The story of menopause will remain incomplete until research and care are guided by the lived experiences of those who go through it.
Menopause—and the conversations surrounding it—is having a moment: Celebrities are speaking out, a commercial marketplace is booming, and state legislatures have introduced a wave of reforms over the past year. But as public attention grows, so too must our scrutiny of who benefits from this surge of visibility … and who risks being left behind.
This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, Flipping the Menopause Script Is Essential to Democracy, published in the middle of Black History Month, in partnership with Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause. This series helps flip the script, building on seven years of narrative and reproductive justice work led by Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause and commemorates “Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀: Remembering Blood,” a 2025 intergenerational gathering in Durham, N.C., centering marginalized menopausal communities. Menopause is not only a physical transition—it is also cultural, social and political. Recognizing its full scope is essential to advancing true health and civic equity. As one contributor reminds us: “We will not disappear with age. We will arrive.”
Like many of the women in my family, I had early menopause and had completed the process by the age of 50, the same as my mother. To date, the best science we have about the onset of both fertility and menopause is that it will be aligned with the age at which one’s mother or other familial elder entered those hallmarks. The alarming truth is that we know more about reproductive organs in other species than we do our own. Our limited societal understanding of the lifespan of ovarian function is a casualty of the intersection of medical racism, patriarchy and white empiricism.
Even more harmful is that we already know there are disparities and variabilities among the human species specific to the distributions of health, illness, life expectancy and quality of life. That one group’s experiences continue to serve as a default standard for all others is and has always been insufficient to capture the vast array of human complexities. The maldistribution of resources to study menopause and other aspects of ovarian life has, unfortunately, been limited to capitalist pursuits: agriculture, assisted reproductive technologies, infertility, and livestock and/or veterinarian services—as these are the subjects deemed profitable and of importance.
Additional complexity to this story is the truth that research into reproductive trajectories of minoritized people has been complicated and polluted by enslavement of Black people, the displacement and genocide of Native and Indigenous people, and other atrocities enacted by clinical practitioners and public health professionals.
Medical racism has been defined in many ways; for the purposes of this essay, “Medical racism is the systematic and wide-spread racism against people of color within the medical system. It includes both the racism in our society that makes Black people less healthy, the disparity in health coverage by race, and the biases held by healthcare workers against people of color in their care.”
Patriarchy is defined as “social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line or more broadly: Control by men of a disproportionately large share of power.”
And white empiricism is “the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read as having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people (particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other.”
…. It would seem an apt time to use curiosity as a tool to guide different conversations.
Taken together, when considering the incomplete story about menopause, the ongoing burdens are exemplified as follows:
- An under-investment in research to understand the health and well-being of a significant proportion of the population, which equates to medical racism.
- Given that the same proportion of the population has different anatomy and physiology, this is a manifestation of patriarchy.
- The focus on male objectivity about these issues, grounded in unproven stereotypes (i.e., menopausal people are to be studied as if they were men in research studies), highlights the depths of incompleteness.
Reimagining a “Menopausal Multiverse” will require acknowledging these gaps and committing to new futures, one in which research agendas can be guided by “historical, cultural and political understanding of the lived experiences, truths and realities of Black women and people who have a uterus and ovaries.”
Given the current disruption in the scientific research and clinical enterprises of the United States, it would seem an apt time to use curiosity as a tool to guide different conversations. Before the current administration, for example, unprecedented public and philanthropic investments were committed in support of neglected research on women’s health, including (but not limited to) menopause. These investments and their associated projects surely should widen our aperture on menopause.
But the story will remain incomplete until we have our research and clinical care guided by the menopausal experiences of those who experience it. Anything else will be covered with the fingerprints of medical racism, patriarchy and white empiricism.
