Periods Fuel Protests

Joyce W. Vance and Jennifer Weiss-Wolf on Meta's Sanitary Product Rebellion

Here we go again…

Throughout the 2024 election, the two of us joined forces to write a joint op-ed each time a candidate mouthed off about menstruation or menopause. (Sort of like a drinking game.)

First, it was “Tampon Tim,” the moniker Republicans assigned to Governor (Coach) Tim Walz upon learning that he signed a bill as governor to mandate the provision of period products in Minnesota school restrooms.

Next up was a viral podcast clip from 2020 in which JD Vance appeared to agree with host Eric Weinstein’s assertion that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise children.

Rounding it out was U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno, who quipped about how he thought it was “a little crazy” that women voters over fifty would care about abortion.

One of us (Jen) is an advocate and writer who specializes in menstrual and menopause policy, and whose work covers the parsing of tax codes, educational programming, research budgets, and the like to ensure equitable outcomes when it comes to periods (or their cessation).

For the other (Joyce), the issue hits close to home: Her civil rights work as a federal prosecutor cultivated her conviction that protecting the rights of transgender and other LGBTQ members of our communities is essential.

We are both believers that the personal—periods—is inherently political. According to yesterday’s New York Times, so do the employees of Meta, who recently staged a protest over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s choice to join the stampede to Trump’s side and to align himself with MAGA ideology. Their chosen means of communicating their rebellion and frustration with their spineless boss? A slew of strategically placed tampons (pads and liners, too) in the company’s male restrooms. The Times reports that after Zuckerberg had the products removed from men’s facilities for use by trans and nonbinary employees, colleagues took it upon themselves to restock them, as well as to circulate a petition to Save the Tampons!

As other broligarch-led tech companies face showdowns with employees, we can’t deny our intrigue with the period power flexed here. For the record, across the nation and around the globe, policies in support of “menstrual equity” are part of a popular movement that has enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Among the wins: 30 states no longer charge sales tax on menstrual products (also known as the “tampon tax”), including red states like Texas, Florida, and South Carolina. Minnesota is one of 28 states committed by law and/or budget to providing menstrual products in schools, joined by states with Republican leadership like Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Utah.

In fact, in 2018, Trump himself signed the first-ever federal menstrual access requirement into law, the First Step Act, a 2018 prison and sentencing reform package that mandates menstrual product provision in federal prisons. In 2020 he signed the CARES Act, which made it possible for the first time for employees to use Flexible Spending Account allowances to buy menstrual products with pre-tax dollars.

More recently, as the conversation around periods has evolved to implicate gender, political leaders have grappled with the reality that menstruation is experienced by the very people Trump’s executive orders aim to write out of existence.

The “Tampon Tim” uproar was caused in part by the language of the Minnesota law, which states that pads and tampons must be available to “all menstruating students” and “in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12,” rather than qualifying that only “female restrooms” stock the products. An amendment was proposed to alter the wording and failed. Note that this did not set off a culture war, nor did it stymie support for the bill. One Republican lawmaker, Dean Urdahl, remarked, “Just talking with my wife and family members, they felt like it was an important issue I should support.”

Clearly, we are now living through a very different moment. The Trump administration’s laser focus on gender and sex requires a new commitment for all of us in the business of defending democracy. Meta employees’ tampon protest is a bold show of an innovative way to do just that.