I'm done with the Zoe COVID study

I never signed up. I can't remember the wording but I do know it was a question about gender/identity instead of sex that stopped me - I deleted it.

I never felt them same about them after I sent a long feedback about how they didn’t ask about sex properly, covid is a disease that affects/kills men and women in different ways, and they were obscuring the stats, that their questions assumed a male default (asked nothing about any female biological processes/life stage/medications) just really disappointing. There was no response and their weekly editorial content never addressed it. But I wanted to help so I carried on giving data, which I regret a bit now.

Ffs to draw robust conclusions you first need quality data. They are designing the data collection and so could easily specify these things correctly - a data analysts dream! Instead they are fucking it up and in years to come it will be in the huge list of study results*
*data specified for gender not sex, symptom/feature based questionnaire used instead to determine sex flawed eg women on mirena, pill, etc who ticked I do not have periods excluded from all follow up questions… etc.

as for 50% of people…

But another bit of the NHS, the 111 online app triage service had these words: what was your sex at birth? Straightforward, no woo options. "If you feel uncomfortable, or don't see an option that reflects you, please ring us".

I can't tell you how delighted I am

Agree, this is pointless without defining who "us" refers to. All people? All adults? All adults worldwide? All women? (in which case I hope I'm the 50% who dont!) All women in the UK? All women over 40? Everyone whose name begins with L? Everyone with blue eyes? All of us who are able to curl their tongue? Everyone in the email distribution list? Who the fuck knows!

Plus, even if you do give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean 50% of humans, I'm not sure this is correct, as, given the age of average menopause (about 50?) sadly enough women die before then (particularly in less developed countries) I would suggest the figure is actually somewhere in the 40%.

It's an invitation to apply.

Not a confirmation of acceptance.

No-one needed to get in touch. Because the first notification was the starting point, not the study parameters.

It's great that they actually mentioned women in the follow-up email. Every little step is worth celebrating.

I unsubscribed and they asked for a reason so I damn well told them.

You’re all being very mean & unreasonable, expecting medical researchers to upend centuries of totally ignoring women.

It’s not like The Real People™️ are going to get hurt by this even if the main study data is of dubious quality for them too, just lowly Support Humans - & we all know there’s a literal surplus of us. In some places they’re literally throwing us away as neonates for goodness sake.

Honestly, do your husbands know you’re messing around here, Having Opinions like this? Disgraceful.

I deleted the Zoe app ages ago on the basis the data they're collecting is meaningless. As a PP said they did begin with sex then moved to the "identify as" bollocks.

Considering that most of the middle-aged men who decide to transition call themselves after the latest popular female teenage singer and buy their clothes from outlets popular with teenage girls, I doubt many self-identified "women" would be pretending to go through the menopause.

It makes me sweary... and as a perimenopausal women ... that is not a pretty sight!

It is the train of logic that by identifying as female we identify into our oppression and the logical fallacy that as we identify into it, we therefore accept it.

Rage, rage, rage against the lunacy... even if it means we get fewer female results in the data.... we already know that many medical studies largely ignore the difference between the sexes...

The authors of these questions need to understand that if we are to trust them with our data, they have to earn our trust.

The phrases '50% of us will go through menopause' and 'if you identify as female' are a stark reminder that the authors do not understand their audience or indeed science... so are not worthy of our time, effort or data.

I think they are just jumping on a bandwagon. There are plenty menopause apps around already.

Menopause is more of a talking point because of the hard work of BMS in getting NICE guidelines through in 2015 and then the years of follow up and awareness to try and get training to doctors to be able to get them to use them.

They have done well out of covid and need something to move onto (where have we heard that story before? 🤔)

They can bog off with their divisive 'inclusive' language.

With the number of participants in the Zoe covid study there will be such a tiny number of people identifying as anything other than their sex at birth that it won’t affect the stats. It’s really not worth getting worked up over.

I joined the Zoe study at the very beginning when it launched for Covid, then they started asking nonsense non-scientific questions about gender and gender “assigned at birth” instead of sex. Considering how Covid does discriminate on the basis of sex (men being more adversely affected) I was disappointed that the Zoe app was so unscientific and so I emailed a complaint, received no ack nor response of any sort, and subsequently deleted the app. Tim Spector needs to sort this out. I believe much of the Zoe team is US based which might explain the woke nonsense.

But there is a small (but potentially statistically significant) number of female-identifying men who claim to experience menopause because of the hormone therapy they take. It’s of course entirely possible that none of them are in the Zoe study as I don’t think this is mainstream thinking, but as it stands there’s no way to know. The only way to be certain would be to ask people about their sex at birth, not how they identify.

I think they are just listing the criteria by which you are automatically emailed for the survey.

This is what happens when academics or developers write messages without involving a user advisory group to critique them for ease of reading, appropriate language, and commonsense.

They could have written that so much better and in a way that would have encouraged sign-up for the menopause study rather than alienated potential participants.

they are missing any male identified trans who are female and menopausal.

True. However, the number of this group or NBs who would be motivated to ignore their dysphoria sufficiently to participate in a study of menopause must be remarkably small. Added to which it will depend if there has been a history of T use, whether there were medical interventions (removal of ovaries) etc. It would be an interesting subgroup, not least if they skewed young for going through this and having both medical and surgical interventions.

How is that going for you a uni @aweegc? I can imagine uni is quite a scary place for people who are GC and are using sex over gender in their work! Agree very worrying for future of research!

Hang on, the email the OP posted (that I also got), says they’ll be emailing those who identified as female AND who told ZOE their menopause status. So presumably that’s the way they are filtering out male-bodied people who identified as female. I don’t think we can be certain that they are including male-bodied people in their menopause research.

Still not clear why they didn’t ask participants who identified as male /non binary whether they have periods and what their menopause status was, and would then be able to include some of them in their menopause study too…

That Covid data is perhaps less useful if a it’s not helping researchers understand how it affects people of each biological sex though? How do we effectively mitigate risks without being secure on the understanding of what men and women’s biology does in reaction to the virus. Early in the pandemic it was made clear that men were considered more vulnerable than women so some advice was tailored to that. Not people who identified as men; that’s a different thing.

Tangentially relevant: I don't use the app but the points raised here about the data collection are exceptionally important. I'm at uni studying psychology and students are almost all using "identification" in their research. The fact they don't seem to understand that sex relates to immutable biology and identification to culturally informed stereotypes and that the difference is important (unless you're specifically studying identification) is worrying for the future of research.

it a good example of a clash between “inclusion” and “accuracy” in scientific research and it sounds like inclusion is more important than accuracy for Zoe.