The Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA) held an emergency meeting Thursday, Feb 9, after receiving significant public blowback to their considerations of making students' menstrual cycle information mandatory on athlete eligibility paperwork. The FHSAA oversees interscholastic athletic programs across the state of Florida and had been considering adopting a form that would have made these previously optional questions mandatory.

The questions, masked under a concern for students' health, would have forced athletes to disclose personal, private medical information about whether the student had a menstrual cycle, when their first menstrual period was, the dates of their most recent period, and the number of periods they had in the previous 12 months. This data would have conceivably been accessible by coaches, school districts, and third-party digital platforms.

We put our toddler to bed and cozied up alongside the fireplace illuminating our small trailer in the woods. If you aren’t ready to have another child, then we have to change what we are doing. You can’t keep coming inside of me. He had protested the idea of a vasectomy (too emasculating). I tried an IUD, but the pain and heavy bleeding following its insertion led to its removal. My period had been irregular since giving birth, and between taking care of a toddler and healing from postpartum depression, I was never successful at tracking my cycle.