Transwomen - pseudumenopausal symptoms due to hrt - asked to approve work policy

Cross-sex hormones, not HRT.

And yes, like any medication they can have a wide range of side effects. Some of these will overlap with menopause symptoms, but they aren't 'pseudomenopausal' any more than migraines caused by viagra are 'pseudomenopausal' just because women often get migraines in menopause.

Can you say that you welcome the way the policy describes the different experiences of (eg) black women, transmen, disabled women, non-binary females etc, all of whom may have slightly different experiences of/feelings about menopause and it's really helpful to have the policy recognise the diversity of experiences. If it does not already cover early/surgical menopause, that would be worth flagging up. But then say that the experience of transwomen taking cross-sex hormones is an important issue in its own right but not, technically, menopause and might be better addressed in the organisation's policy on being supportive to trans employees (since presumably it has one)?

I'd be challenging any use of "HRT", it may be hormone therapy, but it isn't replacement of any sort. I find it really undermining of the importance of HRT to those that do actually need help navigating hormone imbalances and changes.

Well, for starters, it’s not HRT when a man takes oestrogen. It’s not “replacing” anything.

”Pseudo” = fake

So it has no place in a menopause policy.

Given the broad range of menopausal symptoms I would think a lot of symptoms deriving from all sorts of things could be described as “pseudomenopausal”….they wouldn’t belong in a menopause policy either.

I would ask whoever wrote this where they got the information from.

It's not menopause. It's drug withdrawal syndrome.

I am completely prepared to believe that taking doses of hormones that are not normal for your sex causes side effects. Those hormones are not HRT because it's not replacing hormones at levels that the male body produces after going through male puberty. It's a medically dubious method of inducing a male body to change in various ways that make it a bit less male and a bit more like a female body, but not really anything like the glorious and massively complicated female body, because no male can ever have a female reproductive system. It has known adverse effects on the male cardiovascular system, IIRC. Probably others too.

I have no idea how a trans-identified male could experience menopause because what that word means is coming to the point in life where the lifetime supply of eggs a woman was born with are now too old to enable her to become pregnant. The hormones associated with the menstrual cycle, ovulation and conception therefore don't get produced at the levels they did, unless she takes medication, which in her case would be HRT, because it replaces what her body used to produce naturally.

Why would a trans-identified male stop taking their artificial hormones other than to pretend they too are going through menopause? I think some of the changes they wanted from the artificial hormone regime would reverse, so why would they do it?

I think this has been inserted into your work policy by some biologically ill-informed numpty who has swallowed wholesale the obvious nonsense that trans-identified males on artificial hormones experience period-like symptoms and has jumped to the conclusion that they must therefore also experience menopause.