Respectability Politics and the Making of a Menopause Justice Movement

The useful part

After generations of silence, menopause has entered mainstream conversation with remarkable speed, thanks in part to Gen X's insistence and the emergence of older millennials navigating perimenopause. People are finding language for once-isolating experiences, and researchers and clinicians are paying closer attention. This cultural reboot demands that we ask whose stories are treated as authoritative, whose leadership is recognized and resourced, and who can access the care and knowledge being produced.

How it works

• Paid memberships, subscription communities, influencer content, concierge care, exclusive events and information behind paywalls are rapidly turning menopause into a marketplace.
• Prove you are polished, palatable, professionally credentialed, "properly" gendered, sufficiently resourced and nonthreatening before your suffering can be believed or your leadership affirmed.
• We are therefore being asked to interrogate more than whose voices, stories and activism are championed and pushed to the forefront.
• We must also examine whose knowledge is treated as credible, whose testimony becomes evidence, and whose experiences are permitted to define the full breadth of menopause.
• If legitimacy still depends on proximity to whiteness, wealth, cisgender identity, able-bodiedness, professional status or institutional approval, then the table has not been transformed.

What to take from it

(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, published in the middle of Black History Month, in partnership with Black Girls' Guide to Surviving Menopause.