“You can put a pink label on something, but it’s still misogyny,” Jen Gunter told me when I reached her by phone earlier this week. “Goop walked so all these people profiting from wellness on Instagram and TikTok could run.”
The San Francisco–based Kaiser Permanente ob-gyn, never one to mince words, had just been listening to a Megyn Kelly interview with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary—“God help me,” Gunter said, “which is probably why I’m super depressed at the moment, because that’s a double hit right there”—about the so-called expert panel he’d convened regarding the removal of black box warnings from menopause therapies. The panel meeting, per The New York Times, hadn’t featured a presentation of scientific input from FDA scientists; rather, it had included physicians from an advocacy group supported by pharmaceutical companies with a financial interest in the issue at hand, as well as private practitioners who don’t take insurance.
Gunter, a board-certified ob-gyn in the US and Canada, completed medical school at the University of Manitoba, ob-gyn training at Western University in Ontario, and a fellowship in infectious diseases at The University of Kansas. She’s the mother of triplet sons; one died at birth, while two were born at 26 weeks and are now in their early 20s. She’s spent copious time in doctors’ offices, both on and off the clock.
For more than a decade, she’s fought an uphill battle against health disinformation, particularly in the sphere of reproductive health. The causes she takes up aren’t ones that are easily—or sexily—packaged. While speaking at an event in Australia last year, Gunter said that if she were Melinda Gates, she would “throw a gazillion dollars at endometriosis research”—which led a member of the audience to commit a $50 million family donation over 10 years for research on the disease. She’s written books about menopause and menstruation. Now she’s at work on one called Pandora’s Legacy, about “how so many things about women’s health have been misunderstood,” and the fallout from that—namely, she says, the fuel it’s given to the “wellness movement.”
It’s not that she isn’t sympathetic to the frustrations people have with health care in this country. “There are very valid reasons for women to be angry,” she said. However, to Gunter, the solutions lie not in yoni eggs and wellness influencers “just asking questions,” but in systemic change, including health care education in spaces ranging from the classroom (“Why are people graduating knowing more about frog biology than human biology?”) to the doctor’s office (which would require practitioners to have the ability to engage in longer visits: “If you had a plumber come to your house, do you think that they could fix your pipes in 12 minutes if you had a leak?”).
Here, her wide-ranging conversation with Vanity Fair about everything from how she views Gwyneth Paltrow’s legacy (a representative for Paltrow didn’t respond to a request for comment) to the most difficult aspects of fighting pseudoscience claims.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: I read earlier this year that you were moving back to Canada. Is that still the plan?
Jen Gunter: Yeah. I’m moving back in July 2026, so less than a year. I’ve wanted to go back home for a while, but when you’re divorced, it’s harder to uproot your family. I needed to get my kids launched.
Is the state of health care in the US a factor in the move, or is it just coincidental?
I’ve been concerned about how things have been in the US for a little while, and ongoing frustration with the disinformation during COVID—which also happened in Canada and other countries too, so it’s not like that was a US-only thing. I had pitched to my husband moving back to Canada during the Biden presidency. So this wasn’t a “Trump got reelected, we need to flee” kind of thing. We had started looking at houses a couple of years ago, and I showed him where I would like to move to, and he’s like, “Wow, this is a really nice place.”
