Happy World Menopause Day?

It fascinates me how things become ‘a thing’. Over my career, I’ve seen menstruation – the subject of my 1985 PhD thesis – move from being a taboo subject to something that’s talked about a lot. At least in some circles, it’s positively cool to talk about periods. The Girl Guides have taken up the challenge to end the stigma around our menstrual bleeding. Their involvement stems from a 2017 survey of how many girls can’t afford tampons or pads and miss out on school as a result. Then there’s the swing towards reusable methods of collecting the blood: cups, special pants, or washable pads.

While users enthuse about such products, I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to move to them easily, because in my menstruating days I had not only an inherited blood clotting defect but also severe endometriosis which led to a hysterectomy in my late thirties and then the removal of my one remaining ovary five years later. My menstrual experience typically involved two maternity pads on top of each other. And pain. And bowel problems. And a sort of brain fog. Managing all that with a full-time job was a juggling act.

That history may explain why I’m not quite engaged with the current move to make menopause ‘a thing’ and to support it in the workplace. I’ve not really done it. After my hysterectomy, I had five very good years without all the problems that had been part of my life. I could travel without worrying where the nearest toilet was in case I had a flooding moment. I could book theatre tickets without having to be on the end of the row ‘just in case’. And then I had the second surgery, and was plunged into Instant Menopause. That was dire, really dire. I entered immediate deep depression. The only point in the day when I wasn’t crying was when I was swimming, probably because it’s really difficult to swim and cry at the same time. I felt detached from this crying person. I couldn’t understand why she was crying, because ‘I’ wasn’t involved in the crying. It just happened and ‘I’ couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t keen on using HRT but agreed to the patches; however, whatever the brand those made me very itchy and I felt weird enough about my body without having a spotty area under my patch. After a while I was moved onto oestrogen gel, and that was brilliant, not least because after I stabilised I could reduce the dose very gradually, very simply, until I was off the stuff. And then I felt fine.

My former employer, The Open University, is hosting a ‘Menopause Café‘ next week. Its purpose is ‘to increase awareness of the impact of the menopause on those experiencing it, their friends, colleagues and families so that we can make conscious choices about this third stage of life and break the taboo surrounding this topic’. Wow. It’s the third stage of life, is it? Well, for me it has been considerably better than the previous stages. These events are for anyone who wants to talk about the menopause; they’re not giving information or recommendations.

So are events like this, and a World Menopause Day, good ideas? I’m just not sure. Nor am I convinced by the current interest in making the workplace menopause-friendly, as Channel 4 tries to do here. That may be because I don’t know what the menopause is like. I missed Menopause – The Musical when it was on in 2007, perhaps because I realised that, like giving birth, this was one of those things women are all supposed to share but… not all women do. My Instant Menopause was nothing like what other women have.

However, I think there’s more to it. Putting the menopause up there as a problem for which employers need to make provision could make it look like menopausal women aren’t people you should employ. Somehow, there needs to be a balance between saying ‘Women are either having time off for periods or time off for menopause and so they are not as useful as men’ and ‘Nobody needs a day off for a period or for hot flushes’. I’m not convinced that we’ve reached that balance yet. Just as importantly, we need to avoid assuming that all women share the same experiences. Whether we are cis or trans, quite simply, we don’t.