When we created the blog post about this article in April of 2021, we titled it: “Perimenopause is going mainstream — It’s about time!!!”
Rather than delete, we’ve chosen to give it a new title and make some updates. We are now in August of 2026 and we’ve come a long way in some respects.
In this New York Times piece, “Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?” author Jessica Grose hits on one of the biggest problems about this time in our lives, the “undiscussability” of this normal —but sometimes disruptive — life phase.
But looking at the medical and cultural understanding of perimenopause through history reveals how this rite of passage, sometimes compared to a second puberty, has been overlooked and under-discussed.
More articles like this one will help perimenopause go mainstream. It’s what needed for women to better understand what is happening to them as hormonal patterns change and for these changes to be discussable with partners, friends, and at work.
August 2026: We can no longer keep up with the number of articles in mainstream media about perimenopause!
Here are our other two favorite quotes related to testing and the need for more research:
Because hormones fluctuate wildly during perimenopause, it can be difficult to test for.
This is something we have conveyed repeatedly, the fact that testing duringperimenopause isn’t relevant or helpful. When symptoms arise, we so badly want to know why we feel so not like ourselves and testing seems like a way to reign in the chaos, but it doesn’t tell you much since hormone levels change minute to minute and hour to hour in the perimenopausal woman.
August 2026: This message about the futility of one-point in time testing of hormone levels has gotten out there over the past 5 years and we are glad!
And here is the other quote we love as it underscores something we found hard to believe when we started this project. The research hasn’t been done to verify all of the things that arise as our hormonal patterns change. More research is being done all the time to determine how symptoms are linked to changes in hormonal levels and patterns. The tricky thing is that there are symptoms caused by ovarian aging and others that arise just from aging itself.
But the full panoply of symptoms related to the perimenopause transition “is not yet known with any great degree of certainty,” said Dr. Nanette Santoro, the chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
