For Inclusive Content, The Mayo Clinic Gets a Gold Star.
Released by the Mayo Clinic in 2023, Period. The Quick Guide to Every Uterus made me do a double-take. Right from the start the cover art and tagline acknowledge that not every person with a uterus identifies as female. In the thousands of puberty books that return in an amazon search, this is unique among the options aimed at a typical gender binary reader. This up-front approach continues throughout the book in both the language and visual design.
The actual content is pretty typical stuff for this genre; comic strip illustrations trying to make the standard puberty content seem less scary, featuring kids with enough tween sass to prove its coolness. But even though it’s disjointed to read and densely packed, I’ll forgive it for the content on page 38 alone. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen in print that people who wish to stop their periods have choices.
I admit, this concept gave me pause. At a superficial level, it appears to say “Don’t want a period? Just ask, and it can be stopped!” (Wait … what?) My initial concern was that most kids would enter puberty thinking that stopping a period is a simple matter and a breezy choice. I called my pediatrician friend to help me understand why the Mayo Clinic would make this choice. I mean, is this some new thing we’re doing? How did I miss that memo?
As it turns out, it’s not something new at all. Pediatricians have actually been facilitating amenorrhea for certain patient populations for decades, we’ve just never seen them represented in run of the mill puberty books. Certainly one of these populations is people seeking gender affirming care, but this message is also aimed at people with disabilities. Parents and physicians often elect to stop periods when an individual needs assistance with various aspects of daily living, to avoid having other care providers performing feminine hygiene care unsupervised with their daughters.
And this makes this book very cool to me. Might it cause some kids to think stopping a period is like suspending your Netflix account? Maybe. But it will only take a conversation to sort that out. But for the kids whose lived experience requires this care, to simply turn the page and see their needs represented and normalized right there between PMS and common worries? Transformative.
Bonus points: Proceeds from the sale of the book help to fund important research at the Mayo Clinic.
Incredible 