My ambition is to make information, knowledge, education and general understanding around hormones and women’s health more accessible and relatable. I worked in healthcare for 14 years before I ever heard the term perimenopause and I was 42 years old. 

I’m married with 2 children and thought my lack of excitement about anything and everything was due to having a busy full-time job and the admin that comes with being a parent and having kids in school (and no, I never did manage a great spirit week outfit!) I was also the Chatwin family Social Secretary, responsible for organizing our social lives and arranging activities to make those very special and important memories.

It was just after the first Covid-19 lock down that I started to experience anxiety around my work and noticed things always felt worse just before my period. I’d never suffered from anxiety before and so this started to concern me and made me seriously consider whether my job was right for me. I was ambitious and wanted to continue to develop my career, but anxiety had me questioning everything.

As luck would have it, I responded to an opportunity to work in the perimenopause and menopause space. When I started to learn more about perimenopause and menopause, it all started to make sense. The most startling fact I came across while researching this phase of life, was that perimenopause and menopause wasn’t, and still isn’t, taught in detail to clinicians at medical school. As such, asking about changing periods, or whether hormones could be affecting someone’s health just isn’t common practice.

I decided to treat my perimenopause with Hormone Therapy (HT) and my anxiety, along with the aching joint pain I was having, reduced. My enthusiasm for life came back and the feisty outbursts I had been experiencing also seemed to reduce. I seemed more balanced over the month and my husband definitely seemed grateful for that consistency! At the time I hadn’t realized how much my changing hormone levels had been affecting me as little things added up over time. If I hadn’t been working in the menopause space I don’t believe I would have sought treatment and would have put a lot of my symptoms down to my busy life and just general aging.

I often talk about my hormones when I meet up with my friends. Many of them don’t seem to understand that hormones can trigger really intense feelings that lead many of us to feel dissatisfied with our lives. I will often gently ask my friends if they think their feelings could be hormone related. Most are puzzled when I pose this question. I mean, who wants to be asked if they’re hormonal! However, when I explain the role that hormones can play and what happens as we age, you can see the relief on people’s faces.

It’s important for us all to realize hormones can have a big impact on the way we feel and that there are things that can be done about it. Several of my friends have now accessed the care and treatment they deserve and have gone on to champion their friends to seek support and help too. This is what drives me to continue sharing and doing more in the hormone health field, as all women deserve to feel their best and have choices. If I hadn’t had the knowledge, then I truly don’t know where I would be today and that thought spurs me on to do more!

I’ve always been driven by a sense that things should be efficient and sensible— I suppose growing up on a university campus, I acquired that idealistic streak.
During my freshman year of college at Stanford University, I was procrastinating in the dorm library one day and picked up a book with a chapter about a Swiss woman doctor who had discovered a method of male contraception in the 1930’s. At the time a lot of my women friends were having horrible experiences with female contraception. I thought, “If there’s something better, why aren’t we doing it?” It seemed crazy that other options weren’t being developed.
I was hooked. Enrolling in a small seminar taught by Carl Djerassi (who was already famous for his role in developing the first oral contraceptive for women), I researched and wrote a paper on male contraceptive scientific research, with teammates exploring the sociological and other aspects of why there hadn’t been any reproductive health innovation for men in over 100 years. My digging turned up a total of 8 approaches that were known to work, but not being pursued.
It was believed there was “no public demand” for new male contraceptive options, but it turned out to be quite the opposite! The class paper I produced turned into a white paper, then a series of short pieces in women’s and men’s magazines, then a book chapter. In response to a 3/4-page article in Ms. Magazine, I received over 200 letters — and we’re talking stamps and envelopes at the time— from readers interested in knowing more. That’s when I knew times had changed and the new generation of men really was interested.
What started as procrastination became a career, starting an advocacy nonprofit and then, with a few bumps and detours along the way, a foundation (Parsemus Foundation) to further contraceptive development and reproductive health research.
My interest in the development of male contraceptives, and the issues with female hormonal contraceptives, started my interest in this area. However, it was my mom’s breast cancer experience in 2006 that revealed how much still needs to be done to improve hormonal health outcomes for women in general. What really got me riled up was how the breast cancer treatments being proposed sounded logical, but were the exact opposite of what the data showed actually improves survival.
I’ve never been able to forget the struggle we went through to get hormone treatment for my mom, in line with the survival data, rather than the anti-hormone treatment that was and is still standard. One doctor even told us that following the data would be “suicide." (And yes, my mom is still here alive and well, more than 18 years later!)

My support for Hormonally has been born out of a concern for the lack of evidence-based information on hormone health available to women in the US. I believe that women and their healthcare providers need to understand the scientific evidence rather than the false narratives about hormones and hormone therapy. Women need a trusted, non-biased voice to provide safe, factual information for themselves and their providers to use during the shared decision making process.

Over the course of my career, which includes primate behavior scientist, animal welfare advocate, and nonprofit manager, I developed the skills and experience to serve as the Executive Director of the
Parsemus Foundation. Working alongside our founder and trustee, Elaine Lissner, our small, scrappy foundation has taken on controversial issues and moved the needle on diverse health advances that
were innovative yet neglected.
My values of fairness, responsibility, and personal self-determination underlie my passion for animal welfare and empowerment through education. Our work through both the Parsemus Foundation and
Hormonally aim to provide the tools for people to be able to make the best healthcare decisions for themselves, their families, and their pets.
I also have personal reasons for being dedicated to hormonal health, having gone through a hysterectomy at 30 years of age and receiving no information at the time about the health impact. More
recently, I have had to deal with menopause, which included trying to find a physician who was familiar with menopause care and knowledgeable about HRT. Coincidentally, at the same time I worked with
veterinarians to provide my dog hormone therapy to treat serious health and behavior problems after he was castrated at the local county shelter. All of this underlies the importance of increasing our
understanding of hormone health.
I support Hormonally because it bridges the significant gap in knowledge about women’s hormones and ensures that all women are empowered with the latest evidence-based information.