Peeeeeriods, part one.
Well, it’s a hell of a week to start a newsletter.
Personally, my older kid (who on social media I usually call Punkin) was out of school four of five days this week because of an active shooter threat. Wheee, ‘Merica! My younger kid (who I often call Butternut) was out two of five days because of Election Day and a staff institute day. But the deadlines keep rolling!
But let me start with an intro: my name is Kate Clancy and I’m an anthropology professor at the University of Illinois. I study how environmental stressors affect menstrual cycles, including things like harassment and discrimination (and the racism and sexism that underlie those behaviors). I also have a lot of side gigs because of this expertise: I provide expert testimony in lawsuits, consult with Congressional staffers, write for spaces like National Geographic and American Scientist, and have written a book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation, that will be out in April of 2023 (obviously I'd love it if you'd pre-order!).
For now, I plan to post pretty infrequently and will experiment with format. I definitely want to hear from you if you have questions or suggestions! Here are the three topics I want to share for today:
Uncovering the hidden curriculum/professor backstage pass
This week was a heavy writing week because for once I had few meetings – I made most of my way through an external review report (these are things you write after visiting a department at another university to provide feedback on how they’re doing), wrote and submitted an overdue manuscript review, finished another big piece of writing, and provided edits on two papers led by students in my lab and a proposal for something cool that may happen on campus. I also caught up on grading and wrote nominations for awards that got sent up to the grad college.
Part of the reason I thought I might test out a section like this is I was speaking to a postdoc I know and walking her three the eight meetings or so I’d had over the last few weeks about a shared project of ours, and after I detailed what happened in those meetings that she was struck by how slow everything is in academia, how many moving parts. There are so many times there are obvious next steps to things, or cool ideas for centers or projects or whatever, but you have to get together six different constituencies, see who plays nice together, make compromises, and then maybe possibly move forward. It’s exhausting – but also great when it actually works!
A few important links
A natural experiment in the Boston area – a comparison of schools that kept versus dropped masking – shows that SURPRISE masking reduces covid transmission. My kids both still mask at school – and my partner and I do at work – and so far it’s keeping us safe in the covid/flu/RSV tridemic.
If you feel like being enraged today read this account of a person who can’t find anyone who will take out her IUD. I wish this was uncommon but it’s not. Reproductive justice is about full reproductive autonomy, which should be about our ability to choose contraception or not, to choose abortion or not, and to have the community care necessary to raise the children we do choose to have. Unfortunately many are coerced into IUDs and then find the experience unpleasant (close to half of users). And several research studies show doctors are unwilling to remove IUDs, and even try to cajole their supposedly wimpy patients into enduring side effects, rather than take the thing out. IUD removal is straightforward yet expensive, which also spurs some to attempt IUD self-removal.
Finally, if you aren’t paying attention to what is happening with the ICWA you should be. Here is just one of several articles on Haaland vs Brackeen, the Supreme Court case of the white family trying to keep two Native American children who should be able to stay with their family. If ICWA is overturned it has significant consequences for reproductive justice. Note that the lawyers representing the white family pro bono also represent Energy Transfer, an oil company that wants to put pipelines through tribal land. Therefore eroding the ICWA is part of their larger plan to reduce tribal sovereignty. These people do not care about these children. They care about expanding the power they hold.
One cool period (and other stuff) fact
The way I was first taught about the menstrual cycle made it sound like processes occur at a stately pace, one at a time and in order: follicle growth, ovulation, endometrial proliferation, endometrial shedding – each of these have their time and place. However we now know a ton of these events are actually simultaneous, or even continuous.
Take menses itself. Periods aren’t just a time the endometrium is sloughing off the inside of your uterus, and once that’s done it starts proliferating again. Instead, scientists can see that on the endometrium during menses there are areas where the tissue is breaking down, areas where the tissue is still intact, and areas already starting to repair, all happening at the same time, just in different zones. There is a LOT happening all at once. Not only is this inflammatory (in a benign way - tissue remodeling is just inflammatory) but it's definitely using some additional energy. If you ever feel a little tired during your period, this might help explain why.
Source: Evans, J., et al. (2016). "Fertile ground: human endometrial programming and lessons in health and disease." Nature Reviews Endocrinology 12(11): 654.