I want to reply to this email! Help me word this

X post with Beowulfa’s much more professional approach 😉

Tempting to ask which 50% of the population and how you know if it’s relevant to you?

‘Thankyou for your recent communications handling issues around the menopause. You mention that 50% of the population will go through this, but there is no indication of how I can recognise those colleagues to whom it might apply. Perhaps you could clarify/name which class of people you would expect to experience these issues? That would make the communications so much clearer, especially for those colleagues who might find your language confusing because of….’ - groups and explanations clearly listed by pop’s above

Hope this helps get your ideas moving

I would say something like:

I appreciate that employers are finally acknowledging menopause in the workplace, but I'm wondering why you were unable to specify that it's the female half of the population that will go through it. Sex is a protected characteristic of the 2010 Equality Act (link) and menopause is sex-specific; only women will experience it. Clarity of language is particularly important when discussing health issues. There is no point in getting over squeamishness in discussing the human body, to then be coy with the terminology. This is especially important for the large proportion of the UK population for whom English is a second/third language. I would therefore be grateful if you could modify information on menopause training to use the word "women", with a footnote acknowledging that this also impacts transmen and female non-binary people.

In fact in short, I'd ask what was the primary purpose of this.

If it was to support women, it failed.

If it was to signal to male people how very important they are and how centred they are by this politically very very good and progressive group? Well that was probably more of a win.

Accessibility of language to the female people this is relevant to. This language is terribly middle class educated white English, with all its pet preoccupations and special patronised groups front and centre. It's not inclusive. It's not accessible. It does nothing to make the information available to women who speak English as an additional language or women with literacy barriers, women with Autism and literal understanding of language, or women who do not believe that some females are not female and some males are female and consent to participate in maintaining this illusion. Inclusive and accessible either means all groups or it is appropriating and manipulating those words for hidden political purposes.

And that's before we get into the ethics of detaching women from their own language and biology because male people might feel not sufficiently pandered to. This erases and reframes women away from their bodies, their sex, it makes an absolute nonsense of virtue signalling about 'look at how progressive we are talking about this!'. It's political Keeping Up With the Joneses. It cares nothing about women or menopause.

I would say something like if they want to inclusive, but clear (especially important in cases where, for example, English is someone’s second language), they would be better to say ‘women, trans men and some non binary people’

But what they have said is true.

Why cant you write it yourself if you feel so strongly about it? Or are you just outraged on principle?