Ron DeSantis Has Questions About Your Daughter's Tampon
And he'd like you to post the answers online.
Let's start by saying that there is no reason that your daughter's school needs to be asking about her period. None . If she has to get a medical exam to play sports, the doctor will ask about her period, and make a determination that she is cleared to play. End of story ... or it should be, except that the Florida High School Athletic Association ation has other ideas.
In fact, a subcommittee of the FHSAA just voted to make it mandatory that female athletes answer these questions if they want to participate in school sports:
When was your first menstrual period?
When was your most recent menstrual period?
How much time do you usually have from the start of one period to the start of another?
How many periods have you had in the last year?
What was the longest time between periods in the last year?
Even worse, they want kids to upload this information to a third-party platform which is not bound by HIPAA and could be forced to disclose the information under subpoena. Fuckin' Florida, man.
First of all, have these people ever met any adolescents? Are they under the impression that a 14-year-old is meticulously charting her cycle and could tell you how many periods she had in the past year? AYFKMRN?
Second of all, what kind of Handmaid's Tale menstruation tracking bullshit is this? You're signing your kid up for volleyball, not to be a brood mare.
And more importantly, who the hell would hand this information over to the state when the governor clearly thinks he's going to go all in on culture war issues like abortion and trans kids participating in school sports? What assurance do parents have that providing this data won't enable the state to track kids' cycles and police whether they're the "wrong" kind of girl, i.e. not cisgender, or insufficiently fertile for the bowling team. Is the school going to be enlisted in policing whether students have had abortions? Are the girls going to get pulled into the principal's office for an interrogation based on their responses?
"Wow, Hayley, it says you've had your period for three years, and yet you only menstruated eight times in the past twelve months. Care to explain that?"
Seriously, as the parent of a teenage girl who participates in sports, the last thing on earth I would do is discuss her cycle with Ron DeSantis and his minions.
As of now, the questions are optional , but the FHSAA will vote later this month on whether to adopt the recommendations of a panel and make them mandatory .
Ya know, for the party that spends all its time calling the rest of us GROOMERS, these weirdos spend a lot of time thinking about kids' pink bits.
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here in desantistan, the only laws are whatever the mullah ron says.
The only conceivable basis that this information could be sought in this context is to guard against exercise induced amenorrhea. Even then, just include something on the instructions to the doctor about it; the school doesn’t need to know.