misogyny in medicine
- history of hysteria and ‘women’s diseases’
- history of lobotomy for dissident women
- still pervasive issues with mistrusting patients’ account of prior or present pain and discomfort in absence of particular signals eg autistic people not believed due to different/absent outward signs of distress, marginalised people often masking, fawning, or otherwise downplaying their issues for reasons of real or perceived safety
- no-one listens to teenage girls
- difficulties of self-advocating for certain kinds of care, eg:
- people choosing not to birth children find it very difficult to get accepted for elective hysterectomy/oophorectomy
- genital reconstructive surgeries for trans people not always performed in a safe, regulated, manner or at all in certain places. Even in supposedly progressive nations, self-advocating for these surgeries can be very difficult and time-consuming with a lot of hoops to jump through, and they can be unaffordable for most.
- on the flip side, some treatment paths are pushed on people who otherwise wouldn’t opt for them, eg non-customisable surgery-packages in both top and bottom surgery (often the less experienced or more affordable surgeons), or ‘mandatory’ hysterectomy and oophorectomy for transmascs on HRT - this is not actually medical necessity, they just recommend due to lack of research on viable pregnancies after being on T (and going off during) despite anecdotal evidence of plenty of healthy babies born this way. (citation needed) but you can also very feasibly live with these organs (citation needed) remaining dormant even if you don’t plan to use them — this is often an unnecessary surgery that is blanket ‘recommended’ to transmascs.
- ignoring women’s pain, underestimating period pain/discomfort/hassle/shame
- black women often suffer more and for longer due to assumptions of threshold (find a good source)
- bodily autonomy
- family planning, contraception and abortion
- misogynoir, transmisogny, and the amplifying effect of intersectional marginalised identities
- trans health issues and systematic failures
- pregnancy and ‘knowing your body’
- prioritising fertility over health (commonly documented both historically, globally, and currently)
- prioritising fertility over sexual function for pleasure (a friend told me of a doctor claiming that complete paralysis below the torso harms sexual functioning ‘only in males’ and expressed frustration and disgust that the doctor was not concerned about female sexual sensation and pleasure but only about whether a penis could become erect )
- gaps in medical research
- researchers historically have avoided using female animal subjects in medical studies so they don’t have to account for the variable of hormonal cycles and changes it might bring. (citation needed)
- females often don’t react to medications and treatments as expected from the male baseline (citation needed)
- this is a major gap in medical science that is killing and causing mass suffering specifically for non-cis-men
- heart attacks present very differently according to hormonal fluctuations
- doctors only very recently being taught this (find source)
- men also have hormonal cycles, it’s a huge part of how bodies work and neglecting that is dangerous