Periods are normal for women, whether Instagram wants to see it or not.

Poet Rupi Kaur‘s photo of a fully clothed woman lying in bed with a period stain on her clothes and sheets was deleted twice by Instagram. The social media site claimed her photo did not follow community guidelines.

Instagram’s guidelines prohibit nudity, sexual acts and violence — none of which are shown in Kaur’s photo. In order for a photo to be deleted, users much first flag a photo as inappropriate and then it is reviewed by the Instagram team.

After the photo was removed the second time, Kaur moved it to Facebook, where the post quickly went viral. She wrote on Facebook, “thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique.”

According to Kaur’s Facebook post, the photo is one of many on her website, which show various situations that all women experience during their menstrual cycle — cramps, changing pads, spots of blood. Kaur’s project aims to take these image, which are natural to women, but taboo to society, and “make them “normal” again.”

“Objectification and sexualization is okay. People getting off on naked underage women. Bondage. Torture. Humiliation. Abuse is okay but this makes them uncomfortable. That’s what this work is supposed to do. Make you as uncomfortable as you should feel when you watch others get abused and objectified,” Kaur writes.⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀

The post touched nerves with thousands of women, who shared it all over the Internet. Their overwhelmingly positive response eventually got Instagram’s attention, and they restored the photo.

“When our team processes reports from other members of the Instagram community, we occasionally make a mistake. In this case, we wrongly removed content and worked to rectify the error as soon as we were notified. We apologize for any [inconvenience],” an Instagram spokesperson said in a statement to Mashable.

Instagram has apologized to Kaur, who shared the email on her website. She also posted a message to her many followers, thanking them for their support.

Mashable has reached out to Kaur and is awaiting her response.

[via Mashable]