It’s not every day a bureaucratic puzzle emerges that rivals the strangest corners of university policy, but the Gengdan Institute of Beijing University of Technology has managed just that. According to The Star, a student seeking sick leave for menstrual pain was told to lower her pants at the clinic so staff could “verify” she was on her period.
Bureaucracy Meets the Bizarre
The situation first made waves when the unnamed student posted a now-viral video online, describing her experience at the campus clinic. As relayed in IndiaTVNews, she’s heard asking, “So what you are saying is, every woman on her period has to take off her pants and show you to get a leave note?” The uniformed reply from a female clinic staff member: “Basically, yes. It is not my personal rule, it is a regulation.”
Pressed for written documentation of such an odd rule, the staff member reportedly fell silent, issuing no leave note and instead pointing the student toward a hospital for “formal certification.” As recounted in South China Morning Post, the Gengdan Institute is an independent, private undergraduate college affiliated with one of Beijing’s top public universities—a fact that suggests, if nothing else, that prestige and peculiar bureaucracy are not mutually exclusive.
Regulation or Urban Legend?
Public statements from the university attempted to frame the event as all part of standard procedure. Both The Star and SCMP highlight the school’s insistence that staff “followed proper protocols” and that, after inquiring about the student’s condition and “obtaining her consent,” further diagnosis involved “no instruments or physical examinations.” That’s probably as reassuring as it gets under these particular circumstances.
A staff member identified by the surname Xu, in comments to CNR News cited in The Star, explained the origin story: apparently, the policy was meant to curb “abuse” of menstrual leave after some students allegedly requested it several times a month. Xu offered the example of a student seeking leave “four or five times in a single month” as grounds for the regulation. The logic runs—if the paperwork doesn’t overwhelm you, perhaps embarrassment will.
Social Media and Sarcasm: A Sizable Backlash
Unsurprisingly, the internet had thoughts. As documented across both SCMP and IndiaTVNews, Chinese social media platforms were quickly overrun with responses. Some, unwilling to let irony pass by, asked, “So, if I have diarrhoea, do I need to poop in front of the school doctor to get leave?” Others countered the premise of “abuse,” noting, “Taking sick leave four or five times a month for menstrual pain is completely reasonable. During my chronic fatigue phase, I had my period for 50 consecutive days.”
If that seems like a fair amount of information to share for the sake of a leave slip, you’re not alone. “This is not policy enforcement, it is petty tyranny,” another commenter fumed, as quoted by The Star.
Lines, Laws, and Logic
The student herself, after heading out to obtain hospital documentation, posted a follow-up video simply asking for “a reasonable and respectful policy on how women can request leave during their period.” She even offered to retract her claims if an actual written rule requiring students to show menstrual blood could be produced. So far, that written policy remains as elusive as a signed slip excusing absence from logic class.
On the legal front, the response from experts appears definitive. Zhang Yongquan, a former prosecutor and now partner at Grandall Law Firm, told SCMP that such a policy flies in the face of privacy rights and legal protections embedded in China’s Civil Code and Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests. According to Zhang, this approach “constitutes degrading treatment and could cause significant mental distress or long-term psychological harm.” He even called for a public apology, potential compensation for emotional damages, and suggested that education authorities ought to step in.
From Trust to Tyranny (and Back Again?)
Rules are supposed to make systems fair. But as the commentary unearthed by IndiaTVNews and others suggests, policies sometimes seem to drift quietly from “fact-based safeguards” into the realm of ritual humiliation. When staff are encouraged to solve a trust problem by literal inspection and students have to prove their bodily functions at the clinic door, it might be time to re-examine the paperwork—or at least, swap it out for a little common decency.
Who benefits, exactly, from using embarrassment as a filter for leave requests? If a bureaucracy needs this degree of “verification,” is the problem truly absenteeism—or just a spectacular lack of trust?
Oddity as Cautionary Tale
This incident at Gengdan may be a new case study for those intrigued by unintended consequences: administrative zeal run so amok that paperwork gave way to, well, pant-checks. For now, the story resonates less as a one-off gaffe and more as a reminder of how rules—especially the unexamined kind—sometimes exist less to administrate, and more for their own sake. And isn’t that one of the oddest things about bureaucracy?
At the very least, the saga ensures a particularly odd entry for the “strangest leave note validation ever attempted.” You have to wonder: how do these policies even begin, and what meeting minutes explain the planning?
