Hmmmmm. It says “NHS inform” at the top. It shows other available languages. Surely the goal here is to inform patients. And yet…

The goal is surely to inform, and yet the NHS tells people, including people who don’t read English, that there are people who are not women or girls yet who “bleed from their vagina.” Well, what people? What people are those exactly? What people who are not women or girls have the ability to “bleed from their vagina”? Why don’t we all know about them? Why haven’t we all always known about them?

The NHS, let’s remember, is not the Guardian or the BBC, nor is it an activist on social media. The NHS is a health service. An important part of its work is providing information that is as clear and unambiguous and easy to understand as it can possibly be, and also as accurate. Accuracy is key. You don’t want to go mixing up milligrams and micrograms, and you don’t want to go mixing up women and men. You need to know exactly what the patient weighs before you prescribe meds, and you need to know exactly what sex the patient is before a whole lot of things. That’s the job, and it’s crucial. Pretending boys and men can menstruate is the opposite.