By the end of the legislature, the Ministry of Equality will have provided enough material to fill an entire book on erratic feminism. The same portfolio that boasts of fighting against the stigma and pathologization of minorities –which is why it promotes that people can declare themselves of the opposite sex without further ado– now allows itself to propose a law that, like someone who doesn't want the thing, makes menstruation a potential handicap for women's working lives.
His populist rule of three is the same in each case. On the one hand, in his aim to de-stigmatize transsexuals, he launches a bill that is a café for all and dilutes the real needs of these people in a hyper-identity diversity. On the other hand, it now stands as the discoverer of sick leave for painful and incapacitating periods, when the only novelty it proposes with respect to what the INSS already contemplates is that the State assumes the total subsidy and that it be for a few days at a time. month, renewable every year.
There is no need to recall here the indigence that women who have dysmenorrhea, endometriosis and other wild pains associated with their cycle have experienced –and are experiencing–. Until recently, the certificates issued in a pioneering way by doctors such as Santiago Dexeus were a source of jokes in the workplace of those affected. So a law that allows us to talk about that ordeal is an advance.
But the real advance would be laws that do not stigmatize, that do not impose on any woman the suspicion of periodic casualties of a few days a month. The priority, in any case, is to warn once and for all that menstruation should not be painful and that these types of symptoms indicate an abnormality. There are no shortage of populist laws, what is urgently needed is for science to investigate the causes of menstrual pain and for the medical establishment to take seriously doctors who, like Dr. Carme Valls, warn in this regard.
The curious thing about the case is that intimate hygiene products will continue with a VAT of 10% while Viagra is 4. And even more curious: in the current queer dystopia, companies could prefer staff with “non-menstruating bodies”, which would not prevent them from supposedly complying with gender parity.
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