Jennifer Weiss-Wolf: How Periods, Menopause, and Politics are Reshaping Democracy

Guy Kawasaki:
So thank you very much, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, for being on my podcast. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is the executive director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at NYU Law School, which basically means that she's at the forefront of advancing women in the legal profession. And in the past, she has been a driving force with another movement, this is menstruation equity. And her book, Periods Gone Public, was instrumental in this quest. Did I get all that right?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
That sounds good.

Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
That sounds like me.

Guy Kawasaki:
So first of all, most relevant and timely question, how is your newfound singing career going?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Oh, did I mention my singing along the way? I had my concert last night. Yeah, it was very exciting. I sang on an off-Broadway stage with a group of about fifty other people, none of whom are professional singers. And we sang some good old school rock and roll songs and it was really fun.

Guy Kawasaki:
I heard that Instagram went down because there was so much traffic for people.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
That could be true. I think we might've broken the internet.

Guy Kawasaki:
So if this whole legal and activist thing doesn't work out.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah, if it doesn't work out, I've got a career in breaking the internet by singing.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, you've got back up careers. I have a serious question. Why were you all wearing red in that video?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Oh, I posted that, and you can see, I am actually the only one not wearing red, I was wearing black, because we were assigned to wear black and red in whatever combination we wanted. But in that little video clip, which my daughter took, it was just like a little slice of people, and they all just happened to be wearing red.
But if you saw the whole stage, people were wearing a mix of red and black. And the director thought that those were colors that pop on the stage and look festive. So I don't think there's any symbolism behind it.

Guy Kawasaki:
I didn't think so. Knowing where you are politically, I'm like, "Why was she being red?"

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah, no, there was no statement being made there, it was just fashion. And I was dressed in black because I am a true New Yorker. So I really didn't actually even own anything red in my closet.

Guy Kawasaki:
At least you didn't have the red hat on.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I think there were some red-hatted people there, but no logos or slogans on them. So red hats don't go over well in New York City.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, we have been obviously researching you, and you have some pretty much kick butt editorials lately.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I love to write. Writing really is my tool, my sword, my weapon of choice. It's how I combination of think about problems and solutions. And by having to communicate them in the arc of 800 words, which is what an op-ed or editorial the standard length is, it's a really extraordinary way to accomplish that.
So I love to do it because I actually find it serves me and how I'm thinking about the work, but it also serves the world. It's a great way to explain something that they might not have thought about, and that they can digest and get on board with whatever solution you're arguing for.

Guy Kawasaki:
One of the editorials is a reference to the Judy Blume book, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Love Judy Blume.

Guy Kawasaki:
I want to ask you a non-theoretical question, do you think that God is there now for women?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Wow. Okay, I wasn't expecting that question. And my own religiosity and spirituality aside, yes. Women, we're strong. This is not the worst we've seen. And we're smarter than this administration. And ultimately, we're more powerful than what's happening right now. We're the majority of the population. We have clear fights ahead of us. So whether that's God or whether that is our own spirit and passion, I don't feel depressed or without mission or focus at all.
And in fact, part of why I sang last night and decided I wanted to sing this year is because I spent so much time writing and thinking and toiling in the world of all of the things that are wrong with society right now. I think it's really important to simultaneously lean into things that make us happy and push our limits and give us adrenaline. So all of those things are true at the same time. You don't have to just have one or the other.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, your other editorial that we found, which was just as interesting, is about, let's just say that, do politicians have a sense of decency anymore? And there were a bunch of pictures with, "Have you this," and, "Have you that," and, "Have you that," and what's the answer to that question? Do politicians have this decency at all anymore? This is like McCarthyism two.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
It is McCarthyism two. So that particular piece, I wrote because a graphic designer had made these really amazing visuals for the moment, and her name's Bonnie Siegler, and she was leaning into the very line to Senator McCarthy, "Have you no decency?" And she looked at the cast of characters in the current administration. And not only did the question have you no decency come to mind, but so too did have you no integrity, have you no character?
And then some more crass things too if I'm allowed to say them here. And then some of them were just downright funny. There was a picture of one Supreme Court Justice who we got the information about his love of beer during his confirmation hearings, no names mentioned, Brett Kavanaugh, and the sign was a picture of an angry-faced Kavanaugh with, "Have you no beer?" And there was a picture of a down parka’d vice president JD Vance in Greenland with, "Have you no suit?"
So she had some fun with them too. So I wrote about them, and what the intersection is between art and protests and all of these ideas about policy, ideas about equity, ideas about politics. But what I will say as a sidebar was super fun was the website where I wrote about that is a Substack, it's called The Contrarian. And together with the graphic designer, we made the poster art free to download for viewers so they could grab the PDF and take it to their local print shop and turn it into a poster themselves.
So we showed up in a march in New York City just for fun, I wanted to meet up with the designer, she's a friend, and we thought we'd have a good afternoon together, and we saw people marching down the street with the signs. So of course, we ran up to them to ask them how they got them. And yes, indeed, they got them from the article. So that was pretty cool.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, cross my fingers, please tell me that was on Canva.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I don't make them, so I don't know. But I'm going to say yes to you.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, do you have one that says, "Have you no black suit?"

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
No, we can make one.

Guy Kawasaki:
I think that's pretty timely now, right?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah, we'll talk about that. I am not the designer here. And I was not even the slogan maker, I was the person who wrote about them.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So now I have to ask you, you and I, let's just say we share perspectives on politics, but I hesitate sometimes to come out so strongly, and you obviously have no fear because you're writing for Ms. Magazine And you're writing for the LA Times. Are you not scared of being targeted by MAGA or the government?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
No, this is a truth telling moment. No, I'm not. This is a time to speak our truth. They speak their truths and what they believe them to be. So no, I don't think so. And interestingly, I wrote a piece for the LA Times just yesterday, and the reason I knew it went live was because I already had hate you email in my inbox referring to the op-ed, which was my trigger to say, "Oh, I guess it's up."
So yeah, they don't make their dissatisfaction, they don't keep it to themselves, and nor do I keep my views of the world and what is just and what is right and what is fair.
And I don't just write about problems, I don't just point fingers, but I write about solutions too. And in fact, the piece that I wrote yesterday was acknowledging that a proposal that is now in front of the Trump administration is putting forward actually looks a lot like some things I've argued for too, for very different reasons.
And I tried to unpack how we could have such different reasons for actually agreeing on the same thing and what that looks like from my perspective to make sure if this is something they end up doing, that they do it in a way that doesn't harm people.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, are you specifically referring to having more babies and getting menstruation education out there so people can get more babies?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Okay, so I'm referring to a piece of that. But yeah, so something that the Trump administration has indicated it has an interest in is what is called this pronatalist agenda, which is that responding to declining birth rates requires the intervention of the government.
Now, there's a lot of people involved in this debate, and they come at it from almost as many angles. And there are a lot of right-wing arguments that are made, especially in terms of increasing certain kinds of families, families that are very traditional, that are white, that have a mother and a father, that are wealthy.
And they've put forward a bunch of proposals, or they've received a bunch of suggestions of what they should be proposing or advancing. They run a pretty wide gamut from medals of honor to mothers who have multiple, many children, something that was done in Nazi Germany.
And one of the suggestions was that people need better literacy in reproduction all around to understand how conception happens. I would agree with them wholeheartedly that people don't have that education, and that lack of education is a problem for reproductive autonomy, and that if we provided that education, especially where I focused around menstrual literacy, but it goes broader than that, that would be healthier for all people. So yeah, I agree with them that this education is needed.
I certainly don't agree with the reason why they want to do it. I can't imagine I'll agree much with what their educational agenda will look like. But I think it's important in this day and age to engage and to really interrogate what's happening and to pull the threads that you think actually have some potential and figure out how to improve them. He always says people suffer from Trump derangement syndrome.
And I think if I came out saying menstrual literacy is a terrible thing, that is what I would look like, given that I've probably written about fifty op-eds prior arguing for menstrual literacy education.
In fact, the reason why we did this in the LA Times is because two years ago, almost to the date, I wrote an op-ed there about Judy Blume and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret., which had just hit the movie theaters at the time. And that in itself was fifty years in the making. The book came out in 1970 and was a pre-teen classic for Gen X kids like me who read it in the 1970s.
When the movie came out in 2023, that was super exciting, definitely for me, I held a watch party. But I also wrote about a law that was being debated and eventually passed in Florida at the time in which menstrual education is still deprived, their students are deprived of. It was cut out in their sex ed program, any discussion about menstruation for kids sixth grade and younger. And that is actually the law of the land in Florida right now.
So I wrote about that because it was overlapping with the release of the Judy Blume movie, and I thought that made for an interesting discussion point or entry point for people to think about that law in Florida. And Judy Blume herself was advocating against the bill when it was introduced. So two years ago to the date, I wrote that. And now here we are, and the very same idea is in the news for exact opposite reasons. So I felt that was something interesting to reflect upon.

Guy Kawasaki:
I could make the case that the people whose DNA you do not want spread out are the ones who are most interested in spreading it out.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah. That's not for this conversation.

Guy Kawasaki:
But that's a different discussion here. So perhaps you could explain to us, because when I was reading about all your work, never put this two and two together about the relationship between reproductive rights and democracy. So how are those two things related?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah, so menstruation, menopause, that is the beat that I have, but it more broadly falls under this umbrella of reproductive rights and equity and democracy. And among the professional roles that I've had, I worked at a democracy organization for many years, also affiliated with the law school at NYU, called the Brennan Center for Justice.
And as I thought about all the ways we were arguing and advocating for full and fair participation in civic life and in the body politic, it's really hard not to think about how attacks on our bodies are intrinsic to what it means to live in that free and fair society. And it goes both ways.
So the ability to have freedom over your body is certainly part of what it means to live and exist and thrive in a democracy. But there's a flip side to it too. The way our democracy functions, it just so happens that when it comes to issues like reproductive rights and justice, those are the first places that people who would otherwise degrade or deny our democracy, choose to do to keep the people from having their will.
And I'll give you an example. In the state of Ohio, a couple of years ago, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade in the 2022 Dobbs decision, there was a measure on the ballot in Ohio because the legislature in Ohio is so gerrymandered that even the people who are elected to serve, or the people who are elected to serve, don't reflect the will of the people.
So that's the first broken rung in the democracy ladder at Ohio, that the people could want something, but those who are in charge of making and passing the laws are not going to do what the people want. That is not a democracy. So they put it on the ballot so the people could have a say directly. That's scary to people who don't support democracy. So you know what they tried to do? They tried to raise the threshold of the number of votes it would take to pass the measure.
So whereas normally it would be a fifty-fifty kind of thing, they said, "Nope, we're going to raise the bar, and more people, 60 percent of the people are going to have to vote for this," because they knew what the people wanted, and they knew that if the people had their way, their broken system of government wouldn't be serving their needs.
So they tried and they failed. There was a special election in the summertime to try to raise the bar. It didn't succeed, and the measure passed with far more than majority support.
That to me is such a clear example of how people will use the levers of our democracy and try to degrade and distort them if they don't want the will of the people to succeed. And that happens time and time and time again on gender issues and reproductive issues.
So to me, I hope that was clear, those are the ways I see reproductive rights and gender equity as intersecting with democracy. Two-way street. Control over ourselves is part of democratic participation, but so too are the rules of democracy, making sure they're honored so that the will of the people is heard.

Guy Kawasaki:
So do you really think they are actually thinking and plotting that we have to control women's bodies in order to control power, it's that simple?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yes, it is.

Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe you can't explain it because you don't understand it, but that's certainly my case. How does that thinking work?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I'm not here to justify it. But we've seen it over and over again. It's not an accident that it keeps happening. Fool me once, that kind of thing. They do it over and over. It's a playbook that's played out from state to state. So the fight for democracy is intrinsic to the fight for our reproductive lives because those are in fact the tools of how we're going to get there.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you believe that at this point, we are an oligarchy? And for those who are listening, let's just define oligarchy as we're a tiny amount of people have accumulated most of the power and use it to enrich themselves. So are we at that point already?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
It sure feels that way. People who are wiser than me who study fascist states and oligarchs around the world are saying yes. People are now acknowledging this tipping into a constitutional crisis, veering towards authoritarianism, oligarchical tendencies. All of those fears that have been part of our, I think, American story for, not just the Trump years, we've been set up for this for probably the better part of the Twenty-First century. We're already a quarter of the way in, but we've arrived.

Guy Kawasaki:
Next question. So I hope the answer is yes, can the laws and the separation of power and the judiciary, et cetera, is it going to work? Are we going to preserve democracy, or are we going to turn into Hungary two point zero?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I hope it's going to work. We've seen the courts really holding strong thus far where today, we're talking, I think this is the hundredth day of the Trump administration. I think we have something like 1,500 to go.
But so far, I would say that many of the systems and checks have held up. I think we're seeing obviously unprecedented, a very overused word, ways that they're being tested, and I don't think that this administration is going to be deterred by the things that have blocked them so far. So the fights will continue. I'm hopeful. I have no choice but to be hopeful.
And one of the things that I think about a lot is the strategy, this flood the zone, everything everywhere, all at once strategy, and how overwhelming it is. And sometimes it makes me feel overwhelmed because I'm not an expert in most things. I'm an expert in a few things. And oddly, some of the things I'm an expert in, like menstruation policy, have relevance, so go figure.
But I try hard to remember that I don't have to solve everything, and I don't even have to listen to or invest in everything, I have to put my skills and my talents where they can be most useful. And that gives me a lot of reassurance that if there are a lot of us out there doing that, that is the resistance we need.

Guy Kawasaki:
There's a line of thinking that the judiciary is where the rubber meets the road, but the judiciary doesn't have really enforcement power. What's it going to do, call up the US Marshals and tell them to arrest Donald Trump?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
We've seen that already and we've absolutely seen him flouting and defying rulings and judges personally going after them, calling them out, the judge in Wisconsin who was arrested. But I do think that the court of public opinion is a really powerful mode of our democracy, and it's a very challenging one right now too, given the state of media in this country, and I'm happy to talk about that too as somebody who writes and contributes and is part of a nonprofit media organization, Ms. Magazine.
But I think that where the judiciary meets public opinion is a really interesting one because even with all of the crises we've seen at the Supreme Court and questioning ethics and all the ways that we've seen such dramatic shifts with its conservative supermajority over the past couple of years, generally speaking, courts are the place where Americans hold the highest value in regard.
I think they'll have the biggest to fall. Where people think politicians are automatically crooked and slippery, there's a little bit more sensibility that judges and their robes are going to be wiser and more impartial. So that gives extra heft to what the courts are doing.
Even if the administration and the president himself is creating chaos and crises by rejecting or arguing against or making truth social or ex-posts about judges in the judiciary, it's giving the public more to think about and more to chew on and more to be uncomfortable with, perhaps, then they might be if they just saw him duking it out with a member of Congress who they didn't trust anyway.

Guy Kawasaki:
Are you familiar with the work of Erica Chenoweth?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yes, I am.

Guy Kawasaki:
So I think it's an oversimplification to say that when you get three and a half percent, you can have change, but that's her observation, which is not necessarily as simple as that. But at least her work shows that you don't need 51 percent of the people in the streets, you just need a small percentage of the people in the streets.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I'm going to take that back to your earlier question about God and women's rights and looking out for women. Erica also argues that women's focus movements have been the most successful in the world at countering authoritarianism and joining the intersecting issues that comprise what it means to consider and think about and fight for gender equity.
So if it's that you need that critical mass, and that critical mass especially is organized and led by women and people who lead in a women's focused way that has more intersecting interests and collaborative leadership at heart, you do have a recipe for success. And Erica has shown it time and again in the different autocracies and movements that I've seen written about.

Guy Kawasaki:
We are going to have her as a guest in a few weeks.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Good. I don't know if we published another piece by Erica in Ms. Magazine, and it was called “The Revenge of the Patriarchs.” And I hang on Erica's every word.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm so glad. Look, I'm really looking forward to interviewing her. So yeah, I'm glad that you guys are familiar with each other's work. And it makes perfect sense. So let me ask you something. I must confess ignorance here, until about three days ago, I had never heard the concept of menstrual equity.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
You knew it and talked about it.

Guy Kawasaki:
What can I say? At least I'm being transparent. So first of all, could you just please define that for the other ignorant men out there who are listening to this podcast?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
It's not ignorance, it's the society we've been brought up in. And to be very fair, it's a phrase I made up about ten years ago. So I tend to doubt it's in the common vernacular. But the idea of menstrual equity, I'm going to explain it as a concept, and then I'm going to explain it as a policy framework if that's okay.
When I started doing work around menstruation and public policy, I learned about this because some kids in my community were collecting menstrual products, tampons and pads for our local food pantry when they discovered that it was a need of the people who used the food pantry, and the food pantry didn't have a budget for it. So as simple as that. I learned about that through a social media post through a mutual friend. And I contacted the family because I really wanted to be involved in their product drive.
But I really started thinking about it. And I will say, this goes back to my Brennan Center roots and my consideration of these issues as a matter of what it means to live in a full and fair democracy where we all have equal civic engagement and participation opportunities. You're probably not so ignorant, your word, to know that if somebody doesn't have access to these products, it's really hard to participate in public life.
It's impossible for most, I would say, just about everybody. And so I started thinking about it in those frameworks, and I became consumed with why an agency that presumably had public and philanthropic funds and was able to meet every need of their base, why this was being left to a couple of teenagers to go out and stand on the corner like they were selling Girl Scout cookies for. Why was this considered not important enough to be part of any of those budgets?
Was it not allowed? Had they forgotten about it? Was food more important? These were all real questions. So I started digging into that and discovered that there was really no policy agenda that had ever been attempted to normalize menstruation, talk about it in halls of power, and say, "Hey, you know what? There are some problems here that we haven't thought about. Have we ever thought about the fact that for low-income people, they just can't afford to put this in their budget?
Why do we provide toilet paper and public restrooms for free? We don't ask people to pay for that, but we charge for this or we don't make it available at all. Who decided that? Who was making that decision? Was there a discussion?" So I became consumed with these questions. So that was when I started public writing. I really hadn't done much public writing before that either.
And the very first piece that I wrote happened to be published in the New York Times, little old paper that nobody reads. So the issue got a lot of attention and ended up this whole array of activity, people who wanted to get engaged philanthropically. "Oh, I want to do a product party too, that sounds fun."
It's a little subversive. If it's something you don't talk about, it seemed edgy to have a party where you asked everybody to bring a box of tampons. I became really interested in what the laws could be. There was a lot of pop culture interest at the time too, this was all 2015.
I became really interested in what the policies could be, and I wrote this memo and I came up with a whole bunch of ideas. And what happened was I kept writing because the issue ignited me so much, and lawmakers started contacting me, whether it was in municipal governments like here in New York City and the city council, state legislators, members of Congress, and saying, "Hey, what can I do? I really want to make this my issue. This sounds really important, this sounds really doable."
And it wasn't just Democrats, it was Republicans who were interested in it too. There's a lot of bipartisan reasons to be supportive of some of these ideas. So as I started pounding the pavement and talking to people, I realized I needed a vocabulary that everybody could share. And it's not that this wasn't being talked about, especially in other parts of the world. There was a lot of public health focused conversations, there were a lot of human rights focused conversations.
And none of those sounded like they would work very well with American legislators. They're not things we necessarily do or consider in our lawmaking. We really don't use a human rights framework. We rarely consider public health, and we fight about whether healthcare should be covered at all as a basic rights, though all of those frameworks seemed like I would lose people really quickly if I went in and tried to do it through that lens.
So I came up with this idea of menstrual equity. I didn't really call it that, but the idea was I wanted to talk about equitable opportunity to participate in society, whether that is to get an education and be present in school, whether that's to go to work and collect a paycheck, whether that's really the ability to walk down the street. So the first time I ever used the phrase, I remember it very vividly, I was testifying at the Chicago City Council.
They were going to be passing their own resolution around the Chicago city sales tax and whether menstrual product should be tax-exempt under their state or city municipal code. And this reporter from a more tabloidy paper in Chicago asked me a question, and I used the word menstrual equity and she got very sassy with me. And she said, "What are you saying? That's not a thing."
And I got indignant, and I said, "It is a thing." And I defined it, and I gave this, "It's the ability to participate equitably." It was like I just said to you. And it just stuck.
And then lawmakers started naming their bill packages that, and teen groups and youth groups and community organizing groups all started using it as their phrase and as their umbrella. And it was funny to me because I really didn't mean it to be an organizing word, I was thinking it much more as a how to get policymakers, especially Republican and more conservative policymakers to think this is something that they could be for and get behind.
Now ironically, the word equity is off the table now. I picked the worst word in the Trump administration to tie it to. But back then in 2015, 2016, 2017, menstrual equity became something that was wholly supported by Republicans under those words, using those words.
And I even wrote an op-ed back then with a Republican lawmaker in Illinois who told me that in his state when they first passed legislation to eliminate sales tax on menstrual products, in addition to what the Chicago City Council did, and then they went on to pass a second law mandating menstrual products be freely available in all of the state schools. And this was done when Bruce Rauner was the governor, who was a Republican, and it was a Republican led legislature.
And they got both of these things done. And then he said, because they had these conversations and because they had their eyes open to things that they'd been not paying attention to before, and because they were listening to their female constituents in different ways, they went on to expand the State's Equal Rights Act, and they went on to become the thirty-seventh state out of the thirty-eight, finally, that did it, to ratify the Federal Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution.
That is radical to me. That is the entire essence of this work, that it is a gateway, an opening into talking about what life looks like when we lay bare the things we don't talk about, and how we can find inequities, and then the solutions that we need. The world is very different now than it was then, but that's the very long answer to the definition of menstrual equity.

Guy Kawasaki:
It's a complex concept, it's not just sales tax.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I feel like it's really important to understand that story because people often don't, and then they make fun of it, or it sounds silly to them or something. So I feel like if you understand that, it's really hard to argue with. Who would argue with that?

Guy Kawasaki:
I was going to ask you that because I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but right now, 2025, there's still about twenty states that charge sales tax.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah, so when the sales tax piece of this started, so that's one of the many proposals that were in this big old memo that I wrote back in 2015. And there were forty states at the time. Ten states didn't do it, five of them just didn't have sales tax at all, just no sales tax. So obviously that counts. And then five of them exempted, but not because they actually thought about it, they just fell in some other umbrella category or something.
So there hadn't really been any campaigns to this nature. It was 2015. It is now 2025, so it's ten years later, and twenty states have done away with it. And they are red states, blue states, there are whole gamut. Texas did, California did, widest variety of states. Twenty still haven't, I will give you that. But that twenty did, I'm going to glass this half full mood, that's massive for the sake of how fast the legislative and political process moves.
Think about movements, think about the movement for marriage equality, think about the movement for abortion rights where we have come full circle, but things don't happen in a minute. You have to build a groundswell. You have to get public opinion on your side. You have to get people to understand, again, the problem before they can invest in a solution. And given that we haven't talked about menstruation publicly pretty much ever before this time, to me, that is really fast progress.
So I look at it as we're on the right track. I'm going to say something else too, which is in this moment of federal chaos, state governments are a real opportunity for change. Yes, their budgets are going to be strapped. Yes, there are state legislatures that are very gerrymandered, like I described before in Ohio, and there are state legislatures that lean very right and are doing rotten scary things.
But there are also real rays of hope in the states. And one of the latest things that I wrote about, and I don't know if we'll get to the menopause discussion, which is I think how you found me in the first place because of a piece I had written at the Substack, The Contrarian, about menopause policy, right now, menopause policy is, pun intended, on fire in the states.
State after state after state, a quarter of the states, thirteen states have introduced bills already, this legislative session, 2025, for the first time ever to improve menopause care for the people in their state.
And I worked with Axios to create this interactive map showing where it was happening. And the headline they put on, it made me so happy. It said, "Menopause policy is the new tampon tax." And it really is showing the same idea that once one state starts to do it, they fall like dominoes in wanting to catch up and be seen as at the vanguard or the cutting edge of doing things that they can accomplish.
And in these pretty dark times, focusing on things you can get done is far more good for the soul and good for the activism than just constantly being on the defensive and the guard lines. You have to do both, but I like being for things too.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. I need to take a deep breath and you're the one doing the talking.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I talk a lot.

Guy Kawasaki:
This is a question that is going to sound facetious, but I'm pretty sure you're going to have a very powerful answer.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I can take it all.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so do you think that if men menstruated and women didn't, would we be having the same discussion?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
So Gloria Steinem wrote the essay, “If Men Could Menstruate,” back in 1978, which argued exactly that, no, it would be seen as something that's virile and powerful. And if there were things that made it harder to function, pains and aches and all of that, they'd be cured, there'd be a solution. I would say just basically, yes. It's a patriarchal system and society we live in. So the ways that women's bodies function are always otherized and are always undermined.
Women are the larger portion of the population, 51 percent, and our bodies are pretty damn awesome. They bring life into this world. They create all of the things that are mystical and magical and necessary to keep those damn birth rates up. And yet our bodies are the source of all of the strife and attacks and plays for power. So it is all deeply interconnected. It's all deeply broken. But I would never end a sentence on, it's all deeply broken, and I would say, and we know what our work is that we have to do.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. This is a non sequitur, but I just saw the movie Conclave.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Haven't seen it, but now I feel like I should.

Guy Kawasaki:
I won't spoil it for you. But one of the things that I noticed, and one of the things that is so obvious after you notice is everybody who is voting for the Pope is a man.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Kind of a boy's world over there. Yes, it is.

Guy Kawasaki:
Isn't that amazing?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Whenever you see pictures of US governments, up until thirty years ago, it was uncommon to see any large swath of women. We've certainly seen improvement in the numbers when it comes to representation, but women still haven't reached parity to reflect our role and position and population in society. None of this is a short-term project. And whatever we have to say about this administration, they're certainly not the ones who started this. You know what I mean? This is far deeper.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so now I'm going to return, explain your perspective on menopause legislation. Is there menopause equity?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yes. To me, it's always interesting. You can tell I get very excited about this. I hope people who are listening find that they're getting excited when they think about these things too. I was very focused on menstruation public policies, I mentioned from that starting story in 2015, still to this day.
But in 2020 during the pandemic, and really during the height of the pandemic, I was aware that many friends, I'm fifty-seven, I was aware that myself, many friends were experiencing the transition into menopause, and we really didn't have much of a vocabulary for talking about it.
If you stopped and paid attention in 2020, I didn't really see it mentioned very much. And also, because we were all having these conversations with each other in 2020, part of the reality at the time was it was hard to tell what was wrong with you when something felt wrong.
Was it menopause or was it the pandemic? Everything felt wrong. Everything was weird and unusual and hard to define during that time. But I came out of that period of time, the end of 2020 into 2021, really desirous of a new project, I think in part just because life was a little slower and quieter and weirder, and it felt like it would be a good escape to dive into something else.
So this seemed as good as any an issue. People would ask me, "What's the state of play with menopause policy?" And I'd say, "I don't know." And they'd say, "I would think you'd be interested in knowing." And I'd say, "Yeah, you're right, I should be interested in knowing." It seems like the logical next chapter for all the other work I'd been doing.
So I really did start to dive in, and I was quite fortunate to meet up along the way with some extraordinary physicians who are leading voices in this world in terms of medical practice and being able to unpack the science and the research, or the lack of science and the lack of research, and how that translated into the care and treatments we would have access to.
And I discovered an array of problems. I expected them to be really similar to what I found with menstruation, that stigma or shame that kept things silenced was really the culprit. But it wasn't actually that with menopause. There was a governmental story that got us to this position that we're in where we have a dearth of research and doctors not educated and patients having to navigate this wild commercial market of all kinds of too good to be true claims from not reputable companies.
All that is actually part of a long-term story about how research around menopause went awry about twenty-three years ago, in 2002, a government study that was misreported and caused a lot of panic about, in particular, the usage of menopause hormone treatment, which prior to that study, nearly half of women in menopause used. And then after that study, nobody used. And when nobody used it meant that all these other collateral damage started to pile up.
They stopped researching, they stopped teaching it. Since it was not being prescribed by doctors, nobody learned about it in their clinical education. With all of this lack of education and information, all these companies sprung up trying to make a buck and fill the gap of what people's lack of ability to really take care of themselves was leading it to.
So it took me, honestly, about two, maybe three years to really do all of that, navigating with people and hearing it and then being able to translate it into what public policies could help. And the conclusion I came to is there is no singular bill that will do the trick because a lot of the problems, they all talk to each other. So one problem is a problem on its own face, lack of funding for menopause research, but it also causes other problems, lack of education, lack of facility in making prescriptions.
So I came up with this six-step plan for how to tackle menopause in the halls of government. And I published that with a very well-known doctor, her name is Dr. Mary Claire Haver. And if anyone listening to this show is a menopausal or perimenopausal woman, I can almost guarantee you follow Dr. Haver online because she's got a massive TikTok and Instagram following.
And because she has such a big following of people who have been ill served by the medical community, and now that they're getting the care and information that they need, they feel angry and want to help be part of the solution, those are the people I wanted to read this policy plan.
And we made it very readable and accessible to everyday people. It's not policy speak, you don't have to have gone to law school to be able to digest it. And we published that for free as a PDF online back in January.
And I feel quite certain that this big rush of state legislation that's being introduced now as a direct result of that citizens guide, because all the ideas we put forward are what are turning up in these bills. So that's the long answer as well about how I feel about menopause policy and what is needed and why it's a good idea to invest our energy in trying to get that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so Jennifer, when you heard JD Vance's opinion of the purpose of post-menopausal women, did your head explode?

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Yeah, so back in August when that was right around when Harris entered the campaign, a clip emerged that was a couple of years old of JD Vance on a podcast or a radio program, and he appeared to agree with the conservative host who made a joke that the only role for post-menopausal women is to be doting grandparents. So at the time, somebody who is a friend of mine who is a MSNBC person and has lots of traction on her social media sites asked an earnest question of menopausal aged women.
"Is this your only role in life? Is this your only goal in life? Tell me about your life." And the stories were amazing that she got. And they ran from everyday people explaining how they started their first business at age fifty-five, or they wrote their first book at age sixty or ran their first marathon at age sixty-two, as well as people like Margaret Atwood who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, and all kinds of public figures.
So we put our heads together and said, "All right, we're going to respond to JD Vance here." So we used lots of those people's stories and did a really fun, almost snarky piece pushing back on what a alienating and insulting thing that is to say to a population of very vibrant people who have lots to contribute. And perhaps, that also includes being a grandparent. I can't imagine there are grandparents who begrudge that role too, but that's not all we are.
But I want to actually bring us to the here and now because we started this talking about these pronatalist policies. And in, I think that pronatalist agenda probably is where some of JD Vance's ideas about the role of grandparents are rooted, that this is what we need to build these strong families and big families.
And if he really thinks that I want to call him to task right now on all of the ways that federal agencies and DOGE or whatever, I hate to say DOGE as if it's actually a real agency. But the way they're cutting science and research and funding for women's health, there was a big kerfuffle last week about whether the Women's Health Initiative, this huge investment in women's health and midlife women's health biggest ever in this country, they cut it, and then they said, "No, it's not going to be cut."
But they don't know if they're coming or they're going. But if they're actually serious about that agenda for their pronatalist reasons, they actually blew it by announcing they were cutting that funding. I know that sounds a little convoluted, but if we're going to take them at their word of the worst things that they say, they also can't just choose all the worst policies to throw themselves behind and think that's okay.
And then after that, the person who's a Republican senator from Ohio, whose name I'm forgetting right now, but he was a candidate at the time, he also made a crack about menopausal women on the campaign trail.
It was weird. Menopause and menstruation were all over the campaign trail. They called Tim Walz, "Tampon Tim," and then JD Vance had this menopause gaff, and then the senator from Ohio did too, where he said he just couldn't understand why menopausal women would care about reproductive rights, one, as if we only fight for ourselves and we don't fight for our daughters and our granddaughters in society, and two, as if menopausal care isn't also healthcare, as if our own healthcare is not worth fighting for.
So as is evidenced by the way they've been treating women's health research always, and especially in this administration. So anyway, that's what I think about all of them.

Guy Kawasaki:
I have to say that JD Vance makes Dan Quayle look good.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Can spell potato.

Guy Kawasaki:
And that takes a lot of doing.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
That takes a lot of doing. The good old days.

Guy Kawasaki:
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, this is a head-sploding episode of Remarkable People.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Love that.

Guy Kawasaki:
And I want to point out to you that Margaret Atwood was one of the first people on this podcast.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Lucky you. If you could bring us together, you'd be making my dreams come true.

Guy Kawasaki:
I will try. It was very hard to get with her. You know how people have things that they're so proud of in their life? And I tell you, one of the things I am most proud of in my life is that Margaret Atwood on this podcast, she was the first person to drop an F-bomb on the Remarkable People podcast.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
All right, we love her even more.

Guy Kawasaki:
And I am so proud of that.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
We love her even more. Are you a Handmaid's Tale TV watcher? Are you watching season six?

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm still recovering from Conclave and Dark Winds.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
If Margaret Atwood is listening, because she's a lawyer.

Guy Kawasaki:
I will follow that now.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
The new shows drop on Monday at midnight, it's on Hulu, and I can’t stay up till midnight because I'm a fifty-seven year-old menopausal woman. But I get up at five in the morning and watch it at Tuesday morning at five in the morning. So I start my day with Handmaid's Tale energy.

Guy Kawasaki:
So now JD Vance is going to say the role of post-menopausal women is to watch Margaret Atwood.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
He's damn right. See, I would agree with him.

Guy Kawasaki:
Finally. You found something to agree with, yeah.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I can admit it.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, so I want to thank you so much. And I know Madisun is there silent, and she's just loving this.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
Good. I hope so.

Guy Kawasaki:
I can tell. I can predict Madisun.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
I can't wait to hear it all edited with all just the good stuff.

Guy Kawasaki:
The whole thing is good stuff.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf:
This was really fun.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, thank you so much for being on this podcast. This is Guy Kawasaki. This has been the Remarkable People podcast with the remarkable Jennifer Weiss-Wolf. And I tell you, she is an activist, activist. And I hope you are never aligned with a cause that's in her crosshairs because you're going to lose. I promise you; you're going to lose.
So I just want to thank Madisun Nuismer, our producer, co-author with me in several books, and Tessa Nuismer, researcher, Shannon Hernandez and Jeff Sieh in Sound Design. So we're the Remarkable People podcast team. And with guests like Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, how hard could it be to do this podcast? Thank you very much.