Period #3
I'm back with more period facts!
Two more book updates
I’m narrating the audiobook for Period! It’s been really fun and I’m fortunate to have access to an audio booth at the main library here at the University of Illinois. Also – Period got a nod in Publisher’s Weekly (subscription required)! Turns out there will be a number of great books out this spring that look at gender, bodies, and/or health.
(Image description: a selfie of me in an audio booth, sitting in front of several monitors and a microphone)
A few interesting links
This longform article about the history of bio-plastics is fascinating because it points to the kinds of stories we so often like to tell ourselves about conservation-oriented “alternatives” to various harmful products – in this case, the history of certain resins and fibers intended to replace tortoiseshell and elephant tusk. But it reminds me of how we are supposed to wholesale accept that period underwear and cups are similar “alternatives” when many contain the same endocrine-disrupting chemicals as their more disposable predecessors. The labor of the folks who do the harvesting, processing, and/or production of these products are also often made intentionally invisible. We need to start to ask ourselves whether the right way forward in this climate crisis is to continue to act without solidarity, and to stay comfortable by trying to do these sorts of replacements instead of a full reconsideration of what it means to require plastics for so many products.
This fantastic and important paper on racial equity in funding at the National Science Foundation is out. They found white researchers are funded at higher the average fund rate (which varied from 22-35% depending on the year studied), while Black and Asian researchers were funded well below. Numbers were smaller but it also looks as though Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders were also funded at lower than expected rates. Here is the quote I found most striking:
“A decade of efforts by NIH and more recent efforts by the Wellcome Trust have demonstrated that interventions focused solely on individual actions, such as increased bias-awareness training, or specific decision points within the merit review process, like blinding peer review, are inadequate as standalone cure-all solutions.”
We can’t train our way out of this. It’s the same issue as with sexual harassment solutions, which also tend to be focused on training and policy that affects individuals. Systemic change – by which I mean a radical reimagining of the merit review process as well as – as the authors also point out – intentional reparative processes to rebalance funds – is what is needed.
Finally, a terrible story about judicial bypass hearings for abortion. These are a way for children who seek abortion to gain approval for one without parental consent, in states with parental consent laws. In this article, a seventeen year old, pregnant with twins, tries to seek judicial approval for an abortion (content warning for mention of child abuse). Her own parents are effectively out of the picture. The judge rules that she is too young to have an abortion – which of course means he thinks she is not too young to gestate, bear, and raise two children.
This article shows the many problems with how we think about abortion. In particular, this story highlights how we have allowed anti-abortion activists to spread false information that overstates the harms of abortion as compared to the harms of pregnancy, labor, and parenthood… to the point that a judge could worry more about the harms of abortion for a seventeen year old compared to having to carry a twin pregnancy to term. Even if these concerns are disingenuous – which they probably are half the time – having this disinformation out there makes it easy for a judge or anyone else to hold this position and not have to say out loud that the problem they really have is that pregnant people could be allowed any autonomy over their bodies or lives. (Note: this is an NYT story so I’ve provided a “gift link” so that for the first ten of you to click it it’s free, even if you’ve already exceeded your read limit.)
A weird period fact
A lot of people think of the first menstrual period, or menarche, as the major transition from childhood into adulthood. However a lot is happening in those gonads before your first blood! For most people, thelarche (breast development) precedes menarche, and often pubarche (axillary hair growth, like in the pubic region and armpits) as well. One study that measured progesterone prospectively in premenarcheal girls even found that five of the forty-two had had high even progesterone levels that they likely had already ovulated at least once BEFORE their first menstrual bleed.
Source: Gray, S. H., et al. (2010). "Salivary progesterone levels before menarche: a prospective study of adolescent girls." The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 95(7): 3507-3511.