Hi Rulers! Happy Boygenius album release date to those who celebrate. Is it everything you hoped? Send me your favorite track and any story ideas to sgardner@politico.com or @sophie_gardnerj! Earlier in March, a video of the Florida House of Representatives raised collective eyebrows on Twitter. It showed Republican Rep. Stan McClain taking questions on a proposed bill – H. 1069 – that would, among other things, limit sexual health education to grades 6-12. Menstruation isn’t directly mentioned in the bill. But Democratic state Rep. Ashley Gantt had the foresight to ask if the bill would prohibit conversations about menstrual cycles in grades lower than 6, noting that “typically the age is between 10 and 15” when girls get their first period. McClain’s response? “It would.” That response set off alarm bells around the country — which is exactly what a group of women representatives intended: to raise awareness about what they saw as a potentially harmful bill. “We were pretty surprised to hear that period conversations would potentially be limited,” Democratic state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani told POLITICO. (Another bill that's in her line of sight: a proposed six-week abortion ban that's making its way through the state legislature.) When the bill was first introduced, many of the Democratic women in the House quickly got to work, drafting questions they asked during the hearings on the bill, to expose the “limits of this legislation,” according to Eskamani. “We read all the legislation, and as women we can read it from multiple lenses, including that of growing up as a girl and a woman,” Eskamani said. “I think all those experiences really add such depth to our ability to critique and analyze and of course, ask questions on bills.” So when it came time to debate the merits of the bill, Gantt was ready with her pointed question, the video of which quickly went viral. After the video garnered attention on social media, an onslaught of national news articles followed – creating even more (eventually successful) public pressure to alter the bill. Since then, “the provision of the bill that caused confusion was removed,” according to Andres Malave, the director of communications for the office of the speaker, meaning that the bill would no longer ban discussions of menstruation in grades below 6. (McClain has said banning period talk was not the “intent” of the bill.) Gantt was surprised when she found out that the bill had been changed. “Just to know that I was able to impact little girls or save them from at least one thing, that was really a recharging moment,” Gantt told Women Rule. H. 1069 is not the first controversial bill aimed at regulating speech in Florida’s public schools. Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the "Parental Rights in Education” bill, often called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which banned teachers from educating students about sexual orientation or gender identity. The state is also attracting attention for its book-ban scandals. The state’s education policies are some of the strictest in the U.S., but other states have been following suit with their own bills moderating educational materials. Eskamani is concerned that the sex education bill got as far as it did without raising concerns about potentially prohibitive effects on discussions of menstrual cycles. “The fact that a bill is drafted, filed, and there's no consideration to that – it just speaks to how this process has been so dominated by men for generations.” If women representatives hadn’t called attention to the language, the bill would likely have affected a significant portion of students, according to Marcia Herman-Giddens, an adjunct professor of maternal and child health at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, who studies early puberty. “They'll be girls having their periods in elementary school,” she told Women Rule. “It's not unheard of for even a girl as young as eight, there's sometimes girls with abnormalities that cause that even earlier.” Kate King, the president-elect of the National Association of School Nurses, told Women Rule that school nurses often educate students about menstruation in fifth grade, sometimes fourth grade. “It is an educational tool to help our students understand what was happening to the changes in their body, and we are seeing that at a younger age than we used to.” But despite the win for Gantt and Eskamani, they’re still not happy with the rest of the bill, which still requires all materials used to teach reproductive health be approved by the state Department of Education, and prohibits teachers from calling students by pronouns that don’t correspond to their “biological sex.” It also allows parents to object to learning materials that their children are exposed to. Eskamani is worried that parent’s might take issue with “literature that could speak to the experience Black and brown girls or experiences like sexual assaults, which are very difficult topics and some parents have already banned books that mentioned sexual assault – but the reality is that many women experience that.” The legislation is up for a vote Friday and will likely pass as a result of the Republican supermajority in the house.
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