In the same week that the first couple announced a women’s health initiative that feels like a hollow attempt to win over women voters, Portland, Oregon’s media powerhouse Alicia J. Rose shared a different kind of message about women’s health. The community she and her partners, Johnna Wells, Jackie Weissman, and Lara Cuddy, are building around Menopunks—which is incorporating a documentary, a podcast full of badass middle-aged women, and a call to action—aims to bring people together around events that normalize talking about menopause and perimenopause. As part of their mission, Menopunks is hosting Rose’s longtime friends in West Coast punk bands Heavens to Betsy and Calamity Jane (and local openers Mac N’ Toss) at their Black Cat show on Oct. 30.
“Menopunks is a raucous, myth-busting documentary that follows now middle-aged riot grrrl-era musicians and female doctors fighting to reclaim hormonal health care, shattering decades of misinformation about menopause and hormone therapy with guitars, science, and rage,” reads the press kit for the project.
Between the documentary, which is slated for a mid-2027 release, and the Menopunks podcast (that has already featured guests like Neko Case, the Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin, Margaret Cho, Alice Bag, and Heavens to Betsy’s Corin Tucker), Rose and her collaborators are “making a movement to start a hormonal revolution.” Fittingly, the podcast’s theme song, “Fall in Line,” is from Rose’s current band Party Witch (she also plays synths in the cover band Fabulous Bloodstains; both feature Calamity Jane’s Gilly Ann Hanner). “It’s really a song about slapping the patriarchy in the face … and resisting autocracy, revolting against fascism,” Rose tells City Paper.
Rose started playing music in her late teens as Miss Murgatroid, a solo avant-garde noise accordion act, in the early ’90s. While attending the International Pop Underground festival in Olympia, Washington, in 1991, she met many of the musicians who are now part of Menopunks. “I wouldn’t say I was riot grrrl per se but I was very riot grrrl adjacent,” she says.
After years of taking photos and making music videos for artists like Bob Mould and the Decemberists, Rose learned how to be resourceful. She passed on that knowledge while teaching filmmaking at the Northwest Academy in Portland, made the web series The Benefits of Gusbandry, and directed her first feature film, A Kadish for Bernie Madoff. Right around the time that Trump got reelected in 2024, she was thinking about what her next film should focus on. “I wanted to find a way to channel my creativity into some kind of action,” says Rose. “I felt like, if I was going to spend two or three years of my life, I wanted it to be something that could make real change.”
Going through menopause wasn’t helping her process. “I felt really terrible for a while because of menopause,” she says. “I kept playing music but my quality of life was complete garbage. In my late 40s, my hip hurt so bad I thought I needed a hip replacement, before I even understood I was in perimenopause. I had all these scans but there was no answer.”
At a Party Witch show that took place during the week of the election, Rose found herself in a conversation with fellow musicians Hanner and Jen Sbragia (the Softies). That’s when they realized they were all taking hormones and finally feeling better. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, we’re all on hormones,” Rose says. “I should make a movie about this. It feels like there’s maybe a connection between the riot grrrl spirit of defiance in the early ’90s and these women making defiant music in their 50s, back at it, after going through the most intense parts of womanhood, having kids, careers, all this stuff. We’re all in our mid to late 50s, cooler and better than ever.”
For the Menopunks documentary and podcast, Rose has engaged musicians as well as doctors, and attended the Portland Menopause Conference in 2025, where she says she was “hormonally radicalized.”
“Everything I thought I knew about menopause and perimenopause, I realized I didn’t know shit,” she says. “I was really upset: I was upset that my mom didn’t tell me anything, I was upset that culture didn’t tell me anything, I was upset that nobody’s talking about it, that I thought it was embarrassing or shameful for a really long time. I thought that using vaginal estrogen was a failure of me as a woman.”
The lack of access to hormone therapy for many American women started with a Women’s Health Initiative 2002 research study. The nuance was lost in the way the results were presented to a larger audience. “They [the media] said it would raise your risk of cancer, dementia,” says Rose. “And they took that and focused on it and blew it up into the results of the study and it ruined countless women’s lives.” In the end, the study’s takeaway was: “The thing you think is going to save you is going to kill you. That message destroyed midlife care for women for 25 years.”
Use of HRT fell dramatically after the study results were published because of its association with a higher risk of breast cancer, which turned out to be inaccurate. According to Rose, at that time 40 percent of women were using HRT; now just 5 percent. Rose also notes that the hormones in the study are not the same ones we use today: “Now we use bioidentical estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone, derived from vegetables like yams and soybeans.”
Through her research, Rose found that accessing hormones can help you sleep, help your brain, help your relationships, and give you energy. “I really believe women not having access to these hormones for 25 years has put us at a massive disadvantage when it comes to politics—everything.”
Rose is looking forward to hosting next week’s show at the Black Cat. Menopunks will be tabling with merch, information, and a zine. Rose will speak between bands, show a teaser for the film, and read from Menopunks’ Hormonal Bill of Rights. Before the show, Menopunks will stage a “Thrive-In” action at Malcolm X Park before marching to the Black Cat.
“Doing this before the election is just a dream,” Rose adds. “Being able to go back to D.C. to stage an action is really meaningful.”
Heavens to Betsy, Calamity Jane, and Mac N’ Toss play with Menopunks hosting at 8 p.m. on Oct. 30 at the Black Cat. blackcatdc.com. $42.40.
Menopunks’ Thrive-In and March to Black Cat runs from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 at Malcolm X Park. eventbrite.com. Free.
