Guardian article about periods does not mention girls or women ONCE

[BobLobla]

….until they quote doctors who start using female pronouns. Look at how the guardian bits of the article are written. Ffs! https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/31/teenagers-period-pain-menstruation-chronic-pain-adults-research-study

They must have a strict style guide, like the BBC.

Periods effect men too! Especially, mostly and very much! They are most effected by something that only effects women!

Jeez you're such a bigoty bigoty face and you eat children for breakfast.

So sad.

Think about what you have done. 🤬🤬🤬🤬

But they do mention women and girls later on the article. You need to read it properly

To me it seems very necessary to state whether they are talking about all people or all females when comparing groups who did or did not have painful periods.

Academics at the University of Oxford analysed data from more than 1,100 participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and found that, compared with those who did not have painful menses, those with severe period pain (dysmenorrhoea) at 15 years old had a 76% higher risk of chronic pain by the age of 26, while those with moderate period pain were 65% more likely to have chronic pain as adults.

'Higher risk' or 'more likely' than other females or all people of the same age? After all, I imagine that sex and perception/experience of pain are not unrelated.

It’s like reading the maternity information on Hospitals websites

oo how they try so hard to not mention women or mothers.

Reading everything the OP wrote and not just the headline I note that BobLobla ends the first sentence with ….until they quote doctors who start using female pronouns.

@NotNatacha has summarized the problem perfectly. If the population is not defined, the results do not have the same meaning.

Sigh… misogyny. They’re happy enough to write about boys: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/apr/03/bridget-phillipson-education-secretary-more-male-teachers-adolescence

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/dec/30/private-schools-defend-refusal-of-1m-donation-to-help-poor-white-boys

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/27/disadvantaged-white-boys-lag-behind-peers-in-uk-phonics-test

Why not calls for more male teachers to inspire British ‘children’?

Exactly, if it was about men's prostate problems they wouldn't be referring to "people".

Yes my sister had this with her work.

Breast cancer awareness day was all about people.

Prostate cancer awareness day was all about men.

Sickening.

*affect
*affected
*affects

Why bother with English lessons, when basic Biology is still misunderstood..

Even the introduction to the research paper in question begins "Chronic pain is more common in individuals assigned female at birth than in individuals assigned male.1"

Ffs.

I imagine it's because trans women see womanhood as an exclusive club they want to belong to whereas trans men see it as an oppressive prison they want to escape from, so neither are happy about the term "women" being used in a biological sense.

The same doesn't appear to be true the other way round, when talking about men.

I'm not sure that they do have a style guide requiring this, since quite a few articles about women and girls health are written in a normal way - ie with the writer (and not just the professionals s/he quotes) using appropriate sex-based terminology.

My guess is that they are so dysfunctional on this issue that they have allowed individual writers to make their own decisions.

Perhaps it is a sign of some progress (in sociuety generally, not at the graun) that when I read this article my primary reaction was to think "How stupid this sounds", rather than just to be angry. Increasingly, now that the iron orthodoxy is breaking down, it just looks silly to refuse to name women and girls.

I wrote to the Guardian readers editor last year complaining when an article on pcos didn't mention women once while an article on prostate cancer a few days earlier was clear that it affects men. I didn't hear back but please write and complain. I think I said it was discrimination (you have to categorise the nature of your complaint) or just write a letter to the editor. Again, it probably won't result in action but the more random people write in and say 'we can see what you're doing and it's not right' the more internal pressure there will be to change course.

To be fair - both men and women have breasts and can get breast cancer (though much rarer in men)

only men have a prostate…

in some ways it would have been weirder had the latter included women as that would be acknowledging TWAW whereas they are men…

I just looked at the study which is the source for this article. It is published in the Lancet. It also seems to avoid correct sex terms. "Assigned female at birth" occurs a few times, and they generally refer to 'adolescents' or 'participants rather than 'girls'.

However, the term 'girl' slips through twice and (slightly hilariously) the word 'women' occurs 15 times. I think we can probably credit shoddy use of Word's 'find and replace' tool for researchers' acknowledgement of sex in the article.

Interestingly, the research is based on data gathered in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children which, judging from its web pages, doesn't seem reticent about correct-sex terms.

Conceivably, the Guardian might justify its language choices by saying that they were honouring the language used by the research published in the Lancet. But that begs the question as to why these researchers felt able to distort the language which appears to have been used in the Avon longitudinal study. (Disclaimer: I haven't read text from the Avon study -- i'm just going by the manner in which its own website speaks of it.)

I just looked at the study which is the source for this article. It is published in the Lancet. It also seems to avoid correct sex terms. "Assigned female at birth" occurs a few times, and they generally refer to 'adolescents' or 'participants rather than 'girls'.

Yes, both the journalist and the University of Oxford researchers quoted in the article talk about "young people" rather than "women" or "girls". It's only Ranee Thakar of RCOG, Janet Lindsay of Wellbeing of Women* and the DHSC spokesperson who use sex-based terminology.

• I wonder if they've come under any pressure to change their name.

It must be years since I looked at the Guardian style guide - I haven't been a regular reader for a long time - so I don't know if there's a policy on this.

I do know you sometimes get obviously jarring bits of language at the Guardian, which comes with being a very ideological publication. I've noticed that in recent years they seem reluctant to refer to lesbians, and prefer to mention "queer women", which doesn't necessary mean the same thing.

If only there were some kind of word to predict or describe the people who might have periods to better study this phenomenon.

Agree, without clarifying whether the association is partly or wholly sex related the whole article is meaningless.

Just a theory - if the thing that's causing all this trouble is assigning people female at birth, then isn't the obvious answer to assign them as something else?

😁

Ffs. the absolute irony of accusing op of not reading the article properly when you clearly haven't even bothered to read their much shorter post, which specifically says it's only when professionals are quoted that sex-based pronouns are introduced into the article and its the guardian editorial parts op is criticising 🙄

I completely agree op. Removing the sex specification makes the whole thing pointless and illogical because the statistics don't make sense.

"compared with those who did not have dysmenorrhoea, teenagers with severe period pain were more than twice as likely to develop chronic headaches or chronic knee, wrist, hand, foot or ankle pain in adulthoood." So out of a group of 15 year olds, is a girl with severe period pain twice as likely to develop those symptoms as another girl in the group or twice as likely compared with a boy?