2 Kentucky Women Are Taking the State’s Tampon Tax to Court

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2 Kentucky Women Are Taking the State’s Tampon Tax to Court

"While a man in Kentucky can buy Viagra tax-free, a woman cannot buy a tampon or menstrual pad without being taxed," the lawsuit reads.

Danielle Han -->

By Danielle Han |

March 24, 2026 | 3:27pm

Photo: iStockphoto

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Here’s your infuriating, albeit maybe unsurprising, fact of the day: in almost all 50 states (bar Illinois), Viagra is completely untaxed; and in 18 others, the tampon tax can go as high as 7%. Because there’s no essential product quite like the one that lets our nation’s gerontocrats get it up!

But because period products are—indeed—essential, two Kentucky women this month filed a lawsuit against the state’s 6% tax, saying it’s a form of discrimination against women on the basis of sex, and a blatant violation of the state and U.S. constitutions’ Equal Protection Clause.

“Kentucky has made a deliberate choice to exempt from sales tax the products that people need because of how their bodies work,” the lawsuit, which was filed on March 9 and initially reported by the Kentucky Lantern, reads. “The legislature understood that taxing products needed for biological reasons is wrong, but nonetheless disregarded this biological need of women. While a man in Kentucky can buy Viagra tax-free, a woman cannot buy a tampon or menstrual pad without being taxed.”

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The lawsuit is being coordinated by Period Law, whose founder and executive director, Laura Strausfeld, has been working on a litigative campaign to end the “tampon tax” for a decade, as the FDA classifies tampons and pads as medical devices, and the American Medical Association deems them “essential for women’s health.” The organization’s first major lawsuit, which was filed as a class-action suit in New York in 2016, led to the end of the state’s decades-long period tax.

“Ultimately, the tampon tax is unconstitutional,” Strausfield recently wrote in a guest article for the Courier Journal. “The women of Kentucky deserve to be treated fairly in our tax code, just as they are in 23 other states.”

According to the Lantern, the two women filed the lawsuit because they both live with menstrual disorders, one with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and the other wit