High School Girls and the Voyeuristic Do-Gooders

It appears that this time, this time, Florida governor Ron DeSantis might well be innocent of Creepiness in the First Degree. (There’s a chance he’s involved, at least indirectly, but the hysteria on the left would be there either way.)  And if this really is DeSantis’s work, at least he was smart enough to wipe the evidence clean of his fingerprints.

There’s a recommendation, not yet a rule, coming out of the sports medicine advisory committee to the Florida High School Athletic Association to require female athletes to submit information about their menstrual cycles to… well, that’s sort of unclear, too: their school? an online database? The status quo asks that information, but responses are optional. 

Curmie understands the need for athletes to be checked out by a doctor prior to engaging in strenuous activity. No one wants students to endanger themselves if a simple physical exam could prevent it. And Curmie doubts that the prospective new requirement is designed to identify trans women, as some detractors have argued. 

He gets it, too, that students sometimes supply more information than those requesting it need or even want. Curmie took seven groups of students, about 100 in all, on Study Abroad trips to Ireland. Students taking the courses were required to answer a series of rather personal medical questions on the off chance that they would become incapacitated while abroad and Curmie needed that information to tell to medical staff. One of those questions was what medications the student was taking. Given that well over half the students on the trip were women between the ages of 18 and 23, a lot of them were on some form of birth control, and said so, often parenthetically after the name of the particular drug. 

After receiving a couple of forms with Too Much Information, Curmie began sending out an email as soon as a student signed up for the trip, saying that he needed to know the name of the drug, but would rather not know why the student was taking it unless the student thought it essential that he’d know. 

Frankly, Curmie doubts that he ever needed any of that information, but the university thought so, so he dutifully put all of those medical forms in a loose-leaf notebook, which he took with him across the Atlantic but thankfully never had to access. There were a couple of incidents of common colds, a turned ankle, and a reaction to an allergen the student had never encountered before and therefore didn’t know to avoid; not much else. The forms were promptly shredded when we got back to the US. 

Curmie has noted repeatedly on this blog that he is not a lawyer. He’s not a doctor, either (well, he has a PhD, but you know what I mean, Gentle Reader). So, although it doesn’t seem to him that some of the specificity of the questions on the form is necessary, perhaps it is. It is certainly a bit odd, however, to note that the girl is to give the date of her “most recent menstrual period,” information that is quite likely to be outdated by the time the season starts, let alone when it ends. It’s also a bit weird that a student who answers in the affirmative to “have you had a menstrual period?” is then expected to “Explain ‘yes’ answers.” What the hell do you think happened, guys? (The masculine noun in the previous question is not entirely coincidental.) 

Florida, it turns out, is not the only state to ask this kind of information, but different states handle it differently. Louisiana, for example, asks only a yes/no question if there are “menstrual irregularities.” (They do ask for the date of the “last cycle.”) A yahoo article says that five states and the District of Columbia ask no questions about menstruation at all, and that ten others tell students not to turn in their medical records to their school. Vermont’s form seems to Curmie to be perfectly sufficient: a doctor certifies that the student is cleared (or not), with or without restrictions, for all or some sports. Common conditions that don’t necessarily prevent participation, but of which coaches should be aware (allergies, asthma, etc.) are also noted. 

Of course, the links between menstrual dysfunction and certain sports, especially those emphasizing slenderness and low body mass—gymnastics is the prime example, but also dance, figure skating, etc.—is well-documented. The research supporting national guidelines suggests that athletes are considerably more likely than non-athletes to experience amenorrhea (loss of menstrual cycle) or oligomenorrhea (a decrease in number of menstrual cycles per year). So when the guidelines themselves say that menstrual history is “an essential discussion for female athletes,” Curmie isn’t going to argue. 

But isn’t this where we trust in the expertise of physicians? Yes, a member of the high school cheerleading squad ought to discuss her menstrual periods (or lack of them) with her doctor, but in the absence of cause for concern, why does anyone else—the school, the coach, some hackable database somewhere—need to know the details? To Curmie, that positions itself somewhere between the prurient and the garden-variety creepy. 

So the matter at hand isn’t whether the girl’s overall health ought to be paramount, or even whether menstrual history is relevant. It’s who has access to that information. Lose the mandatory questions on the form (which are necessarily self-reported, anyway) and allow doctors to protect their patients: both their bodies and their confidentiality. The proposal may (perhaps) be well-intentioned, but the result is an invasion of privacy that far outweighs any benefits.