For decades, they told us it was in our heads. In 2025 and 2026, the institutions started admitting they were wrong.
For a long time, the story you were told about your own body was very simple. You were tired because you weren’t trying hard enough. You were anxious because you couldn’t cope. You were forgetting things because you were scattered. Your periods, your sleep, your moods, your memory — all of it was either stress, or aging, or, if you pushed, a prescription and a pat on the arm.
And here is the part that still makes me angry on your behalf: you started to believe it. We all did. We internalized it. We apologized for symptoms. We managed, and we masked, and we told ourselves we were the problem.
And then, quietly, the institutions that spent decades looking away started to admit they had been wrong.
Not all at once. Not with a parade. But in 2025 and 2026, three things happened that women had been waiting a generation for. I want to walk you through them, because it is the data — the proof that you were never crazy, and never alone.
Key takeaways:
– The FDA removed hormone therapy’s decades-old boxed warnings; the endometrial-cancer warning on estrogen-alone products remains.
– A bipartisan, bicameral menopause research bill was introduced in Congress in 2025–26.
– NIH spent $56M on menopause research in 2023, out of about $45B, barely one-tenth of one percent.
– Perimenopausal women’s psychological symptoms scored ~1.5× more severe than premenopausal women’s (Menopause, 2026).
– Recognition is not repair; the funding gap remains wide.
First: the warning they never should have written
For twenty years, hormone therapy — the single most effective treatment we have for menopausal symptoms — came wrapped in a “black box,” the FDA’s most serious warning. It flagged heart disease, breast cancer, and dementia. It scared a whole generation of women, and their doctors, away from treatment. Prescriptions collapsed. Women suffered, in silence, for two decades.
That warning came out of the way the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative was reported — as if hormone therapy were dangerous for everyone. It was not. The risks were badly overstated for healthy women under 60 and within ten years of menopause.
Here is what almost nobody handed you: the FDA has removed those boxed warnings. The agency began the process on November 10, 2025, and approved the first labeling changes in early 2026, with more products following.
That is not a fringe theory. That is the FDA — the same agency that wrote the warning — walking it back after re-reading the evidence. One honest caveat, because we don’t do half-truths here: the boxed warning for endometrial cancer on estrogen-alone products was not removed. It stands. And hormone therapy still isn’t right for everyone. What changed is that the fear tag a generation of women were handed is officially out of date — and the conversation you were denied is back on the table.
Then: Congress finally put it in writing
For most of modern medicine, menopause wasn’t a research priority, a training requirement, or a policy question. It was a punchline. So this next part matters more than it might look.
In the 2025–26 session, a bipartisan, bicameral bill was introduced in Congress — the Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act — to fund menopause research, expand training for clinicians, and raise public awareness. It is a bill, not yet a law, and I’ll be honest with you about that distinction. But a decade ago, the word “menopause” did not appear in serious federal legislation at all. Now it has a bill with a name, a number, and support on both sides of the aisle.
That’s not the finish line. That’s the sound of a door that was locked for a hundred years finally being tried.
And the research started catching up
In 2026, a global study published in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society, measured what women have been saying all along. Perimenopausal women’s psychological symptoms — the anxiety, the low mood, the exhaustion — scored about 1.5 times more severe than premenopausal women’s, across twenty countries. A companion survey found that 34% of American women over 35 weren’t even sure which reproductive stage they were in. (Both drew on self-reported data from the Flo app — self-selected, but peer-reviewed, and large.)
Read that together, and you get the whole tragedy in two numbers: it’s measurably worse than anyone admitted, and a third of us don’t have the words for it — because nobody gave them to us.
Because make no mistake: recognition is not the same as repair. The money still isn’t there. The NIH spends roughly $56 million a year on menopause research out of a budget of about $45 billion — barely one-tenth of one percent. Startups chase erectile dysfunction treatments with $1.24 billion in investment against just $44 million for endometriosis — a condition affecting 190 million women — a gap of about 28 to 1. And McKinsey and the World Economic Forum estimate that closing the women’s health gap would add at least $1 trillion a year to the global economy by 2040. I will say it ticks me off that we finally get research when the economics support making money. But that is the nature of our world right now.
Admitted is not the same as solved. But you cannot fix what you will not name — and in 2026, they finally started naming it.
Why it took this long
If you want the real reason none of this came sooner, it goes back further than menopause. For most of medical history, the human body that got studied was a man’s body — down to a literal 70-kilogram “reference man.” Women were treated as smaller versions of that template, when they were studied at all. (It’s a story worth knowing in full — I wrote about it in “The 70-Kilogram Man”.)
Nobody funded the research, so nobody wrote the textbook, so nobody trained the doctor sitting across from you now. That’s not your doctor being careless. That’s a system that was never built to find what you’re experiencing. Which is exactly why, for a little while longer, you’re still going to have to walk in and name it yourself.
What this means for you
It means the ground has shifted under the conversation you’re about to have. The warning that scared your doctor off hormone therapy is gone. The research is no longer a rumor. And the thing you were told to manage quietly has a bill in Congress with its name on it.
So if you were ever told that hormones were off the table, that your symptoms were just stress, or that this was simply what getting older feels like for women — that information is out of date. Bring it back to a menopause-informed provider and ask again. You are allowed to ask again.
You were not imagining it. You were early. And in 2026, the rest of the world started to catch up to what you already knew.
If you want to walk in ready, grab the free 7-Day Symptom Tracker + Doctor Visit Guide at notcrazymovement.com — it turns “I don’t feel like myself” into evidence they can’t wave away.
You’re not crazy. You’re not alone. And this is the year the record started to get corrected.
— Delaney
Delaney Cassidy is the author of You’re Not Crazy... You’re Menopausal: Science, Strategies, and Swearing Through the Hormonal Apocalypse, out now at notcrazymovement.com/book.
A Note on Medical Care
This article is educational and is not medical advice. Regulatory actions and legislation are described as matters of public record; decisions about hormone therapy or any treatment belong with a menopause-trained provider who knows your history. Emerging research on the benefits of hormone therapy is exactly that — emerging — and nothing here is a reason to start, stop, or change a medication on your own.
What changed for menopause and hormone therapy in 2025–2026?
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In 2025–26, the FDA removed the boxed “black box” warnings from menopausal hormone therapy (begun Nov 10, 2025; first labels approved early 2026), a bipartisan bill to fund menopause research was introduced in Congress, and new research quantified how severe and under-recognized perimenopause symptoms are.
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Yes. The FDA began removing the boxed warnings on menopausal hormone therapy on November 10, 2025, and approved labeling changes for the first six products on February 12, 2026. The endometrial-cancer boxed warning on estrogen-alone systemic products was not removed.
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Not automatically. The change reflects that the risks were overstated for many women, especially healthy women under 60 or within ten years of menopause. It is still not right for everyone. Talk with a menopause-trained provider about your history.
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Yes. The Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act was introduced in the Senate (S.4503) and the House (H.R.9090) in the 119th Congress. It is a bill, not yet a law.
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$56 million in 2023, barely one-tenth of one percent of its roughly $45 billion budget. 2023 was the first year the NIH tracked menopause as its own research category.
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That advice may be out of date. Bring your symptoms and history back to a menopause-informed provider and ask again.
Sources & References
• FDA — Labeling changes for menopausal hormone therapy products (approval announcement, 2026)
• FDA / HHS — Removal of boxed warnings on hormone replacement therapy (announcement, Nov 2025)
• S.4503 — Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act, 119th Congress (2025–26)
• Flo Health — perimenopausal mental-health symptoms ~1.5× more severe (Menopause, Jul 2026)
