For much of the past year I’ve been rewriting my academic thesis on the embodied experience of postmenopause as a trade non-fiction book Being the Change for Virago, who publish my fiction. I’m almost at the end of the first draft and I’ve been working on the section where I address the menopause transition and intersectionality. I’m writing for the UK only at this point, and have been able to add links, references (and plenty of praise!) for the brilliant people who are making sure that everyone is included in the menopause discussion. Because of their work, it’s been relatively simple to write about menopause and: cancer, LGBTQIA+, being Black, brown, minoritised and/or racialised, being childfree or childess-not-by-choice, neurodivergence, and trauma. And then I came to menopause and disability – and came to a screeching halt. This, below, is what is in my first draft. I really hope I’ll be able to write something far more hopeful in my final draft.
Unfortunately, and for anyone living with disability, disappointingly but not at all surprising, it is at this point that my recommendations run dry. My own experience of living with after-effects of cancers and with chronic pain for decades is that menopause and postmenopause are largely considered from a profoundly ableist focus. Generally this means that those of us who live with pain and/or disability are treated as if we simply don’t exist or as if our needs are irrelevant. Further, there is a hurtful assumption that the physical problems that some people experience in menopause for the first time in their lives – aches, pains, restricted mobility among them – are somehow an affront to dignity and impossible to live with, despite the very many disabled people already living this way all of their lives.
Of my eight participants, two were disabled, one described herself as living with a health condition, and two were living with what many people would call health conditions – arthritis and asthma – but they didn’t choose to place themselves in this category. I’d hazard a guess that my little sample is fairly representative, especially given the range of locations, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds of my interviewees, suggesting that 25% of people going through the menopause transition into postmenopause are disabled. And yet several searches on Google Scholar show virtually nothing on menopause and disability in UK research the past five years. There is some on menopause and MS (great), and some material on menopause itself being treated as a disability in itself, which is a very different matter, but remarkably little on the effects of the transition on those already marginalised in our profoundly ableist culture.
Assuming I must have missed some great work that doesn’t yet show up on Google Scholar, I took to LinkedIn where I have connected with many researchers in the menosphere and this was pretty much the response from all directions, “Yes, this is an area we need to research, but we haven’t yet done so.”
I am genuinely hoping that by the time I come to copyedit Being the Change, I will have better news, but for now … ouch.
Not Writing But Blogging 