Hormones are absolutely wild. Did you know that the first discovered hormone was secretin in 1902? I was born within that same century. (And, if we’re going to go on a rant about what else happened in that century, we could look to the fact that a woman wasn’t allowed to have a credit card without a male signatory until the 1970s, but you can find that rant elsewhere on this blog.)

Similarly, I’ve also written about how I have both autoimmune progesterone dermatitis and PPMD, both of which are hormone-based (and I think they’re linked, but I have no microscopes or 1900’s technology like that to prove it). I was listening to a podcast awhile ago – maybe a year – where the first or an early case of PPMD was identified (the first case identified as PPMD, obviously not the first time someone had it), and it was this woman who was (unknowingly) suffering from it and when her kid (I want to say a 3 or 4 year old) jumped on her belly she pushed the kid off her, roughly. There was a whole court case about whether she should lose her kid, and in that case PPMD was clinically recognized. A woman psychologist at the time said that she thought that PPMD shouldn’t be a recognized disorder, because it would lead people (men) to gain additional power over women by saying that they were crazy for having periods. She really wasn’t wrong, if you consider the way periods are portrayed in popular culture from the 80s onward. But it was also really devastating to hear a woman say that, because getting a diagnosis was such a relief. If only pretending I didn’t have it would make it so. But instead, I have this very weird hormone-based disorder that I have to manage every single month. And sometimes I’m juggling that and itching incessantly. Truly, it’s a shock I’m sane.

Hormones affect everything, and we’ve only known about them for a bit over a century. That’s hard to contemplate. I have two kids on the cusp of puberty, which is basically a hormone storm lying in wait. I used to work with a woman whose partner realized he was trans a few years after their children were born. My peer decided to try to make it work, even though she had fallen in love with a woman and would now have a husband instead. You fall in love with a person, after all, not a gender. But the transition for her partner was really chaotic (not either of their faults, just the way it is), because as my friend described, “it’s like going through puberty, and I can’t raise two little kids and my husband who is acting like a teenager.” So they ended up amicably separating, but I think about the story a lot, because of hormones and the power they have over us all.

It makes me think about how we have really bad decisions baked into a lot of our medicine. Like, most lab studies until like the 2010s were only on male animals (mice, rats, etc). Like how no one considered that having white-only, male-only clinical trials might not actually yield useful results. Like how the term “hysteria” has the same root as “hysterectomy” for a reason. Like how the age of a pregnancy is determined from the date of the first day of your last menstrual period. Which if you know how a period works (and a lot of people don’t, because We Don’t Like Them And Do Not Want To Think About Them), is ludicrous, because you cannot have a period and be pregnant, so that entire week shouldn’t count, and neither should the week following, during which you are not ovulating. No egg, no pregnancy. But I guess if you don’t actually care about facts or people, but do care about control, then these sorts of definitions work just fine.

I am all for destigmatizing these sorts of things. One of my very first Tumblrs was one that reviewed periods as if they were books. But I also look around at all the hate and harm for people just trying to live honestly and it makes me so tired. And it’s all because of hormones. It’s genuinely mad that we have to vote to ensure scientific research is even possible for some things (like, women’s health, trans medicine, and more). It makes me so angry that insurance is a business built as a brick wall between people and health care, and you can only get it if you have a very specific class of job. And even then, it is not a business built for the good of the people.

I don’t have a conclusion. That’s it, the end. Good luck to us all. Vote.