Florida board scraps questions about student athletes' menstrual history, asks for sex at birth
A new physical evaluation form approved Thursday by the Florida High School Athletics Association has removed controversial questions about athletes' menstrual histories, but FHSAA staff appear to have quietly changed a field on the form to ask student athletes for their "sex assigned at birth."
Florida's previous form asked athletes for their "sex" and included five optional questions about their menstrual history. The entire medical history form had to be turned into schools.
Following an investigation by The Palm Beach Post into the menstrual questions' origin and where the answers were stored, parents, students and physicians called for the FHSAA to remove the questions.
But a recommendation from the FHSAA's sports medicine committee in January suggested that the association make the menstrual questions mandatory and require athletes to turn answers in when they register to play.
Many have asked whether the focus on menstrual history is an attempt to "out" transgender athletes, who may or may not menstruate based on their sex assigned at birth.
Gainesville endocrinologist Michael Haller in September told The Post, part of the USA TODAY Network, that the forms would not automatically reveal an athlete's sex assigned at birth unless they were forced to report that information.
On Florida's new physical evaluation form, athletes will be required to list that information. The board of directors approved the form with a vote of 14-2.
None of the board members mentioned the change to ask athletes to report their sex at birth.
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The changes comes during a period of intense scrutiny of Florida's education policies and a focus on reproductive privacy across the country following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in June.
Jenn Poggie, the parent of a 16-year-old varsity girls soccer player in Tallahassee, started an online petition urging the board to remove the questions. She said she was immediately "astounded and outraged," by the FHSAA's move in January to consider mandating the questions be answered and turned over to schools.
Critics of the move included some parents of current or former Florida public school students and athletes. Others come from physicians and activists who said athletes' reproductive history should not be submitted to schools.
Still more commentators told the board that if the FHSAA collects information on female athletes' periods, then the association should collect information on how often male athletes masturbate.
Progress Florida, a St. Petersburg-based nonprofit, launched an online letter writing campaign opposing the collection of menstrual history information by school districts.
Here are the questions about athlete menstrual history in Florida
Florida student athletes have to answer more than three dozen questions with their doctors before they can be cleared to practice or play, including whether they have asthma, chronic illnesses, recently broken bones or chest pain during exercise.
But according to a review by The Post, the FHSAA physical evaluation form has included five questions marked "for female athletes only" since at least 2002. Those questions are:
When was your first menstrual period?
When was your most recent menstrual period?
How much time do you usually have from the start of one period to the start of another?
How many periods have you had in the last year?
What was the longest time between periods in the last year?
How many other states collect menstrual information from student athletes?
Florida is not unique in asking athletes about their menstrual cycles during their annual sports physicals.
Thirty five states pose menstrual history questions to student athletes and require them to turn in the information to their schools to play. State athletic associations and school districts decide how those forms are stored.
Ten states, including California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, instruct athletes not to turn in their medical history to their schools when they register to play.
But not all states ask athletes about their periods.
Five states, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York and Oklahoma as well as Washington, D.C. do not ask students about their menstrual histories on the forms.
Louisiana asks only whether athletes have any menstrual irregularities, and athletes can check "yes" or "no."
Katherine Kokal is a journalist covering education at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at kkokal@pbpost.com. Help support our work, subscribe today!
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida group scraps questions on student athletes' menstrual history
