Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

I have been an amateur female athlete at multiple points throughout my life beginning as a child of 7, through my teen and high school years, on and off in my adulthood, in particular through my 40s and now into 50. I therefore have a lot of experience with exercising while dealing with my menstrual cycle and not once have I (or my parents) been required to disclose information about it to any sports body. 

This type of invasive questioning about menstruation that we see with greater frequency for girls in amateur sports is just another form of policing girls and women as amplified by the anti-trans hysteria that is ramping up around us. It is an irrelevant invasion of privacy that serves absolutely ZERO medical purpose. Unfortunately, this invasive "data gathering" is being justified by an actual issue in sports (that does not only affect people who menstruate).

Overtraining and under-fueling your body is a known problem in sports and the loss of your cycle in adults can be an indicator of this. We are seeing this problem talked about in athletics more because of the historical toxic emphasis on losing weight to improve sports performance (e.g. the thinner you are - the faster you will run).  In fact, US Division 1 college sports have been notorious for an oft-held attitude that a woman losing her period was a sign that she was now more in racing shape and was more like a man.

This is bullshit.

This overemphasis on weight and body fat composition has had massively detrimental effects (this is a great rundown of the toxic nature of this at running powerhouse University of Oregon) on amateur and professional athletics. Unfortunately, what we now know is that loss of your cycle due to overtraining leads to things like increased bone fractures and injuries stemming from RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport). This culture of under-fueling has decimated the careers of several runners or caused major setbacks in others who have had to seek treatment for disordered eating, including Olympic marathon bronze medalist Molly Seidel. For a long time, RED-S (which was called the female triad) was once seen as a problem only in women. But we are also now seeing that RED-S affects men who don't menstruate too - hence the name change to RED-S so it would be less stigmatizing to diagnose a male with this. 

There is a problem with overtraining in sports and an unhealthy emphasis on body weight and body fat that is extremely unhealthy and unreliable in younger people (teens into 20s) whose bodies are undergoing massive changes. BUT gathering information on a form about a girl's first cycle, last cycle and average length by a sports body is not relevant for addressing this!

It is in fact just another way to police girls and women and enact transphobic practices. Let me illustrate with a personal story.

I got my first period in 6th grade. I think I was about 12. I did not get my next period until 13 months later. I remember because it was a REALLY long time. My next period (so my third one) came something like 4 months later. It then seemed to come every few months through my teens and into my 20s. In other words, it was super irregular during my middle school years in particular. At that time, I played soccer a few times a week (practice twice a week and games on Saturdays). I had not yet started running or doing any particular sport daily. I was NOT overtraining. It turns out, in fact, that irregularity for the first few years after the first cycle is extremely common and has a lot to do with the very big variation in hormone changes going on at that time. 

In other words, if I had had to submit documentation in 9th grade when I entered high school and decided to sign up for cross country in my first semester, such information said nothing about my ability to play sports or the effect of sports on my menstrual cycle. It would simply provide a bunch of gatekeepers very personal information about a child. 

If I were faced with such a form now for myself or a child, I simply would lie.