Dr. Jen Gunter isn’t just your run-of-the-mill OB/GYN.
She’s the riot grrrl of reproductive health, the feminist physician who puts patriarchal pseudoscience on blast, and the loudest, most medically accurate voice in the room when the Goop hits the fan. If your uterus has ever felt personally victimized by wellness influencers, Gunter is the one-woman revolution who’s got your back — and your front.
Raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba (where feminism freezes into your blood and comes out as sharp truth), Gunter didn’t arrive at medicine through the usual polite Canadian pipeline. At 11, she ended up in the hospital with a ruptured spleen and watched her own angiogram light up on the screen. While most preteens were trying to score a Cabbage Patch Kid, she was having a medical awakening. That early exposure to human vulnerability — and the power of science to fix it — lit a fire under her that never went out.
At sixteen, while most of us were still figuring out how to parallel park or survive gym class without crying, Jen Gunter was on her bike—pedalling across Winnipeg to the Morgentaler Clinic, a flashpoint in the fight for abortion rights. She wasn’t there for a summer job or a school credit. She was there to take up space. To stand, alone if she had to, in defiance of the screaming protestors lining the sidewalk.
This wasn’t performative. It wasn’t Instagrammed. It was just a teenage girl in the prairies, deciding that no one should get to control someone else’s body. That moment—raw, uncomfortable, radical in its ordinariness—wasn’t a blip. It was a blueprint. A quiet, unshakeable start to a life spent throwing elbows at misinformation and lighting up the medical patriarchy like a flare gun.
And if you’re wondering when she became the kind of doctor who tells Goop to shove their jade eggs where the sun doesn’t shine? It started right there. On a bike. On a Winnipeg street. At the centre of a storm she refused to back down from.
By 23, she had a medical degree from the University of Manitoba and was deep into OB/GYN training at the University of Western Ontario. But she wasn’t satisfied with the narrow lane medicine had carved out for women’s health. She took her scalpel-sharp intellect to the U.S., did a fellowship in infectious diseases and women’s health at the University of Kansas, and developed an interest in pain management — particularly how women’s pain is often dismissed, downplayed, or chalked up to “hysteria” (because of course it is).
Where other doctors shy away from controversy, Gunter runs at it full speed, stethoscope swinging like a mace. She blew up in the public eye in 2017 when she took on the empress of health woo herself: Gwyneth Paltrow. Goop, Paltrow’s expensive, candle-scented misinformation machine, had started selling jade eggs for vaginal insertion, promising improved “feminine energy” and orgasms (without a single peer-reviewed study to back it up). Gunter hit the internet with the force of a thousand IUDs, calling the jade egg nonsense “the biggest load of garbage I’ve read on your site since vaginal steaming.” It was surgical. It was savage. It was science.
The media called it a feud. Gunter called it fact-checking.
Since then, she’s become the patron saint of pissed-off people with uteruses, while also availing herself to follower questions across her social channels. Through her books — The Vagina Bible, The Menopause Manifesto, and most recently, Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation — she’s dissected every piece of garbage the wellness-industrial complex has tried to shove up, dry out, or detox from women’s bodies. These books don’t whisper politely about the vulva; they shout about it in full, unapologetic anatomical terms. There are no euphemisms, no cutesy metaphors — just the kind of clear, rage-powered truth that kicks shame in the teeth.
She’s also taken her fight to the airwaves with her TED Audio Collective podcast Body Stuff, where she debunks health myths with a tone that’s one part medical professional and one part exasperated older sister who told you not to try that turmeric suppository. On her Substack, The Vajenda, she gives her readers the ammo they need to reject the endless stream of nonsense peddled by TikTok influencers, your aunt’s essential oil dealer, and certain tech bros who think a keto boner is the peak of medical achievement.
And she does all of this with a tone that’s half clinician, half punk frontwoman. Think Kathleen Hanna if she had gone to med school and decided the system needed a shake-up, stat.
But Gunter isn’t just out to correct health myths. She’s battling an entire system that profits from women not knowing their own bodies. She talks about the medical gaslighting that leads women to be misdiagnosed, the research gaps that ignore trans health, and the fact that tampons still aren’t classified as medical devices (because who cares about the cumulative chemical exposure of half the population, right?).
She’s not afraid to call out the medical industry itself for its failures, particularly its failures toward marginalized communities. Her feminism is intersectional and rooted in rage and evidence — the most powerful combo since the invention of birth control.
In 2025, Gunter made headlines again when she announced she was leaving the United States after nearly 30 years. Her reason? The political erosion of women’s healthcare, especially abortion rights. “When the government gets between a person and their uterus, I’m out,” she said, more or less. Returning to Canada was both a personal decision and a political statement — a mic drop on the American medical landscape.
She hasn’t gone quiet since. If anything, being back in Canada seems to have turned up her volume. She’s vocal about the importance of defending science-based medicine north of the border, especially with the global creep of anti-choice, anti-trans, anti-fact rhetoric.
And through it all, she remains deeply funny. Dry, salty, and unbothered by what people think a “lady doctor” should sound like. If you’re offended by the word vulva, that’s your problem, not hers.
Dr. Jen Gunter doesn’t coddle. She clarifies. She doesn’t whisper. She roars. And in a world where women’s health is too often ignored, exploited, or mystified, her refusal to be polite about it is revolutionary. She doesn’t want you to worship her. She wants you to read the damn science.
Because when it comes to the health of people with vaginas, what we don’t know has always hurt us. But now, thanks to Gunter and her scalpel-sharp words, we’re cutting through the bullshit — one jade egg at a time.
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AXO (she/her) is a multidisciplinary creator, editor, and builder of feminist media ecosystems based in Toronto. She is the founder of She Zine Mag, Side Project Distro, BBLGM Club, and several other projects under the AXO&Co umbrella — each rooted in DIY culture, creative rebellion, and community care. Her work explores the intersection of craft, technology, and consciousness, with an emphasis on handmade ethics, neurodivergent creativity, and the politics of making. She is an advocate for accessible creativity and the power of small-scale cultural production to spark social change. Her practice merges punk, print, and digital media while refusing to separate the emotional from the practical. Above all, her work invites others to build creative lives that are thoughtful, defiant, and deeply handmade.
