Work endometriosis talk

[Endorage]

I’ve NC’d because this is very outing and my work is becoming more woke by the day.

This week I have spotted a talk on endometriosis organised by the women’s network. Whoever wrote the blurb has taken stats from a legitimate website and replaced the word ‘women’ with ‘people’ rendering the stats completely invalid.

and then someone has also claimed that men also get endometriosis so this isn’t just a female issue - I’ve looked at the medical literature and it appears that this is vanishingly rare and usually as a complication or prolonged exposure to oestrogen therapies.

I am so over this, why on earth can we not just treat this as the women’s health issue that it is?! Why do we have to shoehorn gender into this? It makes it utter nonsense.

I've seen this idea that men get endo too therefore we have to say 'people with endo' and stop talking about it as a women's/female specific disease spreading on various social media sites too, and as another long term sufferer, it's absolute bollocks.

Yes, I'm aware of the handful of cases which have had scientific papers written about them precisely because they're so bleeping unusual. Most of the men who developed it did so as a side effect of treatment for prostate cancer. There are not young, healthy men running around with a pelvis full of endo lesions that are causing them agony, driving them out of the workplace, making them infertile, giving them constant bowel issues and bladder infections or making it impossible for them to have sex. But there are so many women. So many. In the average secondary school in the UK, it's a girl in every classroom (and NO BOYS AT ALL).

We've ended up in this position precisely because it affects women and the long running strategy of the medical profession and researchers has been to study things in men, to then announce that it affects 'people' (because if that's how it is in men, then obviously it must be the same in women, no need to verify that by actually studying women because female bodies are just so complicated anyway and might muck up their results).

So here we are, 2023, and it remains difficult to detect and incurable, and all women are offered are hormones that don't really work and cause all sorts of negative side effects, or surgery that doesn't really work and causes all sorts of long term damage. Endometriosis UK chickened out of using the word 'women' in any of their literature a couple of years ago. It's pathetic. We're now being told we have to ignore the deep rooted medical sexism b/c we might offend someone if we point it out. Well stuff that.

• Endometriosis affects roughly 10% (190 million) of reproductive age women and girls globally.

It’s interesting that this is the headline statement from the World `health Organisation - there’s no mention of men anywhere. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/endometriosis#:~:text=Overview,period%20and%20last%20until%20menopause.

Men cannot ‘suffer from it’. Because they do not have a uterus. They may have something that causes similar symptoms, but it ain’t endo.
The allegation that 20 men have been diagnosed worldwide is misleading. I wonder how many of those men are female and either have a DSD such as Turners Syndrome or are transmen?

Men cannot ‘suffer from it’. Because they do not have a uterus. They may have something that causes similar symptoms, but it ain’t endo.

Endometriosis occurs outside the uterus. You don't need a uterus to have it, and it can persist after a hysterectomy. You do, however, need endometrial tissue, which men do not have, except in incredibly rare and anomalous situations.

@MadamePickle puts it perfectly. The whole question of whether men can get it is a total distraction.

Yes - this is exactly what I mean. We should be discussing this as a women’s reproductive health issue. It has nothing to do with gender.

I'm so glad I don't work at your place of work, I don't think I'd be able to hold back. After having endo for my whole adult life, a lot of IVF, and now endo with menopause, they'd be told to F off, F off some more, and when they get there, get to F. GRRRRR!

Leaving aside the vanishingly rare men, the coleague who has taken the web site and changed 'woman' to 'people' has plagarised.

If you are nto waking in academia it might not be an issue but it isn't good practice.

Presumably the reason they've put on the talk is that endometriosis (in women) is sadly very common. Endometriosis in men however is vanishingly rare (ten million times less common than in women, according to the above statistics). I don't imagine they're having many talks on conditions only known to affect less than twenty people - what would be the point?

FFS. I couldn’t sit through this. Are you going to speak out? All your colleagues will silently thank you.