Why the brain changes

The boxes don’t hold, because the chemistry doesn’t hold still

Oestrogen

Works in the brain as well as the body. It supports dopamine signalling in the prefrontal cortex, the region that does the triage: what gets your attention, what gets filtered out.

Progesterone

Is converted into allopregnanolone, a neurosteroid that acts on GABA-A receptors, the same receptors some sedatives act on. It works like a brake.

The transition

Oestradiol doesn’t decline in a straight line. It swings, sometimes higher than before, sometimes far lower, from month to month. Progesterone falls as ovulation becomes irregular. The triage gets porous, and the brake works when it feels like it.

Attention, memory and sensory sensitivity are exactly what screening questionnaires for ADHD ask about. So for a while, many women answer them like someone who is neurodivergent. A box that can’t hold the same woman for five years running is made of cardboard.

What we don’t know yet: how much of this settles after the transition and how much stays. Studies that follow women’s cognition through the transition with this kind of attention are still few.

The relation to neurodivergence

Built on a word that was made to include

“Neurodivergent” was coined around 2000 by Kassiane Asasumasu, an autistic activist. She made it broad on purpose. Her definition covered divergence a person is born with, and also divergence that is acquired or situational. She was explicit that the word should be used to include people, not to exclude them.

Menovergent borrows her root and follows her logic. Neurodivergent describes a trait. Menovergent describes a state, with a known biological trigger and a time frame. It does not claim that every woman in the transition is neurodivergent, and it takes nothing away from those who are. It is the word for the overlap that, right now, has no word: where the women who have always been like this and the women who became like this at 45 describe the same fridge.

Why it matters to say it

So we can recognise each other without asking for a label first

A woman who can name what is happening stops filing it under personal failure. She can tell her doctor something other than “I’m just tired”, and the doctor can no longer answer only “it’s your age”.

And women can recognise each other as they are now. The one who was always like this and the one who became like this don’t need to know each other’s diagnosis to understand each other. Neither should the doctor, to listen.

What menovergent is not

• A diagnosis. It doesn’t need a test or a score.
• A replacement for an ADHD or autism assessment, if you want one.
• An explanation of what is happening in your body. That question belongs with a clinician who has examined you.

Where the words come from

Two hundred years of naming women’s brains

1. 1812“Ménespausie”The French physician Charles de Gardanne coins the first version of the word.
2. 1821“Ménopause”De Gardanne shortens it, in a book titled On the Menopause, or the Critical Age of Women. The first box.
3. 1990s“Neurodiversity”Sociologist Judy Singer names the natural variation between human brains.
4. c. 2000“Neurodivergent”Kassiane Asasumasu names the individual whose brain diverges from the norm, born that way or not.
5. 2026“Menovergent”Coined by Anca Stanescu for the divergence that arrives with the menopause transition.

In two more languages

Use the word

It’s free to use

Say it to your doctor, in your group chat, in your own posts. Tag it #menovergent so the women looking for it can find each other.

Anca Stanescu is a kPNI and orthomolecular therapist in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She writes about the physiology behind the transition for women who are tired of being told it’s stress.