Why is the NHS wasting money on the ‘male menopause’?

Men and women’s bodies are different. Feeling grumpy and developing moobs does not compare to the hell of the menopause

Is there anything that a woman has that some man somewhere won’t lay claim to? In short, no. This applies even to the menopause. One in 10 NHS trusts now has a male menopause policy; at least eight councils, four universities, four police forces and one fire service do, too.
What a relief! Men, as we now know, can be better women than actual women – this is why gender-critical fools like me complain, obviously – because these guys in their cheap, scratchy lingerie and Just Seventeen make-up make such prettier creatures than we do. Give or take the odd bulge, the beard, and their tendency to want to crash into women-only spaces to feel “validated”.
God, I hate that word “validated”.
This is a strange new modish request, isn’t it? Everyone must be respected and validated however ridiculously they behave. A situation where an individual’s feelings are elevated above all social norms would once have been called self-indulgence. Now it’s called “inclusion”. In this delusional world every feeling matters equally – even though that is a lie.
The decision to include some people’s precious feelings and identities may risk excluding others.
Dealing with all this is like stabbing a unicorn-shaped balloon. It crumples, deflates, the glitter disperses. Because guess what? Children, at the risk of being a party-pooper, you can’t have what you want all the time, any more than you can be what you want all the time.
The reason that old boots like me bang on about biology as opposed to our innermost secret feelings about the innate mystery of femininity is because having lived in female bodies for zillions of years, we know that, quite frankly, female biology is literally a bloody mess. A mess all too often hidden.
From the minute a female child starts sprouting breast buds (for which they will be teased and tormented), followed swiftly by the monthly reminder of what it’s all for (menstruation, with its accompanying shame and fear), we know stuff men don’t.
Yes, things are more open now. But girls still don’t want to be washing out blood-stained underwear in gender neutral toilets. And this is just the beginning.
To inhabit a woman’s body is to go through a series of often miraculous changes. We grow people inside us. Sometimes those babies die inside us. If they are born, we are torn asunder in the process. But never mind! Here is a pink fluffy toy and some organic balm. And look, a BAY-BEE.
Pregnant women, revered in the abstract, are given about five minutes at each appointment and if there are complications, or questions even, no one has time to deal with them. Yet the NHS, so desperate for more clinical resources that it is now going to get an extra £2.5 billion a year from the Government, still finds money to squander on manopause policies. During lockdown I saw my daughters give birth largely alone.
Still, onwards, ladies! The next thing you know you are hot and cold, can never sleep and feel you are going mad. Welcome to the perimenopause, which can go on for 10 years apparently. What fresh hell…
I wrote about the menopause in 2015 because I couldn’t find enough information about it. Write a book, everyone said. I even had a title: “Sweaty and Mental”. But as time went on, a bunch of celebrities – the Davinas, the Mariellas, the Kirstys – had clearly seen the menopause market, and were primed and ready. Get that private HRT down your neck. Put on another patch. Buy this supplement. Get in the gym. Get in the ice bath. Get fillers. Get a trainer.
The menopause industry is now in full flow. So perhaps it was inevitable that commercially minded people thought: what about the men? Why all this focus on these brain-fogged women?
Fear not: many councils, police forces and fire services have developed guidance for “male menopause” policies. Never mind that crime rates are up and councils are going bankrupt: poor, middle-aged men need help to deal with everything from poor sleep to mood swings.
A tenth of hospital trusts now have strategies for these addled blokes, even though the NHS itself describes the term “male menopause” as “unhelpful and misleading”. The handbook for police forces calls the male menopause the andropause. Irritability and man boobs are part of it, apparently.
Middle-aged men may experience a drop in testosterone, leading to lower libido and erectile dysfunction. But how exactly is this comparable to what is happening to women? Where the reproductive system is effectively closing down, resulting in all kinds of symptoms, some extremely serious?
Special provision cannot be made, it seems, for menopausal women without the pretence that it also has to be made for “menopausal” men. This is the apotheosis of this institutionally embedded nonsense that biological difference is not real, and that gender is all that matters. And then, as I said, there is the money. The NHS is spending cash on a non-clinically proven ailment as a nod to what? Equality? Lunacy?
Men’s bodies and women’s bodies are different. To say that in the public sector is to verge on transphobia. This is how insane it has all become.
When middle-aged guys start having hot flushes, severe joint pain, flooding and are begging for HRT patches, I might give them the time of day. In the meantime, man up. You are just out of shape and grumpy. And you are looking in the wrong place for sympathy here, mate.
As the bumper sticker I saw last time I was in the States said: “I’m all out of oestrogen and I’ve got a gun”.