MP blasts writer over menopause comments

A SWANSEA MP has said comments that men shouldn’t be included in conversations about the menopause are “absolutely nonsense”. Writer Michelle Kirsch has said that telling men the reality of the menopause will give “reasons not to hire us”.

High-profile campaigns, including a documentary by Davinia Mccall called Sex, Mind and the Menopause, have increased awareness about the menopause, and Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris is campaigning for a law for hormone replacement therapy free in England.

Writing in The Spectator magazine, Kirsch said she thought we had reached “peak menopause” and told BBC2’S Politics Live she “wasn’t convinced men should be part of this conversation”.

The Labour MP said she was “disappointed” to hear the comments and said the comments were “nonsense”.

In her column the writer said: “It’s not that menopause isn’t real or worth discussing. It can absolutely make you a moody cow, a bit fuzzy or foggy round the old noggin, or, in extreme cases, psychotic. It sucks – but then, much of life sucks. If we treat every female biological event with this level of serious, anxious attention, we’ll never talk about anything other than our own bodies”.

Ms Kirsch added: “Some women don’t suffer very much at all and we don’t need to have just the one narrative.”

Ms Harris, a menopause campaigner, told her: “It’s absolute nonsense.”

“If only we had reached peak menopause. If we reached that stage we’d have every woman in this country who was able to access the support and resources to actually help her through it, and for every woman who says she has sailed through this, a conversation with somebody who has gone through it and explained some of the symptoms she believes were not the menopause, she may well realise that she was menopausal.

“What we are trying to do is to make sure that everybody understands just how debilitating the menopause is, and if that means shouting about it from the rooftops, so we will.”