Kate Clancy
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kateclancy.bsky.social
Kate Clancy
@kateclancy.bsky.social
20K followers 1.8K following 2.3K posts
Feminist science professor at the University of Illinois. Obsessed with the uterus, even when it's being shitty. Author of PERIOD: The Real Story of Menstruation, now out on paperback. Up next: PREGNANCY, INTERRUPTED. Settler, queer. 🍉
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kateclancy.bsky.social
Trying to share this quote and the link to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social's excellent column in the same post is not working for me - link in next post. But as usual, brilliant all the way through.
These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.
October 29, 2025 at 2:52 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
So I know this is excessively stupid of me but I already have an idea for the next book, & it has led to reading about the women's health movement in the 1970s. And I need you to know how they originally tried to recruit people for the Nurses Health Study:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
With promising results from the US pilot studies, Speizer, who was at Harvard Medical School at the time, submitted a National Cancer Institute grant application that was eventually successful. However, by the time the funding was received in 1974, the follow-up questionnaire was revised to cover a 2-year period and needed to be repiloted. In the second pilot mailing, questionnaires were addressed to 3 groups on the basis of responses from the first pilot: “Doctor, give this to your wife,” “Ms,” and “Mrs.” The worst response came from the “Ms” group. Women who were married and aged 30 to 55 years in 1974 did not like to be called “Ms.” The most important information came from the “Mrs” group, in that a substantial portion of the women in this group reported that they had not seen the initial questionnaire. Their physician husbands had presumably filled out the form for them. We therefore redirected the effort to nurses, because we believed it was important to have a medically sophisticated group of study participants.
July 16, 2025 at 2:52 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
I don't have good pictures of our Chambana protest but it was big - thousands of folks despite it being summer when we're 50,000 students short. We were maybe a third from the front once we got marching and I couldn't see the end.
Photograph with people blurred from the No Kings March in Urbana, IL. My favorite sign from this image reads "From Palestine to Mexico all the walls have got to go"
June 14, 2025 at 11:36 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
I'm co-leading an organizing training tomorrow and it feels good to be doing the work in this way again. If you're in Chambana, this is open to all!

Registration: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Poster for the UIUC Campus Faculty Association Organizing Training happening tomorrow, May 8, 12-1:30pm at the Clark Lounge at the University YMCA. While the focus will be on campus organizing it's for anyone looking to pick up some basic organizing skills.
May 7, 2025 at 7:53 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
You mean to tell me not only that @edyong209.bsky.social's young readers edition of An Immense World is almost out, but that @roseveleth.com is narrating???
An image of the audiobook cover of An Immense World Young Readers Edition by Ed Yong, read by Rose Eveleth.
May 7, 2025 at 2:50 AM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Excel does not like this. The closest chart type I can figure out is stacked data, but then it adds the implantation day numbers to the ovulation day numbers so it looks like implantation day is like day 43 (in the data it's 27). 2/2
An annoying and highly inaccurate chart looking at ovulation and implantation days where I'm redrawing data from an existing paper to make a point in my upcoming book. The article it's from, which is fantastic, is Mahendru et al 2012 Ultrasound Obstet Gynecol. The data shown in this image are not an accurate representation of the data in the paper. This is a very silly problem.
April 11, 2025 at 11:54 AM
kateclancy.bsky.social
There is a straight line between the eagerness with which universities prosecuted student protestors last year and the aggression of the Trump administration in their revocations of student visas. My comments from yesterday's UIUC Academic Senate meeting: 1/4
My name is Kate Clancy, I’m a senator from Anthropology. I also serve on the senate committee for student discipline. I will speak on the connection between the university response to last year’s encampment and the visa revocations now hitting our campus. Last April, brave students and community members stood together to protest Palestinian genocide and work towards divestment. University administration called the cops. The cops initiated physical contact with protestors, and one protestor was pushed to the ground by an officer and ended up concussed. Over the summer, campus administrators worked to revise the campus administrative manual and UIPD spent countless hours coming up with things to charge protestors with. UIPD sent a number of reports to the Office for Student Conflict Resolution, and several students were investigated through the student discipline system in addition to the nine students and community members who still face legal charges. At any point the university could have considered its obligations to academic freedom, the right to protest, the safety of the campus and broader community, and come to different conclusions. They could have contacted OSCR and had disciplinary investigations halted. They could have contacted the UIPD and discouraged additional detective work. They could have spoken to the States Attorney to ask that she drop the charges. Instead the university facilitated punishment and abandoned their students. The university’s actions last year unlocked the door for Trump and his cronies, and they have now blown it open. Students – we don’t know who or how many, or whether there will be more – have had their visas revoked. They must flee the country or risk being taken on the street and detained like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and countless others. (Alt text continued in next post.)
April 8, 2025 at 5:48 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Went to the Urbana-Champaign rally and there were easily over a thousand people, maybe two thousand. It's a blue town but not densely populated, and we're surrounded by red. Saw lots of friends but also lots of folks I didn't recognize.
Photograph of Kate and her kids at a rally with the faces of other folks blurred out because she's not a cop
April 5, 2025 at 8:04 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
UIUC/Chambana rally at noon today on the quad!

BREAK THE SILENCE
BREAK THE FEAR

Organized in coalition w UC Jews for Ceasefire, CU Muslim Action Committee, GEO, UIUC FJP, & many many more.

Show the university our collective power, that we stand with Mahmoud Khalil, that we keep ourselves safe
Image of UIUC's statue Alma Mater with a red bar over its mouth. Text reads: BREAK THE SILENCE. BREAK THE FEAR. AN ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK EVENT MONDAY MARCH 24 @ NOON ILLINI PLAZA ON THE QUAD "In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all." -- Mahmoud Khalil, political prisoner
March 24, 2025 at 1:22 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
It must be difficult to see all the capaciousness that comes with being queer – all the potential, the joy – and compare it to your own small life, one increasingly defined by a toxic, rigid definition of masculinity that requires aggression, cruelty, and isolation. At the same time, you have to work to be left behind in these moments – to see the possibilities of queer futures as excluding you rather than enjoying all it has to offer in terms of how we understand what it means to be a person, a family, a community.
March 6, 2025 at 3:01 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Well just received this email regarding a paper under review:
Screenshot of an email that reads: "Dear Authors, As you may know, the new presidential administration in the United States has issued Executive Orders, including one that impacts foreign aid.  As part of these Executive Orders, USAID-funded projects have received stop work orders. Given the circumstance, we must stop all work on Global Health: Science and Practice. As such, I regret that we will have to postpone processing submitted papers. We know that a lot of work has gone into preparing your paper. Please feel free to take your manuscript elsewhere. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this challenging time.   Sincerely, Natalie Culbertson Managing Editor Global Health: Science and Practice Journal"
February 4, 2025 at 8:55 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
16) I love how my little one looked today at the dentist's office in the outfit she put together herself and sunglasses to protect her from the bright light.
A photograph of a redheaded seven year old in a dentist's chair wearing big rubber boots, a sparkly skirt, and hot pink sunglasses.
January 22, 2025 at 8:10 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
buttondown.com/KateClancy/a...
Screenshot of a portion of the linked newsletter, which reads: When I wrote PERIOD, I wrote it as a feminist science book about the menstrual cycle. What I mean is, people keep trying to fit it into their understanding of what a book about periods should be: a self-help book to tell you how to fix them, or a cultural narrative to make you feel all woo woo about them. It’s a particular kind of sexism that has led us to expect little more than this: a guidebook to make us more palatable to others, or a reminder of how special it is to bleed so that we withstand pain and suffering. If there is anything to “fix” when it comes to our periods it's a completely different set of things: our understanding of what constitutes normal, our relationship to the environment, our recognition of how great it is that our bodies are a flexible system that responds to change rather than acts the same through this crisis and the next. So, that’s not what I wrote. You can check out my Goodreads reviews to find the occasional person with exactly this frustration because this is what we are supposed to feed people when it comes to this topic. I was supposed to tell you what to eat and what exercises to do and what pollutants to avoid to have a nice, healthy, normal cycle. Or, I was supposed to toxic positivity you into submission about our connectedness to mother earth. Instead, PERIOD teaches you about the eugenic histories of both gynecology and anthropology, about the mocking, degrading way we have written about and treated women scientists who had big ideas, about the cultural biases that have led to biased ideas about what periods are even for. Instead of a how-to or woo woo, I hoped to write about how one might think about periods, and from there, how one might think about science and one’s place in the world.
November 20, 2024 at 3:09 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Sorry, I've now looked at the paper and what they say in the intro supports what I've read elsewhere. Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding something.
Introduction of JAMA paper that reads Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. More women die from pregnancy associated homicide (while pregnant or in the year after pregnancy) than other causes of maternal mortality such as preeclampsia or hemorrhage.
November 10, 2024 at 4:04 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
First paragraph of paper:
Introduction of JAMA paper that reads "Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. More women die from pregnancy associated homicide (while pregnant or a year after pregnancy) than other causes of maternal mortality, such as preeclampsia or hemorrhage"
November 10, 2024 at 4:01 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
I'm in
Medium-haired black cat curled up in a sunspot surrounded by the detritus of daily family living - purse, children's shoes, adult shoes, brown delivery bag.
November 5, 2024 at 2:25 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Let it be known that I did not open our Halloween candy until the evening of the 29th of October even though we had Reese's pumpkins. My favorite detail: pretty sure the "decorating suggestion" is because of a lawsuit last year.
Photograph of my hand holding an empty Reese's pumpkins wrapper
October 30, 2024 at 3:07 AM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Woooooooooooooooo leaving Twitter early has given me an arbitrary sense of accomplishment as an early adopter of this other social platform!!!
September 17, 2024 at 1:38 AM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Psst...
Screenshot of a section of a word document title page that reads "Pregnancy, interrupted: the n..." and is cut off. A few lines below, the words "draft for review."
September 10, 2024 at 3:54 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
And wouldn't you know it, my advance copy of my paperback showed up today!
Photograph of Kate Clancy holding a paperback copy of her book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.
August 22, 2024 at 6:47 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Here are some flowers my six year old picked 🥰
A photograph of flowers picked by a child, in a mason jar, next to a hand drawn banner by the same child reading "I LOVE YOU" with four hearts.
July 15, 2024 at 2:15 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Pretty proud of Illinois SJP and FJP tonight for putting on a rally on hours' notice after administration meetings went downhill. Someone also did something to Foellinger Hall...
Photograph of Foellinger Hall at the University of Illinois, with two dropped banners. One reads "WE WON'T STOP" and the other reads "UNTIL YOU DIVEST." Part of the encampment is in the foreground and to protect protester identities the hundreds of people gathered for a rally are not shown.
May 7, 2024 at 2:34 AM
kateclancy.bsky.social
The doctor struck again this morning! Also alongside it is one of the several greeting cards I get from some dude every day. Welcome to a woman professor's inbox.
Two more emails with sender's names intentionally obscured. One medical doctor writing me about my book for the fifth time and one e-card from the same address I've been receiving them from for weeks.
April 14, 2024 at 6:22 PM
kateclancy.bsky.social
A male medical doctor is live-emailing me his uninformed takes on why my book is bad. #WomenInSTEM #WritingWhileFemale #Authors 🧪
A screenshot of four email previews in a row with the sender's name intentionally obscured. You can see previews of the first line of each email.
April 14, 2024 at 3:14 AM
kateclancy.bsky.social
Love getting anonymous anti-trans hate mail. If I get this sort of stuff for simply speaking against transphobic and shitty science imagine how much worse it is for my trans and non-binary colleagues.
Photograph of an envelope addressed to Kathryn Clancy and one printout of several anti-trans missives with lots of dramatic underlining and circling.
January 17, 2024 at 4:11 PM