“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.”

Where?

We’re moving to Vancouver Island. We had put the wheels in motion, we were looking at houses, and then, I would say, in the run-up to the election—when it was very concerning, what was going to happen—we moved it into higher gear. If Trump hadn’t been elected, it might have been a slower process, but the process was going to happen regardless.

You live in California, which has very strong protections in terms of abortion rights and reproductive health. But do you have concerns about abortion access in the future in liberal states?

I think it’s a very real concern. Because if, for example, there’s a law that makes abortion illegal—or, I don’t think they would go straight to that, but the Born Alive Act and all those, they slowly boil people by degrees, which seems to be a very effective strategy. These panels that [Commissioner of the FDA Marty] Makary is convening, there’s real concern that he’s going to subvert the process. Normally, if we remove a black box warning or put one on, [there’s] a scientific committee, they have reviews, they submit evidence. But if he opens the door to unilaterally making these decisions or using a veneer of a panel—“Oh no, we didn’t do the full process; this is the fast track, lean government” kind of thing—then you’re giving a “forced birther,” and Makary is a “forced birther,” the power over deciding who gets what drugs. What might that mean for mifepristone?

He’s on record saying he thinks a fetus moves away from abortion equipment during an abortion. That’s really concerning: to have somebody who cherry-picks things or flat-out makes stuff up, has a fetal fetish, for lack of a better word, who could be making unilateral decisions.

Is there a trickle-down effect in terms of fewer people pursuing specialties in reproductive health?

I don’t know the data. Certainly, in some states with restrictions, they’re obviously losing providers and hospitals are closing. Another issue that my colleagues discuss is the role of private-equity firms coming in and making attractive offers and buying up practices, and then immediately they close the gynecology practice. Gynecology is very poorly reimbursed unless you’re operating all the time. This is also affecting hospitals.

Gwyneth, a new biography about Gwyneth Paltrow, which you participated in as a source, is coming out next week. You’ve been a vocal Goop detractor for nearly a decade. How did Goop first come onto your radar?

I had a blog back in the day, and I just would write about things that interested me or questions people asked. I think the very first thing I wrote was she had some awful thing on her website about bras causing breast cancer. [Editor’s note: The story has since been removed from the Goop website.] The idea that you would legitimize this fringe conspiracy theory that medicine has actually used real dollars to disprove, because people are scared, it’s like, Wow, couldn’t we have used that money for something else? To pay for mammograms? It’s this whole distraction of funds. And I was just like, What kind of person does that? “Just asking questions,” it’s like jacking off—that’s one of these whole pseudoscience things.

The next thing might’ve been the vaginal steaming. People would just send me things, and often my responses would go viral, because the concern for me wasn’t just the junk in it, but that all the experts tied to it were what I would consider pseudo-experts, or people with massive agendas, or people who were profiting from this. Naturopaths who were claiming that you needed to do a goat milk cleanse because everybody has parasites. You might be the reader who reads that and say, “Well, that’s ridiculous,” but now you’ve been introduced to this person that’s an “expert.” All of these people who were profiting from this fear, selling all kinds of things—I think that was her greatest harm, the legitimating of people with some really fringe ideas. Catapulting them into the mainstream.

What role do you think Goop has played in the popularization of the “alternative” wellness space?

Goop walked so all these people profiting from wellness on Instagram and TikTok could run.

In a recent Vanity Fair cover story, Paltrow said that she is “very fascinated” with the MAHA movement. Do you see a causal relationship that runs from Goop to MAHA?

I think that Goop is very misogynistic. You can put a pink label on something, but it’s still misogyny. It’s misogyny to tell women that bras cause breast cancer. It’s misogyny to tell them that they can put a jade egg in their vagina that you conveniently sell, that can help their health. Because it’s not true. [Editor’s note: In 2018, Goop settled a consumer protection suit for $145,000 but did not admit any wrongdoing. The suit alleged that the company had made unsubstantiated medical claims about several products, including its jade egg, which remains for sale on the Goop site today.] In my mind, anything that deviates from science that can lead to people making bad choices is misogyny, because you’re hurting women and profiting from it. It’s all the same marketing. Goop, MAHA—you cherry-pick one thing that gets people scared: “Ooh, food dyes, they must be scary.” You’re capitalizing on chemophobia. It sounds good.

Do you know what’s the big issue in this country? Poverty, lack of access to health care, lack of clean water in some places. The absolute hypocrisy of taking out food dyes while they’ve canned the whole scientific branch of the EPA. You’re like, Wait, what? So the factories can literally pollute the water, but we don’t have blue raspberry food dye now, or whatever, so that’s a win?

I’m a firm believer in modern medicine. I get vaccines on FDA timelines; I take antibiotics when they’re prescribed. At the same time, I am also not infrequently frustrated by the mysteries that seem to persist around reproductive and gynecological health. And also, I am very aware that the opioid crisis, confusion around pesticides and microplastics—all of these things erode public trust in the medical establishment. What do you say to people, and women in particular, who believe that traditional Western medicine isn’t always transparent or holistic in the way they might hope?