We’ve Been White-Knuckling It Since Seventh Grade

The Pushback Was Predictable

I was eating breakfast Thursday morning when the STAT News piece hit my feed.

The headline: the perimenopause movement is selling women the lie that their hormones rule them. The authors, two researchers from Georgetown’s PharmedOut project, argued that brain fog, weight gain, dry skin, and most of what we chalk up to perimenopause are just aging. Normal aging. And that the movement to take our symptoms seriously has tipped into something pharmaceutical and dangerous.

I put down my coffee. Not because I was surprised. Because I was tired.

Here’s what I wanted to say to my screen, and what I’m going to say to you instead.

The Silence Had A Price Tag Too

The Women’s Health Initiative study came out in 2002. It scared the hell out of everyone, doctors, patients, and researchers, with its suggestion that hormone therapy caused breast cancer. Prescriptions cratered. Women were told to tough it out.

What got buried: the study’s average participant was 63 years old, well past menopause, and it was designed to study disease prevention, not whether hormone therapy actually worked for the symptoms women were reporting. When researchers later reanalyzed the data, they found meaningfully different risk profiles for women who started HRT before 60 or within ten years of menopause. The nuance got buried. The panic stuck.

For two decades, women went to their doctors complaining about brain fog so thick they couldn’t finish a sentence. Sleep deprivation made them feel like they were losing their minds. Joint pain that appeared out of nowhere at 44. Vaginal dryness nobody wanted to say out loud.

And they were told: “This is just aging. This is normal. There’s nothing to be done.”

So when STAT publishes an op-ed in 2026 telling us that what we’re experiencing is “just aging” and we need to calm down about it, you’ll understand why some of us have a visceral reaction.

Who’s Doing The Overcorrecting, Exactly

I want to be fair to the STAT piece, because it raises something real. Supplements are flooding the market with zero clinical evidence behind them. There are influencers monetizing fear. There are companies selling $200 “perimenopause kits” of questionable value to women who are desperate for answers. That part is true. That part is worth watching.

But the piece doesn’t stop there.

It argues that the movement itself, women advocating for their symptoms to be taken seriously, demanding that their doctors know something about the decade of hormonal shift that precedes menopause, insisting that perimenopause be included in medical training and research, is medicalization. Is victimhood. Is making healthy women believe they are ill.

I’m sorry. I need a minute with that.

Healthy compared to what baseline? The one we never studied?

The NIH didn’t even assign menopause a research category code until 2023. Before that, it was so far off the radar that tracking the funding was essentially impossible. When they finally counted it up, $56 million for menopause research in a year when the NIH budget topped $47 billion. We’re not victims of our hormones. We’re women navigating a decade-long physiological shift with almost no clinical map, and we’ve been doing it in the dark.

Is that the “normal aging” we’re supposed to cheerfully accept?

Is Perimenopause Real? We’ve Been Riding Hormonal Chaos Since Seventh Grade

The STAT piece warns that if we accept perimenopause symptoms starting in our 30s and lasting until the average menopause age of 52, we’re basically saying women are helpless victims of their hormones for most of their adult lives.

I’d like to point out that we’ve been managing hormone fluctuations since we were kids, some of us as young as 9.

We went to school with cramps that made us want to lie on a heating pad and never move again. We took the SATs while bloated and exhausted. We showed up to jobs and interviews and first dates and parent-teacher conferences through PMS that nobody around us knew existed because we had learned, very early, that mentioning it was not done. We managed pregnancies and postpartum and perimenopause, and we did all of it while performing fine, thanks, how are you?

Nobody called us victims then. Nobody suggested our hormones made us untrustworthy. We were just expected to handle it. And we did.

So when the STAT piece invokes the specter of the hormone-addled woman who can’t be trusted because of her biology, I want to know: where was that concern for the last forty years? Because we were there. Handling it. In silence.

The ask now is not for sympathy. It’s for science.

The Volume Was Always Warranted

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

I have sat in doctors’ offices and smiled and said thank you only to drop the anti-anxiety script in the trash. I have done the research myself at midnight because nobody in a white coat was going to do it for me. I know what ignored feels like from the inside.

So when a woman finally raises her voice after years of having her pain minimized, her questions dismissed, her symptoms explained away as anxiety or stress or just being a woman, and someone calls that overcorrection? No. That’s not overcorrection. That’s what it sounds like when the quiet finally breaks.

The perimenopause conversation happening right now, the women talking openly on podcasts and in Facebook groups at 2 a.m. because they finally found someone who understands what’s happening to their body, this is not hysteria. This is twenty years of pent-up medical neglect finding an outlet.

Some of that outlet is messy. Yes, there are bad actors selling snake oil, and it pisses me off, because they hand critics exactly the ammunition they need to dismiss the whole conversation. But the answer to that is better research, better regulation, better medical education. The answer is not to tell women they were better off when nobody was paying attention.

What The Emergency Brake Actually Looks Like

There’s an HRT shortage right now. Women who finally found a treatment that works, who finally convinced their doctor to take them seriously, who finally felt like themselves again, those women are rationing patches and calling pharmacies in three states. One New Jersey woman, rationing her patches after her pharmacy kept running out, described it to NPR as a “monthly mad scramble.” I wrote about this shortage and what it actually means, not a supply chain inconvenience, but the predictable result of twenty years of medical failure aimed squarely at women.

I am not a victim of my hormones. I am a 61-year-old woman who, in her early 50s, was told her symptoms were in her head. Who had to educate herself because the medical system wasn’t going to do it for her. Who built a platform so other women wouldn’t have to feel as alone as she did at 48, with no language for what was happening to her body.

What looks like overcorrection to the people who were comfortable with the silence is just the volume that was always warranted.

We are not done being loud.

The STAT piece ends with a call to fight “the disempowering concept that women and their hormones must be medically controlled.”

Must. That word did something to me.

Because I don’t read “must” as a warning about overreach. I read it as the first time in my adult life that medical control of my hormones has actually been on the table as an option. Not a mandate. Not a pharmaceutical conspiracy. A choice. My choice.

That’s not disempowering. That’s the whole damn point.

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