The Luxury of Bleeding
The Luxury of Bleeding: The Tampon Tax and the Fall of a Very Old Idea
This entry is different from every one before it, daughter — because this one is still moving, and you're in it. The First Slave asked you to witness. The Hammer asked you to remember. This one hands you a receipt — a literal receipt, the one in your bag right now — and asks you to read it like the archive taught you. Because on that little strip of paper, in the tax line, four thousand years of this history is still collecting.
THE HISTORY
Here is the mechanism, plain: most U.S. states exempt "necessities" from sales tax — groceries, prescriptions, medical supplies. The logic is simple humanity: you shouldn't pay a premium for the things survival requires. And for decades, in state after state, period products didn't make the necessity list. Pads, tampons, cups — taxed like decor, electronics, and toys. Items that did make various exemption lists over the years, as advocates have pointed out with documented fury: Rogaine and Viagra. Hair growth and erections, essential. The blood half the population cannot choose to stop: luxury.
The cost is not symbolic. Period products run about twenty dollars a month — two to three hundred a year, roughly six thousand dollars over a lifetime, by pre-inflation research — and the tax rides on every purchase, hitting hardest the women and girls already choosing between products and groceries. That's period poverty, and it's documented in school absences on multiple continents: Rwanda scrapped its tax in 2019 after data showed nearly one in five Rwandan women and girls missing school or work because they couldn't afford supplies. The tax was never a few cents. It was a toll on participation in life.
Now watch the dominoes fall, because this is The Return happening in real time. Kenya led the entire world, scrapping its tax back in 2004. Canada followed in 2015 after a petition movement. India dropped its 12% tax in 2018 — the same year Australia ended an 18-year fight and Colombia's Constitutional Court struck the tax down unanimously on gender-equality grounds, a court telling a nation in writing that taxing menstruation is discrimination. Rwanda, 2019. The United Kingdom, January 1, 2021. And Scotland went past repeal entirely — becoming the first nation on Earth to make period products free by law. The idea that bleeding is a taxable luxury is dying on every continent, in courtrooms and parliaments, in our lifetime.
And here at home? Minnesota stood alone for decades — it repealed the tax in 1981 and almost nobody followed for thirty-five years. Then the wave: New York in 2016, whose bill sponsor noted the tax had been "levied at a time when women were not part of government"; Florida, Connecticut, Illinois; Texas in 2023; South Carolina in 2024; Alabama and Missouri in 2025. As of this writing — July 2026 — 18 states still tax period products, at rates up to 7%, with Indiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee at the top of that list. And the archive gives you the cautionary receipt too: Utah repealed its tampon tax in 2019 and reinstated it the next year. Some manufacturers, tired of waiting, began repaying the tax to customers themselves in 2023. Meanwhile the same years produced legislators blocking free products in schools as too "woke," and a Florida bill that would have restricted young girls from even discussing periods at school. The Forging never fully retired, daughter. It just files amendments.
But read the scoreboard honestly: within one generation, most of a country and much of a planet reversed a tax that had stood unquestioned for as long as sales tax existed — because women counted the toll out loud, organized, sued, petitioned, and refused to call their own biology a luxury. This is the smallest entry in the archive and the proof of its largest claim: what was built on purpose comes down on purpose.
THE RECEIPTS
Alliance for Period Supplies, tampon tax tracker (current to July 1, 2026) — 18 states still taxing, rates 4–7%; the state-by-state repeal timeline from Minnesota (1981) onward; Utah's repeal-and-reinstatement.
The lifetime cost research (2021) — ~$6,000 per menstruating person before tax; ~$20/month; period poverty's documented effects on school and work attendance.
The global timeline — Kenya (2004), Canada (2015), India, Australia, Colombia's Constitutional Court ruling (2018), Rwanda (2019), UK (2021), Scotland's free-provision law: documented in national legislation and court records.
The ongoing fights — school product programs blocked, discussion restrictions proposed, and manufacturers' 2023 tax-repayment programs: documented in national reporting.
GO DEEPER
Every link free — and the first one is a weapon:
Check your state and act tonight: the Alliance for Period Supplies tracker, with pre-written letter templates that auto-find your legislators → https://allianceforperiodsupplies.org/tampon-tax/
The map, state by state: NBC News on where period products are still taxed → https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/where-tampons-pads-period-products-are-taxed-map-rcna132874
The global timeline of the falling dominoes: → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax
The companies repaying the tax themselves: CBS News → https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tampon-tax-feminine-hygiene-products-sales-tax/
THE SACRED RESPONSE
This one's ritual has paperwork, daughter, and that's on purpose — because this is the entry where the archive stops being a candle and becomes a lever.
Three acts, small enough for tonight:
The receipt reading. Next time you buy your products, keep the receipt. Look at the tax line — whether it's charged or blessedly zero — and read it the way the archive taught you to read clay tablets and trial records: this is a document about what my body is worth to the people who govern it. If you're in one of the 18, put that receipt somewhere you'll see it. It's not a receipt anymore. It's a summons.
The five-minute letter. Open the Alliance tracker above. If your state still taxes, the template is written and the tool finds your legislators — five minutes, your name, send. You will have done more about this history than reading a hundred entries. If your state repealed, send the letter anyway — to say don't you dare pull a Utah.
The tithe of supplies. Once a cycle — your cycle, that's the calendar now — buy one extra box and give it where period poverty lives: the shelter, the school nurse, the food pantry, the little free pantry on the corner. Blood tithe, paid forward. Somewhere a girl stays in school because of it, and she will never know your name, which is exactly how the motherline has always worked.
They called your blood a luxury. Fine. Then spend like a rich woman, daughter — generously, deliberately, and always with the receipts.
The full cycle-tithe practice and the advocacy ritual calendar live inside the Shedding Circle.
→ [Join the Shedding Circle] → [Get She Who Sheds: A Savage Return to Sacred Blood]
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