About two years ago, at the age of 49, I tried to type the word perimenopause into a text, and autocorrect didn’t give me any help. The first four letters yielded period or periods . The first five letters resulted in perimeter . Eventually, I typed the full word myself.

You may be thinking, Oh, what a hardship—you had to type out an entire word. But this situation was a telling one; it was as if perimenopause, as a term and as a phase of life, didn’t exist. Though people with ovaries had been going through it since the literal dawn of humanity, it wasn’t part of the lexicon.

Celebrities like 55-year-old Jennifer Lopez didn’t mention it, even though they surely were in it or had gone through it. Perimenopause wasn’t as acceptable a thing to discuss as, say, menstruation, becaus

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