It seems barely a day goes by when we are not confronted with some fresh lunacy from the sinister ‘progressive’ forces that seem to hold much of our public life in their grasp.
Each time, I ask myself whether the world has truly gone mad.
This week, I was left flabbergasted by the news that some NHS trusts and councils have put policies in place to guide staff through the physical and emotional turmoil of the so-called ‘male menopause‘. No doubt some of you will have had to read that paragraph twice, blinking slowly at the words ‘male’ and ‘menopause’ nestling alongside each other.
Because, of course, such a phenomenon simply doesn’t exist – and that’s not just the angry rhetoric of a lifelong feminist who has spent her career campaigning for women’s rights.
The science tells us so – not in the least the NHS’s own website, which describes the very concept of a ‘male menopause’ as ‘unhelpful’ and ‘misleading’.
The idea has been debunked time after time by respected medical journals, which conclude that while men experience a range of physical changes while ageing – a process that arguably underpins the entire human condition – these occur gradually and do not qualify as a life stage in any meaningful sense.
There you have it. Yet the undeniable fact that the NHS has categorically dismissed the notion of the menopausal male has not stopped Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust defining the menopause as a stage in ‘both women and men’s lives’. Their colleagues at the East Midlands Ambulance Service Chiefs have gone one better, reportedly telling managers at the trust to provide additional special uniforms, portable fans and introduce flexible shift patterns to assist male staff members experiencing menopausal symptoms. That’s not all: they are preparing to give male staff up to 12 months of paid leave if they suffer menopausal-like symptoms.
Not to be outdone, meanwhile, a publication drawn up by Leicestershire County Council designed to ‘support menopause in the workplace’ now has a section devoted to symptoms of the imagined male menopause, among them ‘development of breasts’ and ‘infertility’.
In fact, this is the thin end of the wedge. An audit by the Mail has found that dozens of councils, universities, police forces and fire services have developed policies to cope with the apparent scourge of the ‘manopause’. They suggest that firefighters suffering with the condition should be allowed to work from home, while policemen should be offered flexible working practices.
I thought I had seen it all in recent years, but this has left me reeling and furious in equal measure.
Frankly, it would be risible if it wasn’t so insulting to women, feeding into the pernicious narrative that biology is something that can be shifted and appropriated and that ‘feelings’ somehow counteract the irrefutable reality of the body into which we are born.
We have seen where this ‘anti-science’, as I call it, has led us in recent years: to a world in which we are told that there are multiple genders, that there is no difference at all between those who are born female and those who chose to identify as women, and that a penis can be a female appendage.
Women’s identities are being airbrushed out of existence.
