Background reading:

Explore: Flipping the Menopause Script Is Essential to Democracy, including:

• Democracy, Divestment and the Power to Choose Liberation: On Cultivating ‘the Menopausal Multiverse,’ Omisade Burney-Scott
• Menopause in Three Parts: Where Rivers Flow, Split and Unravel, Omisade Burney-Scott, Danielle Purifoy and Austen Smith 
• Cool the Cell, Feed the Spirit: Abolition as Reproductive and Climate Justice, Scalawag, Julian Wilson, ​​Omisade Burney-Scott and Kwaneta Harris
• Menopause Matters, Yes! magazine, Omisade Burney-Scott
• A Letter to My Future Self in a Time of Undoing, Omisade Burney-Scott
• The Incomplete Story of Menopause: Where Medical Racism, Patriarchy and White Empiricism Intersect, Monica McLemore
• Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀ and Menopausal Mapping: How Womanist Cartographies Make People Into Place, Alexandra Jane
• Queering Menopause: A Conversation on Story, Power and Policy, Rev. Syd Yang and Austen Smith
• Menopause in Prison Is a Public Health Crisis We’re Ignoring, Kwaneta Harris
• Midwifery Is for Menopause, Too, Racha Tahani Lawler

Transcript:

0:00:00 Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to 15 Minutes of Feminism, part of our On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, at Ms. magazine platform. As you know, we report, rebel, and we tell it just like it is. And on 15 Minutes of Feminism, we count the minutes in our own feminist terms.

We dive right in, and in this episode, we’re talking about menopause. It’s going to affect most women during their lifetimes, and until fairly recently it’s been a bit outside of the mainstream, a bit taboo. In the shadows. But we are shining a light on it right here and now. We know it’s going to affect populations across ethnic and racial groups, people who are queer, trans folks, people who are incarcerated so much more. And I couldn’t be more thrilled to break all this down with Omisade Burney-Scott, who’s the creator of the Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause, and she’s one of those advocates who tells it just like it is and gives so much love and care to informing us all about what we should know about menopause and doing so with an intersectional view and lens. So listeners, sit back and take a very close listen. 

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You know, in our 15 Minutes of Feminism platform, we dive right in, and I couldn’t be more thrilled than to be spending time with you, Omisade, and I want to start off with unpacking an area of reproductive health, rights and justice that tends to get ignored generally, and particularly when we’re looking at certain communities in the United States, and that is menopause. So much attention is paid to matters of abortion, but matters that affect so many lives, that is menopause, gets overlooked. And I want to start off with just asking you a high-level question, which is: Why is that?

0:00:47 Omisade Burney-Scott:

I think that’s a really good question. We tend to compartmentalize reproductive health and reproductive justice in our country. So, if we’re only talking about access to reproductive health care, then we’re talking about abortion access, protecting those rights, and that’s very important.

And then, we move a little bit to another box, and we start talking about maternal mortality rates, and how we need to disrupt that, and educate people about that. That’s important too. But then, there’s like this barrier, a wall, confusion, opaqueness to reproductive aging and menopause.

And I’m not sure why that is, outside of some of the things that we know, generally speaking, around health equity. We don’t value aging reproductive bodies in this country. We don’t value or are curious about the needs, the experiences, of reproductive aging and menopause in marginalized communities or marginalized identities.

So, I think that the opportunity or the call that we are being asked to answer from inside of the reproductive justice movement space is to create a spectrum that is continuous and has a very, very strong through-line from menarche to menopause. So, instead of compartmentalizing it, it is iterative, it is fluid, it continues to expand on the becoming of your humanity, as a person who was born with a uterus and ovaries.

0:02:16 Michele Goodwin:

I appreciate that framing. It brings to mind certain cultural/social backdrops that we can’t ignore in the United States. Look, 50 years ago, a woman who was in her 40s was likely a grandmother. Society expected her, if she was living the good life, she had a new refrigerator. The good life meant she maybe had a dishwasher. Advertisements to her ranged from smoking a cigarette, to then her washing machine, her refrigerator, her stove, her oven, and making sure that her husband was satisfied and that her children were well-fed.

And that’s living the high life. And if we pull back, I mean, even in that cultural moment, we’re looking at women basically being shut out of higher education, at least co-ed higher education, right? It’s not happening there. We don’t have a Title VII then, or we do 50 years ago, but just before that, we don’t have a Title VII. We don’t have a Title IX, any of that. 

0:03:20 Omisade Burney-Scott:

That’s right.

0:03:21 Michele Goodwin:

And so, I’m wondering if you’d pick up on this thread about how women today are demanding different things. A woman today in her 40s and her 50s is a very different woman, in many ways, than looking at like, let’s say the 1950s and ’60s.

0:03:38 Omisade Burney-Scott:

I think you bring up a really important point, for me, as someone who’s a Gen Xer. So, I was born in 1967. My younger sister was born in 1968. And literally, we have a family that ranged from my parents, who were part of the Great Generation or the Silent Generation. They were born during the Great Depression, in Jim Crow South, in Eastern North Carolina. So, what looked like success and safety for them was very, very particular.

And then, I have older siblings, who are Boomers, then my sister and I. We were supposed to be the first generation that didn’t have to worry about all those things, right? You know, came online, literally, figuratively, physically, right after Civil Rights Movement, Voting Rights Act, Title VII. Title IX grew up with us, right?

So, we were supposed to be this generation, you can go to school where you want to go to school. You can work where you want to work. You can have a credit card. You can own property. You can marry who you want to marry, and then, you will be safe and happy and you will die in your bed with your children around you, right?

And it has been a very complicated, fraught journey of being the first of many Black children in integrated spaces, of being the first Black woman in many integrated spaces, and being told, with no uncertain terms, you shouldn’t be here. I don’t think you’re intelligent enough to be here. I don’t think that you have a right to be here. I think you’re taking a space from someone else. And I have, also, an idea of how you should show up in spaces. So, when you don’t show up in a space legible to me, then I want to make you different. I want to actually elevate you to an odd pedestal of a spectacular Negro who’s like, oh, but you’re different.

You’re so smart, and you’re so articulate, and all these things. And I feel like the experience that I’ve had with my Gen X compatriots, as well as the Millennials who I’m in relationship with and have given birth to, because I have a Millennial and a Gen Z, is that we have decided that the blueprint that we were offered might not be accurate, that the blueprint that we have been offered is actually a practice and not something that is etched in stone. And when you are engaged in a practice, you have to keep learning. You cannot rest on what you did previously, because that might not be the appropriate approach for the current context.

0:06:16 Michele Goodwin:

So, then, I want to hear from you about then what that older context was in terms of menopause.

0:06:23 Omisade Burney-Scott:

Sure.

0:06:24 Michele Goodwin:

And then what that context looks like today in terms of encountering, because you’ve just dropped so many pearls of wisdom, right? It’s the Southern piece. It’s the life that was supposed to be different, and in many ways, the life that is different, except there’s been blowback about that life that was different, right? There was the expectation that it would be a life…you work hard. There’s going to be this life that is different. And with that life that is different, there isn’t going to be the incessant pushback. 

So, you cross the line, but on the other side of it is a bat that’s looking to whack you at every three paces that you take forward. But that said, it turns out that menopause took place 60 years ago, 70 years ago, and menopause is still happening today. So, how do we understand those two differences? I mean, physiologically, a lot of it is the same, but we’re in different circumstances. Unpack all of that because there’s a whole lot of complexity there.

0:07:22 Omisade Burney-Scott:

You know, Michele, I think you’ve lifted up a couple of things that we have been diving deep into over the last seven years of this work with the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause. First thing, menopause is not a new thing. So, let’s just alleviate any of that. The cultural zeitgeist, right now, feels like everybody’s talking about menopause. Why are we, all of a sudden, all talking about menopause? Well, we have different technology to understand each other now.

We have different ways of understanding systems, context, patriarchy. We understand the difference between critiquing a system from within and disrupting a system. So, I think that we have grown and evolved in a way. I think about my mom as a nurse who really prepared my younger sister and I for our first periods. She was alive when I gave birth to my first son. So, she was very instrumental in that preparation, but she passed away when I was 31.

So, I did not have the benefit or the opportunity to do a deeper dive with her around going through the change. But I’m grateful for memory because I do remember observing, listening, ear hustling, as I like to put it, observing my mother.

0:08:34  Michele Goodwin:

You know it’s ear hustling when you’ve grown up in a Black household. It’s all ear hustle because, you know, you’re supposed to be silent.

0:08:43 Omisade Burney-Scott:

That’s exactly right, and then, they would figure out you were there and be like, get out of the kitchen. Oh, sorry. I just wanted some water. But my recollection of my mother’s generational footprint was that there was a lot of transformation happening. Divorce was happening in her late 40s, early 50s, with her friends.

Hot flashes were happening. We were not allowed to touch the thermostat. I remember that very distinctly, not in my mother’s house, not in my auntie’s house. Do not touch the thermostat. My aunt had a ubiquitous hand towel that rested on her shoulder. So, if she kind of had a hot flash, she could just like…

0:09:20 Michele Goodwin:

Stop it. Stop it.

0:09:23 Omisade Burney-Scott:

This is all recollection. This was not because she looked at me and said, you know, I’m going through the change, right? But we knew that’s what it was. What I don’t think I have access to, which I am very curious about, and this kind of like takes me into this kind of critical fabulation of like, what did my grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother do? I think there was a ritual that we don’t have access to currently that they did.

I think there was a role that midwives played with postpartum women who may have had babies well into their 40s that we have been separated from. And so, there’s a reunification that I think is happening now that’s important, and it’s complicated. I think there’s a landscape and I think there’s an ecosystem.

I think that the landscape, right now, still very much focuses on a white, cis, hetero, middle-class, reproductive aging menopause experience, which then creates outliers to that Black women, Indigenous women, queer folk, trans people, intersex people, people who are neurodivergent and differently abled, people who are incarcerated are not being included in this current conversation. So, if I’m going to be a student of history, our history in this country, if I’m going to be a good movement person, I’m going to pull that in and say, okay, listen, let’s disrupt that.

0:10:53 Michele Goodwin:

So, two thoughts come to mind, one in thinking about that history is the loss of what is an Indigenous knowledge or a non-pharmaceutical knowledge.

0:11:04 Omisade Burney-Scott:

Exactly.

0:11:05 Michele Goodwin:

The knowledge of what you steep, what you take off of the bark, what you do in terms of helping to heal and nurture the body. So, that loss, and then, something else that comes to mind is the disregard for the concerns and pain, anyway, of women generally, and then certainly women of color in those generations that we’re talking about, and that actually makes me feel quite sad, really sad reflecting on that, the put up or shut up, grit your teeth and bear it. 

That was part of the legacy, sadly, of our country towards so many communities of women. I mean, we can’t separate thinking about 60, 70 years ago, and we will go forward to looking at what you’re doing now, but I think we can’t separate that from other aspects within society and law. During those periods of time, marital rape was legal.

0:12:01 Omisade Burney-Scott:

Exactly.

0:12:03 Michele Goodwin:

So, all across the country, you could beat…domestic violence was permissible. Police would show up at the house and then walk the husband to a bar so he could drink some more. 

0:12:15 Omisade Burney-Scott:

And then, let him come home, and then let him return. Yes.

0:12:17 Michele Goodwin:

Yes, exactly. So, you have domestic violence, you have marital rape, women being excluded from juries, being excluded from opening checking accounts in their own name, credit cards in their own names, being excluded or treated to hostile circumstances at co-ed colleges. And so, all of that is this milieu of women working through what is happening physiologically with their bodies, and that is really quite sad.

0:12:45 Omisade Burney-Scott:

Absolutely.

0:12:46 Michele Goodwin:

Today, as we speed forward, and my goodness, this is 15 Minutes of Feminism, but we always say to our guests, we count the minutes in our own feminist terms. So, now, we’re on the feminist terms clock, and I want to hear about what’s taking shape today. What is the work that you are doing now to address these kinds of intersections that we’ve been talking about?

0:13:11 Omisade Burney-Scott:

I love what is taking shape today. I think that we are troubling the narrative in a very delicious, organic way. And I’m also looking forward to us continuing to trouble the narrative in a way that is informed by history, that is informed by the sociopolitical climate that we currently exist in, not the one we want to live in, because we do get to create alternatives to this world, right?

But we are living currently in a situation that is fraught, fraught with violence, fraught with medical misconduct. I just heard about the 600 women who are suing this hospital because they received non-consensual hysterectomies. I was not aware that this had happened, and it just came across my timeline.

And I remember reading about Fannie Lou Hamer and how she was politicized because she had received a Mississippi Appendectomy. So, there are some things that have changed, and there are some things that have stayed the same, but the technology and the approach has changed. So, where we are now, we’re talking about it boldly, in public, to many people.

We came online in 2019, and at that time, I felt like the landscape was primarily physicians, researchers who were like, we need to understand this better. But it wasn’t coming from a cultural perspective, and it wasn’t certainly coming from a feminist or a social justice perspective. So, there was still a very narrow view of what menopause was being discussed publicly, how people were bringing people together to have these conversations.

And then, it became very popular. You know, we see a lot of people with star power, influence, affluence, talking about their menopause journey. And then, the trajectory to being a healthcare advisor or to starting a fintech company, that trajectory kind of took off, and then paywalls started popping up, right?

And so, you’re like, you can get this information about menopause for just a small, small fee of $13 a month. So, how do we not do that? How do we make sure that the information that everyone needs, whether you identify as a woman or you are assigned female at birth and you don’t identify as a woman, how do you get access to accurate information for your journey?

That’s the first thing. The second thing is how do you learn how to advocate for yourself? Because you’re right. We held certain positions in our communities in high regard, teachers, principals, pastors, doctors. We didn’t question those folks. If the doctor said, you’re going to do this, you say, well, that’s what the doctor said, and so, that’s what I’m going to do. 

Now, we’re in a position where we can say, listen, this is what I need you to understand about myself. I’m the expert of this body. I had a period for 37 years. What did that make me? The expert of my period. So, let’s talk about what I’ve experienced and what I’m experiencing now. How can you be team Omi to make sure that I’m getting the care that I receive? So, we are learning that as well.

And then, we’re also learning about these amazing organic Maroon communities that exist at the margins of the current landscape, queer Maroon communities, where people who have been able to access gender-affirming care and did not know that that was going to take them into medical menopause and did not know what to do. 

So, we are working with these communities, partnering with these communities, listening to these communities, creating pathways for the communities to talk to each other, to share their narrative, to shift the narrative, and to shift the culture of our understanding of what this means inside of a Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, poor, whatever body. Yeah.

0:17:01 Michele Goodwin:

I really appreciate that. And part of what’s being reflected in what you’re doing is that there are more massive women…that some of the civil rights work that our foremothers fought so hard for, in Mississippi, in Alabama, in North Carolina, in South Carolina, that got us a Civil Rights Movement, a 1964 Civil Rights Act, a 1965 Voting Rights Act, thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer, and it truly has transformed. 

Even though there’s been the bat on the other side of the door far too often, the reality is that folks are daring to cross those lines, daring to say, I’m here, and now that I’m here, I want to be able to stay here and not become overwhelmed, overburdened by what is physiologically taking place in the body. 

And that is actually beautiful to see, that menopause is one measure, in many ways, if you think about it, of the benefits of a civil rights movement, because it means so many folks, so many women, so many non-binary folks, so many people, as you were mentioning, who were assigned as women at birth, and may not be now, but their civil rights are in play, and that means that they are in the workforce. 

0:18:17 Omisade Burney-Scott:

That’s right.

0:18:17 Michele Goodwin:

That means that they have been educated. That means they’re educating other people, and they don’t have time to waste. They want to get answers and get things done, and they’re demanding it, and that is really beautiful to see. All right. So, even with our feminist time clock, I think that our time is coming up, but I cannot let you go before asking a question that we pose to guests who come on our show, and that is, what do you see as a silver lining, going forward, and especially as we think about revolutionizing, how we address menopause?

0:18:54  Omisade Burney-Scott:

I think the silver lining for me is I grew up in the generation of the remix, right? I’m a hip-hop baby, right? My generation is the generation that took jazz, took R&B, and said, you know, I really love this. I don’t want to degrade this. I want it to, however, be something different, potent in a different way. So, I think that there’s a remix that we are offering to the community.

There’s a way in which realities of menopause, it’s important to understand, but the remix offers it in a different way. The remix offers context. The remix doesn’t erase history. The remix remembers justice. The remix is focused on liberation. Hip-hop, in and of itself, is a liberatory practice. 

So, I think that the remix that I learned from hip-hop, growing up, is the same thing that I bring to this space, as someone who’s done movement work for 31 years and also is a hip-hop head. We are remixing this. We are not pathologizing this. We are not disregarding the realities, but the remix is powerful, and we’re excited to be a part of that.

0:20:05 Michele Goodwin:

Oh, you’ve got me thinking now on a spectrum from the blues to hip-hop. 

0:20:07 Omisade Burney-Scott:

Come on. Come on. 

0:20:10 Michele Goodwin:

It has been such a joy and pleasure to spend this time with you, Omisade. Thank you, so much, for your brilliant work. It’s inspiring. Thank you so much.

0:20:23 Omisade Burney-Scott:

Thank you.

00:33:24 Michele Goodwin:

This has been your host Michele Goodwin, reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. On the Issues with Michele Goodwin and Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, our Ms. Magazine and Ms. Studios joint productions, I’m Michele Goodwin and the executive producer of Ms. Studios. Our producers for this episode are Roxy Szal, Oliver Haug, Allison Whelan, and our Ms. Studios intern Emerson Panigrahi. The creative vision behind our work includes art and design by Brandi Phipps, editing by Natalie Holland and Emerson Panigrahi, and music by Chris J. Lee.