Chronic pain and intimacy for queer, trans and polyamorous people: community insight on HRT and libido, joint pain in queer sex, two disabled partners, and polyamory as a structural accommodation for chronic illness.
What hypermobility and EDS community members actually use during intimacy to protect joints, plus what the evidence says about kinesiology tape, braces, compression and props.
A practical pain management routine for intimacy with chronic pain. What to do before, during, and after, drawn from community experience and evidence based principles.
Pacing advice usually focuses on the things that look like work. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, working, exercise. Intimacy gets left off the list, partly because nobody
Most sex advice assumes a body that does what it’s told. Bend here, hold this, support your weight on that joint for as long as
You didn’t sign up to be a carer. Neither did they. That wasn’t the deal when the relationship started. And yet here you are, a
There’s a grief that sits underneath chronic pain that most clinicians don’t name, most partners don’t fully see, and most people living with it don’t
How to Talk to Your Partner About Pain, Flares, and What You Actually Need There’s a conversation that happens in a lot of relationships where
The disclosure question, and why nobody gives you a straight answer At some point, most people living with chronic pain or hypermobility end up in
If you have hypermobility, fibromyalgia, POTS, endometriosis, or interstitial cystitis, and sex hurts, you are not unusual. You are also not broken, dramatic, or making
Your brain has a map of your body, and the map drives joint control, not the muscle. A look at cortical maps, proprioception, vestibular and visual inputs, why the signal goes fuzzy in hypermobility, and how to train for sharper joint awareness.
Constipation in hypermobility and hEDS is not a fibre problem, it’s mostly a sensation and coordination problem. Here’s what the evidence actually says about the mechanisms and what works.
Hypermobility comes with a strange contradiction: muscles that feel constantly tight, while also being told you have low tone. Once you understand how passive, active and readiness tone actually work, that contradiction makes sense, and so does why traditional ‘just get stronger’ advice keeps missing.
Why people with POTS sleep so badly, what the autonomic nervous system does overnight, and what the evidence actually supports for fixing it. The honest version.
Why training for hypermobility and chronic pain is a motor learning task before it’s a strength task. The stages your nervous system runs through, where the science is solid, and what that means for how you actually train.
The most thorough evidence review of fascia and hypermobility on the internet. 50 verified primary references, every claim CrossRef-checked, every fascia release method tested against the actual evidence. Honest about what works, where the marketing breaks bones, and what those with hypermobility should actually be doing instead.
A 2026 state-of-the-art review from an international team of 11 researchers has updated the diagnostic framework for POTS. Here is what actually changed, what it means for people struggling to get diagnosed, and what the review still does not address.
One in four people with hEDS carries diagnoses of all three: hypermobile EDS, POTS, and MCAS. The overlap is well documented. The mechanisms are still being worked out. Here is what the research actually says.
