A just menopause movement must do more than make Black, queer, trans and disabled people visible. It must trust them to shape care, research and policy.
Menopause—and the conversations surrounding it—is having a moment: Celebrities are speaking out, a commercial marketplace is booming, and state legislatures have introduced a wave of reforms over the past year. But as public attention grows, so too must our scrutiny of who benefits from this surge of visibility … and who risks being left behind.
This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, Flipping the Menopause Script Is Essential to Democracy, published in the middle of Black History Month, in partnership with Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause. This series helps flip the script, building on seven years of narrative and reproductive justice work led by Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause and commemorates “Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀: Remembering Blood,” a 2025 intergenerational gathering in Durham, N.C., centering marginalized menopausal communities. Menopause is not only a physical transition—it is also cultural, social and political. Recognizing its full scope is essential to advancing true health and civic equity. As one contributor reminds us: “We will not disappear with age. We will arrive.”
Some generations are asked to secure rights. Others are asked to defend them. Still others inherit the quieter responsibility of asking whether the stories shaping public life can hold everyone they claim to serve. That is the work before us now in conversations about menopause, reproductive aging and gender-affirming care.
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.
But 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. Paid memberships, subscription communities, influencer content, concierge care, exclusive events and information behind paywalls are rapidly turning menopause into a marketplace. Who gains power as the conversation grows?
Black representation alone does not make a menopause movement inclusive, equitable or liberatory. Some Black leaders have gained visibility in the mainstream menopause landscape, but that visibility has not necessarily changed the standards determining which people, experiences and forms of leadership are considered acceptable.
The dominant culture has long demanded a particular currency in exchange for acceptance, investment, and even tacit anointment to a seat at its table. That currency is respectability: the belief that Black people can secure safety, recognition, or access to power by conforming to standards of behavior, appearance, gender, sexuality and class established by those who already possess it.
Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the term “politics of respectability” to describe a strategy developed by Black Baptist women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they confronted the brutal conditions of Jim Crow. Respectability politics addressed two audiences: Black communities, urged toward education, discipline, moral conduct and collective uplift; and white America, which Black women hoped to compel to recognize their dignity, capacity and citizenship.
We should be careful not to dismiss this history as simple accommodation. For people living under racial terror, respectability could function as protection, resistance, institution-building and a public assertion of humanity. Yet it also carried a painful contradiction. By using white, Christian, heterosexual and middle-class norms to rebut racist caricatures, it could reproduce class hierarchies and imply that Black people who could not or would not perform those norms were responsible for the violence and exclusion directed against them.
Paid memberships, subscription communities, influencer content, concierge care, exclusive events and information behind paywalls are rapidly turning menopause into a marketplace. Who gains power as the conversation grows?
Anna Julia Cooper embodied both the historical complexity of racial uplift and a vision that exceeded its constraints. Writing in 1892, Cooper insisted freedom was not the property of “a race or a sect, a party or a class,” but “the birthright of humanity.” She believed deeply in education and collective advancement, but she also argued that the liberation of Black women, particularly those positioned at the intersection of racial and gender oppression, was essential to the freedom of the entire race.
As Brittney C. Cooper cautions in “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women,” reducing race women like Anna Julia Cooper to the politics of respectability obscures the breadth of their intellectual labor and the radical futures they imagined. They navigated the class and gender conventions of their time, but they also contested who could produce knowledge, exercise leadership and be recognized as fully human.
This is the core of narrative shift justice work—and that distinction matters now in the developing menopause landscape.
What may once have operated as a strategy for surviving racial terror has hardened, in many contemporary institutions and marketplaces, into an entrance requirement: 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. It has simply diversified its guest list.
In March 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus, nine months before Rosa Parks’ refusal became national news. Yet movement leaders did not make Colvin the public face of their campaign. Her youth and working-class background were treated as liabilities; when she became pregnant later that year, her perceived respectability came under further scrutiny. Colvin recalled even her mother urged her to let Parks take the lead, believing Parks’ lighter skin would make her less vulnerable to white hostility. Colvin remained a plaintiff in the case that challenged bus segregation, but her leadership was pushed from the public story.
Queer liberation activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera faced a different version of the same bargain. Their vision of liberation included people confronting poverty, homelessness, policing, incarceration and racism. But as parts of the gay rights movement sought legitimacy … white, middle-class, gender-conforming gay and lesbian people became its more publicly acceptable representatives. Poor, trans, unhoused and Black and Brown queer people were treated as liabilities, even as Johnson and Rivera organized alongside them.
These historical accounts mirror what continues to unfold across justice movements and throughout mainstream media. In 2023, Oprah Winfrey convened The Menopause Talk, followed in 2025 by the nationally televised ABC special The Menopause Revolution. Both broke meaningful silence around menopause—yet their celebrity guests and credentialed experts largely reflected the movement’s most mainstream and marketable voices. Missing from the center were trans, nonbinary, disabled, working-class, uninsured and currently or formerly incarcerated people, along with those experiencing surgical or medically induced menopause. The revolution reached primetime, but many of the people living at the sharpest intersections of reproductive inequity remained outside its frame.
Access also shaped who could enter the conversation. The 2023 program was reserved for paying Oprah Daily “insiders.” The 2025 special aired on broadcast television, but continued streaming required a subscription or paid television service.
BG*G2SM is not outside this contradiction. Our work has been featured in Oprah Daily, and we have written for the publication, with both forms of coverage living behind paywalls. We valued the platform and visibility, but the experience forced us to ask how our own pursuit of reach, legitimacy and recognition might make us complicit in the very gatekeeping and respectability politics we critique. Respectability politics operates not only through who is rejected, but also through who is selected, made visible and granted legitimacy. None of us doing this work is exempt from examining the currencies we exchange for recognition, access and proximity to power.
My college education, sorority membership, relationships and participation in upwardly mobile Black Christian church communities gave me credentials to command a room—even when my race, gender, deep brown skin or class were used to diminish my presence.
As a quintessential Gen X baby, born in North Carolina in 1967 and raised by Black parents who came of age during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow South, I learned early that access came with conditions. Their dreams for me and my siblings grew from a fierce desire for our safety, education, mobility, faith and joy in a world intent on denying us all of them.
As a child, I absorbed the message that navigating predominantly white spaces with “Black excellence” and resilience could unlock doors and validate my place in the world. I learned to rely on what I call my “Black girl passport.” My college education, sorority membership, relationships and participation in upwardly mobile Black Christian church communities gave me credentials to command a room, even when my race, gender, deep brown skin or class were used to diminish my presence. I wanted to shine in rooms that had been inaccessible to my parents and older siblings. So I popped the respectability pill under my tongue, put on the mask and tried to color inside the lines. But whenever I opened my mouth, some inconvenient truth would spill out and loosen the mask.
My life changed when I became a mother at 25. Having a child before marriage tore at the edges of the map my parents had given me. As my place within my family and community shifted, I took greater responsibility for defining who I was and charting where I would go. I redrew the map and found my life’s work in social justice movements, Black diasporic culture, and spiritual traditions indigenous to West Africa.
In 2019, during a sabbatical from movement work, I began BG*G2SM as a personal love note to myself in a menopausal body and to those traveling alongside me, those who came before, and those still to come. As the work gained visibility during the pandemic, media outlets, organizations and healthcare professional associations invited me to share our story and analysis. I accepted many invitations to advance a reproductive justice, Black feminist and healing justice understanding of menopause, and to bring greater visibility to the communities our work centers.
But visibility came with its own respectability bargain. The spaces inviting us in were often homogeneous, organized around the mainstream archetype of the menopausal person as white, cisgender, heterosexual and middle class. As one of the few Black queer-led organizations present, BG*G2SM was praised for being articulate and brave enough to offer an “alternative” narrative from the margins. I could board a plane for an invitation-only menopause gathering and enter the room already conscious of the voices, histories and needs missing from it. The experience felt painfully familiar. Once again, I was positioned as the magical Negro in the classroom, boardroom or fellowship: welcomed for what I could contribute, with no expectation that the room itself would change.
That tension followed me into my participation in The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause. I was honored to be invited into a documentary that brought urgently needed attention to menopause, and especially honored to appear in the same segment as medical historian Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens. I understood the significance of being featured. I also noticed, yet again, the voices and experiences still missing from the frame.
Its sequel, The M Factor 2: Before the Pause, expanded the conversation about perimenopause, yet the intimate partnerships represented were cisgender and heterosexual. Where were the same-gender-loving couples, queer families, trans partners and other relationships through which people experience the physical and emotional changes of the full spectrum of menopause? Representation can expand while its boundaries remain firmly in place.
Those boundaries matter because we are not simply witnessing the future of menopause. We are helping to create it. Menopause justice begins with the understanding that reproductive aging is more than a biological transition, a medical diagnosis, or an emerging consumer market. It deepens and extends the work of reproductive, healing and disability justice and LGBTQIA+ movements. Who stewards this movement is as important as the care, education, research and policies it produces.
Every future begins with a story. The story we choose to tell about menopause today will shape the conditions generations inherit tomorrow. Menopause has entered the public imagination. The question now is whether we have the courage to build a movement in which Black, queer, trans, disabled, working-class and incarcerated people are not simply recognized, but trusted to shape research, care and policy—and can access the benefits they help create.
That is the difference between telling a more inclusive story and building a more just future.
Originally published on Hippolyta’s Journal by BG*G2SM as “Project M: Respectability Politics and the Birthing of a Menopause Justice Movement.”
