FLORIDA – Questions about female athletes’ menstrual history will no longer appear on the medical forms that Florida high school students have to fill out before participating in sports.
The Florida High School Athletic Association axed the questions on Thursday after listening to a flood of complaints contained in letters read aloud during an emergency meeting of the board.
Board members revealed they were threatened by the public for considering making the questions a requirement.
“Personally, I feel like there was a lot of attack on me and the board, and a lot of different names called to us,” Trevor Berryhill said.
Board President John Gerdes said all the staff of the Florida High School Athletic Association got an earful from irate parents.
“I know they heard a big brunt of this, everything we heard, multiply that,” Gerdes said. “And some of it was very personal in nature.”
One email read out loud said, ““It is sick and borders on perversion, it is overreaching in the least, and It would appear to be a means of deterring women from sports through the means of humiliation and shame.”
READ: FHSAA questionnaire
Some called the questions “humiliating” and “invasive,” and others suggested they were connected to a recent bill barring transgender girls and women from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes identified as girls at birth.
“This is another way to shame girls,” Connie DeWitt said in a letter.
Dr. Deborah White wrote that there was “zero” reason for a school to know about students’ menstrual history.
“The only reason is to weed out transgender kids who may not have periods,” White’s e-mail said. “As a doctor I would never fill out this form.”
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill in 2021, thrusting the state into the national cultural debate over transgender rights. DeSantis is widely believed to be considering a run for president next year on a deeply conservative platform.
The association’s spokesperson has said the proposed changes were not in response to concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, as some social media users have claimed. And Gerdes stressed that politics played no part in the decision to change the form.
“This governor and his office had nothing to do with this,” Gerdes said.
One of those against the elimination of the questions was Board Member Chris Patricca. She said she’s the mother of a female athlete, and in her opinion, removing the questions puts female athletes at risk.
″I would argue that eliminating the questions on female athletes is discriminatory towards female athletes because we are not instituting best practices that protect them,” Patriccia said. “I believe based on medical advice and well established medical facts that students athletes are safer and better protected by the inclusion of these questions.”
The four-page form adopted by the board will still contain questions about mental health, alcohol and drug use, and family health history, but the answers will stay in the offices of the health care practitioner who conducted the medical screening. Schools would only get one page of the form declaring the students’ medical eligibility.
An earlier version of a proposed, revised form, which had mandatory questions about students’ menstrual histories, had been recommended by an advisory committee of the association. Members of the medical advisory committee claimed they were following national guidelines for sports physicals developed by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Sports Medicine and other groups.
The national guidelines say menstrual history is an “essential discussion for female athletes” because period abnormalities could be a sign of low bone density, anemia, eating disorders, low energy or pregnancy.
Florida isn’t the only state that was asking female athletes about their menstrual cycle during the annual sport physicals. Thirty-five other states pose the same questions, and it’s up to each state athletic association and school district to determine how that information is stored. These new physical evaluations forms will be available for student athletes, this spring, going into effect for the 2023-24 school year