Teacher asks dad to ‘verify’ daughter’s period claim after she opts out of P.E. class. His reply involving the CPS left the teacher squirming

A teenager suffering from period pain requested her teacher to excuse her from a P.E. class. Not only was she denied, but her teacher also refused to believe that she was menstruating and even asked the girl's father to "verify" the "period" claim in writing to the school. Disheartened, the teenager informed her father, who soon came up with a brilliant way to deal with it. While he did write to the school as insisted, his sarcastic tone left the sexist teacher regretting her absurd demand. The letter was posted by the father's friend (u/SweetMoney3496) on Reddit.

The dad explained that when he was first told about the incident, he wanted to confirm his daughter's claim, but then realized he couldn't just take her word for it. The father began his probe by checking the trash cans and found feminine hygiene products, but since he was living with three women, he couldn't confirm that his daughter used them. Next, the father checked the laundry but found no stains to prove the period claim. Things took an ugly turn when he said his wife caught him red-handed.

"She is a feminist, and she has been yelling stuff about the patriarchy for about 45 minutes now. I keep hearing the word 'divorce' and the phrase 'moving out,'" he shared in his letter. The father then mentioned his daughter asking him to buy tampons at 6 on a Sunday morning, which he assumed she ordered for her own use. "Short of holding her down and doing a visual inspection of her nether region, I’m not sure how I can verify this for you... Can we both just agree to take her word for it so I don’t have to go through a divorce AND a CPS investigation?" he asked the P.E. teacher. CPS stands for Child Protective Services, which is a body of social workers who descend upon families abusing children and investigate those allegations.

It's 2026, but period taboos are still prevalent, leading to stigma, discrimination, and misinformation in many parts of the world. Many young women even feel dismissed when they share about their cycles. In fact, 53% of female respondents in a UK-based survey revealed that they have been shamed for period-related symptoms, and 32% reported it happening more than once. Surprisingly, shame comes from very close-knit relations. While 42% of women reported being shamed by a friend, 27% reported the same about their partner. Moreover, the survey found that 50% of women had their period symptoms dismissed by someone close.

Meanwhile, people online praised the father for standing up to the PE teacher; for instance, u/chinarosesss commented, "All jokes aside, if I had a teacher who wanted proof that the lining of my uterus was shedding, I would have given them my used tampon or pad right there." Similarly, u/xclame wrote, "I knew where this was going and was horrified by it, but I was also laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. This is the perfect way to handle a situation like this: ridicule the person to the point of embarrassment, and they won't know how to respond."

u/wickedbitchoftheuk commented, "I find it sad that we are still period-shaming. Why should it be embarrassing? Girls get such a rough time about their bodies. They are so easy to make feel shame. But please, can grown-up women start standing up for our and other women’s daughters and stop the shaming? Normalize periods. They are, after all, normal."

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