Labour work out the demographic they need to win

Interesting article which mentions cancer screening and breast cancer screening in particular.

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11820153/Blood-test-catch-70-cancers-start-experts-worried-unnecessary-treatment.html#comments

You're right, DemiColon. Black thinkers like John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are dismissed as "the wrong kind of black" because apparently "real" black people all share the same political views and see everything in the exact same way. FFS!

This kind of generalization about groups seems to be a problem to the left.

A while ago I watched a film about black American conservatives. Not meant to be even-handed, but one of the interesting things I found was how the people interviewed found liberals, specifically Democrats, would make these really unwarranted generalizations about black voters.

I sometimes get the same sense in leftist feminism too, that all women, or all women who matter, think very similar things.

And it's interesting because in a lot of cases the generalizations are not only not correct, sometimes actually the opposite is more true than what they think. There seems to be some capacity for self-delusion there.

When it comes to election time I hope SFW and Sex Matters produce some leaflets us women who used to do leafleting can use.

I think there are still many people, particularly in the older generation where I live, entirely unaware of this issue who would be horrified at the loss of single sex spaces and as they approach the age where they may need NHS care, would be appalled they will end up in mixed sex wards.

Yes, funny isn't it that in DEEDS not words (i.e. appropriation of language) those women are like the most entitled least altruistic MEN you've ever met.

Pissing off the middle aged women who step up and do unpaid work is a terrible decision. I've offered to do leafleting in the past, the Lib Dems and Labour can fuck off now. Or maybe I'll sign up, tell them I'll leaflet for them and then I don't know, run out of time or energy because of the menopause, and just recycle all the leaflets they send me. Or accidentally (because of my menopausal brain, you know) replace their leaflets with Standing for Women stickers.

I doubt there will be loads of woke bros stepping up to do tea and leafleting to replace all those poor menopausal women who need special accommodation suddenly now.

There was an article ages ago in the Guardian about how Labour policy makers assume things about whole demographics which aren't at all bourn out by the data e.g. that people voting for Brexit were racist. They seem to just assume.

They assume we're going to be stupid enough to fall for this dodgy menopause fob off - we're not.

Fuck off Labour.

And great posts too MissLucyEyeles

I'm more left wing if anything but less liberal.

But are we looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Maybe binning women's rights and childrens' safety just isn't very progressive or enlightened.

Completely agree @Melroses.

Few women in their forties would now identify with the WI,

Aye because they're all about the menz now

Completely agree with this and your previous post - the degree to which women's bodies are used to shame and police us is shocking.

I didn't want "menopause" leave an education at work for symptoms, I wanted functioning healthcare system which treated women with the same priority and respect as men. I'd still like that plus workplaces which don't use women's health conditions as "evidence" that women are problem employees - just humans who over the course of a lifetime will likely have some health needs.

The women I have known have trouble with menopause and work have it come gradually upon them, starting to have trouble coping then having working through being managed out of the workforce. Most women realise they are perimenopausal quite late into the process and it can last a short while or years. It is a boiled frog thing.

Menopause is a part of life, a continuum from being a girl child, through menarche, reproductive years, peri- menopause and post menopause.

Menopause is when your periods have stopped for a year, so it is diagnosed in retrospect.

What they need is good access to good health care when they are feeling rough so that they can function. Private health care doesn't even cover menopause unless it is a specific one-off complaint.

Making it a special thing (or even a 'protected characteristic' as the W&EC were pushing the other day) is not really going to help. It is just window dressing.

THIS X 1000.

Labour would get my vote (like they used to actually), just by enshrining my sex based rights, thanks. I want to not be afraid to use a public loo or changing room.

'You can have some drugs and sympathy for the menopause, uterus-havers, just shut up complaining about gender neutral bathrooms, okay?'

I think the tendency to make these blanket recommendations or programs for groups is a feature of the identity approach.

In reality women and men suffer from all kinds of illnesses and such that may be debilitating, some of which are particular to one sex or the other. Many on the other hand won't be affected. There are programs already for employees who have health problems.

Undoubtedly in some cases a certain amount of awareness on the employers part is good, so they don't think people are taking the piss. But it's never going to be a one sized fits all thing.

You see similar things with stuff like university applications in the US. They take a race based approach that ignores the fact that people in those groups come from all kinds of circumstances and treating them like a block will end up with often really inappropriate outcomes.

I agree with this. It’s give the old dogs a bone time, something that won’t offend the Momentum wing and twenty years old activists.

But I don’t want this. I want single sex loos/sports/prisons etc and for Labour to start balancing women’s rights and trans rights rather than giving ours away to look progressive.

But good luck getting those ladies to stuff envelopes and make the tea and do the other useful stuff Labour has always seen the old balls and chains as good for.

This⬆️

You just know that box of chocolates is going to be full of Labour Sex Fudge.

Alcohol in pregnancy is another example. There is no real evidence of small amounts of alcohol being harmful. OTOH, there is also no clear evidence of what a safe level is and - for obvious reasons - this isn't an experiment that can be done. So I support the recommendation that women avoid alcohol, but I think we should be honest with them - the recommendation reflects our ignorance about whether any level is safe, rather than evidence that small amounts are harmful.

I had DS1 in 2005 and read around dietary risks in pregnancy. One of the articles I read was a Cochrane review that covered various foods and alcohol in pregnanycy. It said there was no evidence that a small number of units each week was harmful. IIRC there was a band of c2-8 units per week where there was no evidence of harm. I take your point about caution because there’s no ethical way of testing such a hypothesis, but the advice now does seem very draconian - and it gives other people license to comment on and police women’s choices in pregnancy. That’s where more honesty about the lack of evidence either way at low levels might give women more scope to tell people to eff off when they overstep.

I agree completely. Just got carried away, probably because of the value-laden way breast screening has been discussed in so much popular press, despite it, too, sharing many of the same uncertainties.

Many recommendations about reproductive health -related activities show the pattern you describe, too.

I recall reading a US recommendation about the need for all women of reproductive age to avoid things like alcohol because they might fall pregnant.

That this was viewed as something beyond their control, the falling pregnant bit, was explained by data showing what percentage of pregnancies are unplanned.

In other words, that there are women who have pregnancies which are unplanned means that all women (whether fertile or not, whether in a heterosexual relationship or not) should alter their behaviour in certain ways, and not for their own benefit, but for the sake of a possible but currently fictional future child.

I have ever only seen one article addressing something even vaguely similar to men who might become fathers. But similar articles aimed at women are quite common.

It's fine, I'm sure they can find enough ladies with penises to make up for the HALF OF THE HUMAN RACE they've fucked off right royally.

The efficacy or otherwise of screening isn't really the point, though. It's about honesty with women and treating them as capable of making decisions for themselves.

Alcohol in pregnancy is another example. There is no real evidence of small amounts of alcohol being harmful. OTOH, there is also no clear evidence of what a safe level is and - for obvious reasons - this isn't an experiment that can be done. So I support the recommendation that women avoid alcohol, but I think we should be honest with them - the recommendation reflects our ignorance about whether any level is safe, rather than evidence that small amounts are harmful. Many women are incredibly anxious throughout their pregnancy because they drank in the first few weeks, when they didn't know they were pregnant. We are harming those women psychologically, by not being truthful about the limitations of our knowledge.

Men are not treated like this. I can't think of a single example of a blanket recommendation being made to men without evidence to support it. Men are not made to feel shame about their health choices, whereas this happens to women constantly - even about accidental 'wrong' decisions, like drinking before knowing you are pregnant.

Some years ago I did some work on the benefits and costs of varying types of screening programmes. Not all are created equal.

Though I haven't followed the literature in this area quite so intensively, I believe that some types of screening programs are well supported by evidence (pap smears for sexually active women, colonoscopy for cancer of the colon?), while for others the benefit-harm ratio varies by such variables as age, past medical history, and the availability of any kind of effective treatment.

The general problem is determining when early detection actually increases, say, life expectancy, rather than just being an artifact of the disease having been diagnosed earlier. As we don't mostly have the ethical ability to compare two otherwise identical groups over time, to screen one group and not the other, and then to compare mortality rates for the screened disease in the two groups, much of what we do is not well understood in efficacy.

But often it's the best that can be offered, until science produces better diagnostic and treatment methods.

I can't take any credit - apart from being truthful with my own patients. But I'm very glad that colleagues who were in a position to influence the screening programme kept on campaigning for truthful patient information. It's shocking that they had to, but unfortunately that's women's healthcare for you: a bracing combo of paternalism and neglect 😬

None of it had occurred to me till I saw Thelnebriati's post!