The NHS has come under fire for publishing a new menopause policy that claims: “Not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman.” The Mail has the story.
Women’s right groups today warned the “outrageous” document will sew confusion and accused NHS England of promoting an “activist agenda”.
The national policy, which will apply to all NHS employees in England, is intended to create a “kind and caring culture” for women affected by the menopause.
It details what help is available to them in the workplace, tells staff how to support their colleagues and outlines the responsibilities of managers.
But campaigners have criticised the use of woke “non-sex language” such as “people affected by the menopause”, rather than “women”.
The 17-page booklet says: “It is important to note that not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman.
“Transgender, non-binary, and intersex colleagues may also experience menopause and will have specific needs.”
It comes after successive Health Secretaries have told the NHS to stop erasing women from its publications and to use sex-based language on its health advice pages, including those on women-specific cancers.
A source close to Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said: “The Secretary of State has been crystal clear that biological sex matters and that it’s important that language – including language used by the NHS – recognises the different biological needs of men and women.
“That is really not an unreasonable expectation.”
NHS England published the ‘National Menopause People Policy Framework’ on its website this morning but later removed it, claiming it had been issued when error, when contacted by the Mail.
A spokesperson said the document was a draft and the final version would not be published until next month, despite being labelled “March 2024” and having a “publication approval reference” number on it.
He was unable to say if the “final version” would contain the same claims.
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What’s the problem. It has been known for decades that even robustly heterosexual sexual men can experience menopausal symptoms. No doubt those of confused sexuality can get them as well.
Menopausal symptoms do not definitively indicate presence of the menopause.
I could lie motionless and it would be a symptom of being dead. But I would not be dead.
FFS.
Have you heard of theatre? These mentally ill folks are acting in their own, weird play (and trying to force the rest of us to dress up and put make up on alongside them). They are not female. They cannot go through menopause.
I swear there is a disturbingly large sector of the population who believes that what they’re seeing in those porn videos which feature butchered individuals (or CGI of such) is natural (and/or real).
Are there really videos like that? Unbelievable, the population as a whole must be mentally ill!
An accurate diagnosis relies on more than just symptoms. This has been the way that professionals distinguish real from psychosomatic conditions, by the use of objective testing.
You and Marcus Aurelius raise roughly the same point. However, it is not that simple. Many conditions are defined by their symptoms. For example, I suffer from ankylosing spondylitis – a kind of chronic inflammation of joints – it is not known what causes it but it is a recognised condition. Menopause can be defined as the end of periods but it can also be defined as a distinctive set of symptoms that arise in late middle age. It is just a matter of definition.
Nonsense. The word has always meant the time when women stop having periods. The NHS now wishes it to mean something else, and we’re not having it. Anyone who thinks this “guidance” is appropriate would ideally go and live in another country, continent or planet, away from adults who want to face reality rather than construct a fantasy world for satanic purposes.
“Signs of male ageing often mirror menopausal complaints in women [3]. The deteriorated general and sexual condition in men was first identified in 1944 by Hellers and Meyers [4] who associated it with decreased testosterone levels and were the first to use the term ‘male menopause’.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4440190/
Yeah I know about testosterone.
But that’s not what the NHS are referring to and you well know it.
I don’t think so and I challenge you to prove it.
The NHS wording enumerates transgender, intersex and non binary people so it’s clear they are not referring to the andropause which potentially affects all men.
But they are not the menopuse which is specifically the cessation of menstruation.The NHS says “The “male menopause” (sometimes called the andropause) is an unhelpful term sometimes used in the media.” (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/male-menopause/).
Human complaints are often similar to other human complaints. News @11. For instance, they’re commonly voiced by talking.
I can only find one definition of menopause
Perhaps you can tell us where the alternative definition comes from.
Yeah …. I get what you mean.
As a woman, for me the menopause meant the permanent cessation of menstruation and I would never again be able to produce a baby.
Meanwhile, for men it means a desperate urge to buy a motorbike or Porsche and to “pull” a female 20 years younger than themselves.
Entirely equivalent (not.)
Spot on!
I have no clue what “robustly heterosexual” means nor what is has to do with “menopausal symptoms”. Nor do I know what you mean by “sexual men”. What are “menopausal symptoms”? What causes them, in these “men” of which you speak? I also have no idea what you mean by “confused sexuality”. Do you mean people that are confused about their sexual orientation? If so, I don’t know what that has to do with this issue (and in any case I strongly doubt that there are many people on this planet who are confused about their sexual orientation. Or do you mean people that are confused about what sex they are? Again I strongly doubt anyone is in any doubt about what sex they are. Some people seem to claim they want to change their sex, but that’s not the same thing at all.
Anyway, to the more important question “What’s the problem”, there are at least a couple of problems, which I list in order of importance
1) The statement that-not-everyone-who-experiences-menopause-is-a-woman is absurd and they well know this, and so does everyone else. People say absurd things all the time, but they don’t expect to be believed or have their statements treated with respect or followed in any way (unless they are stark raving mad). For a civilisation to indulge in absurd statements which moreover you may be punished for questioning is clearly a path to ruin and collapse.
2) The NHS is supposedly a medical organization, and a publicly funded one at that. For them to be engaging in political posturing on a medical matter and pretending that there is any sense in this shows a clear lack of focus on the job they are paid by us to do, and as well as disregard for basic biology.
If you require further information on the menopause, I can put you in touch with my wife, but would advise you to stand back a few paces before you try to advocate that this “guidance” is in any way acceptable.
Really ? And your source for this bizarre assertion ? Speak for yourself MTF.
A 2022 document from our NHS pours cold water on this idea of a male menopause
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/male-menopause/
s there such a thing as a “male menopause”?The “male menopause” (sometimes called the andropause) is an unhelpful term sometimes used in the media.
Fair enough. The term male menopause is widely used (see my reference above) but this strongly suggests that is not what the NHS guidance is referring to. On reflection it is more to do with the possibility that patients who present as men but who are biologically women (maybe even had a sex change operation) may still suffer the menopause.
You have indeed used it widely here. But that’s just an attempt to turn a repeated, nonsensical assertion into proof of its truthfulness.
The NHS doesn’t refer to THE SYMPTOMS of menopause. It says that “it is also important to note that not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman.”
So it is biologically inaccurate. Menopause is the permanent cessation of menstruation, after which a woman cannot conceive, carry and give birth (and the process can have a variety of associated symptoms).
Someone who is not a biological woman CANNOT experience menopause.
It would appear that Alice Cooper is more knowledgeable than the woke activists of the NHS.
“Only Women Bleed.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yALNSd0iME
In men it’s usually regarded as mid life crisis and is more of a mental health problem than a physical one, women in menopause can suffer serious physical problems than can involve invasive surgery such as a hysterectomy so, comparing the two is damn right dangerous when it comes to the NHS!
There are so many responses to this I can’t handle them all. So, this is for anyone who continues to have an interest.
I changed my mind and accept that the NHS guidance was unrelated to the male menopause. Although this has been a widely accepted syndrome since the 1940s I don’t think this is what the guidance had in mind.
I think the point of the guidance is that some people who appear to be men and want to be seen as men are actually biologically women and may therefore suffer the female menopause. This seems like a reasonable point. It can’t be very common but such people are likely to be extremely vulnerable and need sensitive handling.
By the way – I am absolutely with JK Rowling on gender. I am just trying to give a different perspective on the guidance.
Possibly. “Transgender” (a term I dislike and think should not be used) may in this case refer to women claiming to think they are men/pretending to be men. But then why is that not made clear, and in any case why even mention this because menopause only affects women*, full stop. Extra words defining who might be affected are not required and are political, not medical.
I’m not sure what “non binary” means, but assuming it means women who think they do not have a sex I would repeat my reasoning from above.
*I don’t know enough about intersex to comment but I am sure relevant staff are aware of intersex and it doesn’t need covering in general guidance.
I am glad to know you are “absolutely with J K Rowling though dislike the word “gender” in this context. It either means the same as sex, in which it’s not needed, or it means something about how “male” or “female” you feel in which case it’s meaningless because those words themselves are hopelessly vague.
If you look in an anatomy textbook, you will find the necessary pictures, and also may find one of a an individual with true gonadal hermaphroditism has both ovarian and testicular tissue, either in the same gonad (referred to as an ovotestis) or in one ovary and one testis. Some affected individuals have XX chromosomes, others have XY chromosomes, and others have a combination of both.
There you have it, identification is very clear indeed, and anything else is entirely psycological.
Thanks for that – makes sense. Arguably no need to refer to this edge case in general guidance.
And the cause of these is not biological, it is severe mental illness! Where is the biological proof these are genuine?
Are you saying mental illness is not genuine illness?
But you need to cure the mental illness not pander to it.
There are several points here.
I suppose you could argue that as a man there is certainly a feeling of drop off of male hormones at some point between forty and sixty. In that sense you could say that men experience something analagous to menopause but it would be etymologically absurd to claim that these things are identical especially given that the respective hormones represent a polarity of forces.
And the hormones in a woman causing periods do not occur in a male at all, they are produced by the ovaries. Women can have some low level of testosterone, thus some rather male looking attributes of some women.
And in a similar vein, over in Canada, in what realm would referring to a female who is the victim of a sexual assault as a ”woman” be problematic and ”person with a vagina” deemed preferrable? Can’t say I’ve ever found somebody using the appropriate word, ”woman” as particularly confusing. And you know the worst part? The disgusting idiot who came out with this absurd objection was a woman!! As if it wasn’t traumatic enough for rape victims to press charges and go to court, now they have this insensitive and blatantly insulting treatment to contend with. Disgraceful, and this from a fellow woman!
”The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”
In a decision published Friday, Justice Sheilah Martin wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.”
Martin does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing, but the next passage in her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.” Notably, not one person in the entire case is identified as transgender, and the complainant is referred to throughout as a “she.”
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/supreme-court-decision-say-word-woman-is-confusing-unfortunate
Well, what do you expect. It’s the same organisation that administered experimental mRNA treatment to millions of people without understanding whether it had any benefits or what the risks might be, including to millions of children who had absolutely no need of it.
At this stage, I would say that more than a health service the NHS is a cult. If you come into contact with it it’ll probably be a bit touch and go, equally likely to be harmed as to be helped.
Bingo
They (the ones doing the jabbing) didn’t even know the jabs were experimental.
Menopause comes from Greek and means “the end of the monthly cycles”.
So while it is true that men can have hormonal shifts during their lifetime, the menopause specific to biological women experiencing “monthly cycles”.
They’re using the term incorrectly and probably intentionally.
Ah I see you beat me to it. Anyway I said it in my own way again
You have to ask the question, what has fallen out of our reality or mythos that we have reached this point. I see it as a sort of depletion whereby a civilisation reches a point where a certain sort of energy is exhausted.The last two hundred years bear testament to this if you look at the efforts of religion to try and keep things together. Jung talked about the staleness of the Christian mythos. Spengler about this trajectory, Bergson about the loss of elan vitae This is the whole basis of Modernism and everything that followed it. The people living in a culture might feel the emptiness without knowing that it is there.Part of that which has been lost is our sense of beauty and distinction. It is very difficult to admit that to yourself and it would take a special soul to remedy it.
Are they acknowledging that these snowflakes who allegedly experiencine the menopause ARE NOT WOMEN?
Maybe they’re just experiencing the boring old midlife crisis, which usually involves some attention seeking…
I am not sure how any of these pretend women can suffer from irregular periods or vaginal dryness.
Menopause refers to the ending of the female cycle. It has NOTHING to do with males or whatever an individual who is not a female wants to force everyone to call them.
Christ Almighty. NHS really has been hijacked.
I wouldn’t waste your energy on feeling indgnant about an agenda that is already dead even if it doesn’t look that way. The battery-powered vehicle is already dead it is just that it will take 3-4 years to be acknowledged. The real soul-searching begins when you try to consider a way out and a future because this is not easy. To build a factory that makes pencils takes about 3 years and an extra two years to get it to high producitivity. And given that we have very high population density in this country then if you are of an engineering bent then you need to be thinking how to deal with these issues. There is absolutely no point in complaining about the deficiencies of what went before. To just look at yourself as an npc, a non-player character who is just happy to be fed like an animal at the zoo makes you a legitimate target of the enemy. To oppose them from the depth of your being is what you really want. Who cares how long you live. Do you want to die in a care home getting your arse wiped by some underpaid and embittered refugee?
“I wouldn’t waste your energy on feeling indgnant about an agenda that is already dead”
I don’t feel at all “indignant”. It’s much more serious than that. The abandonment of reality for fantasy will lead to our decline and destruction (it already is).
There are no more spectator seats. Either you face up to nastiness or you are eradicated later on when you are rightly deemed to be less than vermin.Our lives have been astonshingly easy in this country. I lived in other countries before I came to this one and frankly the level of cossettedness in this country in greater than anywhere else. In the sense that many countries have state institutions and media channels but the level of credulity regarding the BBC in this country is higher than I have ever encountered in any other country. And it is no exaggeration to say that among the British people the NHS is a secular religion. You would have to go the Far East to see a similar level of state worship. I would never say a bad word about the NHS for this reason but I think a bit more reflection and circumspection is required.
I get really confused by these erroneous statements from medical types. I’m surely not the only one! Perhaps that is the intention of the NHS?
Presumably when they say ‘not everyone who experiences menopause is a woman’ they really mean ‘not everyone who experiences menopause thinks of herself as a woman’ – that is surely a different thing entirely?
Back in the eighties I had a GP who said ‘you’ll have to get better soon, otherwise it’s a mental condition not a physical one. Then I’ll have to refer you on, I don’t deal with loonies’. I paraphrase (but not a lot). Obviously times have changed.
I went to try and get a doctors appointment in mid December. I was told by the teenage receptionist that I could see a nurse. Despite me telling her that my wife is a Practice Nurse and has told me she is unable to diagnose my problem it made no difference. The nurse basically took a wild guess at what the problem was. I asked politely “Should I not go for an X ray”. She said no. ——After following the nurses instructions for 8 weeks, the symptoms were the same. So I returned to the surgery to tell them that. This time I still was not getting a doctor but was given an appointment with a physio. The physio then could not decide either what was wrong so she said I will send you for an X ray. I waited another 2 weeks and no X ray appointment had arrived. I popped into the surgery to double check that I had been referred for an X ray. The receptionist checked and said “Yes you have been referred, you will just have to wait”. —–So I waited. I waited all week infact. So 12 weeks after my first appointment with a nurse I still had no idea what my problem was. Then last week the phone rang and it was my surgery. They said they were sorry but I had not been referred for an X ray after all. Someone had forgotten to do it. I was told to phone X ray department at the hospital myself. I did that and now finally have an appointment for an X ray on the 19th of March. So after 3 months of this clutter I still have no clue what is wrong. ——This is quite pathetic, and thankfully my problem is not life threatening. ———-I don’t think people are interested in the current gender diversity and race nonsense that our institutions seem currently obsessed with.—–An appointment would be nice though.
It is important to realise that this bit of silliness relates to NHS treatment of colleagues not clinical treatment of patients.
This is just another instance of “How many fingers am I holding up?”.
The Government could stop this nonsense by repealing, or at the very least amending, the Equality Act.
It chooses not to.
Exactly and the opposition parties have aided and abetted the Govt in this whatever they may try and say now.
I’m beginning to wonder if MTF is a plant? (one meaning or another!)
Seems to me to be overly one sided no matter the subject?
Some agreement is normal even between people who are strong adversaries in other topics.
I for one will not be biting anymore.
That’s your decision but please see the comment I just made.
100% agree, Dings. Nobody is that much of a contrarian 100% of the time and irrespective of subject. MTF is either 77th Hamster Penis Brigade or just a tragic troll who doesn’t have a Netflix subscription. Like you say, don’t take the bait.
Or AI?
I don’t think MTF is a “plant” – just someone who likes arguing those kinds of points and oddly chooses to do it in the midst of people who seem to have a pretty different view of the world from him/her on many subjects discussed here, not the least of which is “covid”.
But it is good to get the absurdity coming from this person so we can all see for ourselves the Liberal Progressive world view on everything. ——-You say you won’t bite anymore, but when you reply you are not just replying to that person, you are making points for everyone else to read as well.
I agree varmint, but it just seems such hard work to keep replying with little to no recognisable sense of a possibility of agreement in any subject!
“Is this the right room for an argument?”
“I’ve already told you once”
“No you didn’t ”
“Yes I did”
“This isn’t and argument, it’s contradiction ”
“No it isnt”
“Yes it is”
Get the point
?
Whenever an organisation or individual is about to gaslight note they always use the words “kind” and “caring”, its a way of shutting those who oppose down, in this instance the NHS is shutting down women, by inferring that women (not men wearing a woman suit) or men who object are bad, unkind people.
Why is the constantly “cash strapped”, “underfunded”, NHS wasting our money on producing literature that spouts such drivel. Get rid of it for every sick persons sake.
Freedom is the freedom to state that women have ovaries.
This also contradicts itself: It’s claimed that intersex people exist, that is, people with which are neither men nor women, but which share some combination of both kinds physical traits. But this necessarily means that men and women must exist as biological and not only psychological categories as well, otherwise, intersex cannot be defined. Putting intersex here thus inadvertently confirms that these people don’t believe in their own bullshit, either.