\u201cYou can put a pink label on something, but it\u2019s still misogyny,\u201d Jen Gunter told me when I reached her by phone earlier this week. \u201cGoop walked so all these people profiting from wellness on Instagram and TikTok could run.\u201d<\/p>\n
The San Francisco\u2013based Kaiser Permanente ob-gyn, never one to mince words<\/a>, had just been listening to a Megyn Kelly interview with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary\u2014\u201cGod help me,\u201d Gunter said, \u201cwhich is probably why I\u2019m super depressed at the moment, because that\u2019s a double hit right there\u201d\u2014about the so-called expert panel<\/a> he\u2019d convened regarding the removal of black box warnings from menopause therapies. The panel meeting, per The New York Times, hadn\u2019t featured a presentation of scientific input from FDA scientists; rather, it had included physicians from an advocacy group supported by pharmaceutical companies with a financial interest in the issue at hand, as well as private practitioners who don\u2019t take insurance.<\/p>\n Gunter, a board-certified ob-gyn in the US and Canada, completed medical school at the University of Manitoba, ob-gyn training at Western University in Ontario, and a fellowship in infectious diseases at The University of Kansas. She\u2019s the mother of triplet sons; one died at birth, while two were born at 26 weeks and are now in their early 20s. She\u2019s spent copious time in doctors\u2019 offices<\/a>, both on and off the clock.<\/p>\n For more than a decade, she\u2019s fought an uphill battle against health disinformation<\/a>, particularly in the sphere of reproductive health. The causes she takes up aren\u2019t ones that are easily\u2014or sexily\u2014packaged. While speaking at an event in Australia last year, Gunter said that if she were Melinda Gates, she would \u201cthrow a gazillion dollars at endometriosis research<\/a>\u201d\u2014which led a member of the audience to commit a $50 million family donation over 10 years for research on the disease. She\u2019s written books about menopause<\/a> and menstruation<\/a>. Now she\u2019s at work on one called Pandora\u2019s Legacy, about \u201chow so many things about women\u2019s health have been misunderstood,\u201d and the fallout from that\u2014namely, she says, the fuel it\u2019s given to the \u201cwellness movement.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that she isn\u2019t sympathetic to the frustrations people have with health care in this country. \u201cThere are very valid reasons for women to be angry,\u201d she said. However, to Gunter, the solutions lie not in yoni eggs<\/a> and wellness influencers \u201cjust asking questions<\/a>,\u201d but in systemic change, including health care education in spaces ranging from the classroom (\u201cWhy are people graduating knowing more about frog biology than human biology?\u201d) to the doctor\u2019s office (which would require practitioners to have the ability to engage in longer visits: \u201cIf you had a plumber come to your house, do you think that they could fix your pipes in 12 minutes if you had a leak?\u201d).<\/p>\n Here, her wide-ranging conversation with Vanity Fair about everything from how she views Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s legacy (a representative for Paltrow didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment) to the most difficult aspects of fighting pseudoscience claims.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Vanity Fair: I read earlier this year that you were moving back to Canada. Is that still the plan?<\/p>\n Jen Gunter: Yeah. I\u2019m moving back in July 2026, so less than a year. I\u2019ve wanted to go back home for a while, but when you\u2019re divorced, it\u2019s harder to uproot your family. I needed to get my kids launched.<\/p>\n Is the state of health care in the US a factor in the move, or is it just coincidental?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been concerned about how things have been in the US for a little while, and ongoing frustration with the disinformation during COVID\u2014which also happened in Canada and other countries too, so it\u2019s not like that was a US-only thing. I had pitched to my husband moving back to Canada during the Biden presidency. So this wasn\u2019t a \u201cTrump got reelected, we need to flee\u201d kind of thing. We had started looking at houses a couple of years ago, and I showed him where I would like to move to, and he\u2019s like, \u201cWow, this is a really nice place.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYou can put a pink label on something, but it\u2019s still misogyny,\u201d Jen Gunter told me when I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,1542,84,392,3436],"class_list":["post-21851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-gwyneth-paltrow","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-robert-f-kennedy-jr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}