Have you had negative experiences with the medical profession? You’re not alone. Is it the fault of individual doctors who are bad people? No, this is a structural, institutional problem that goes down as far as medical research itself (or the lack thereof).

You should read this: Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery.

Because it’s not just you.

And somehow, reading this was very healing. I have had issue after issue after issue for most of my life, and I couldn’t figure it out. Was it my fault? Was I not explaining myself well enough? Was that one doctor just an a-hole who hates women? Was that other doctor just a different kind of a-hole? I used to think I must be imagining my problems, but then I finally got a diagnosis of PCOS after 18 years of actively complaining one or more times a year to doctor after doctor.

And that’s not the worst thing I suffered. As a child, because of my PCOS, I ended up visiting the gynecologist much earlier than anticipated, at 12. He decided to put me on birth control because doctors have consistently not cared about my symptoms of PCOS, just throwing birth control at the symptoms rather than finding the cause. (Over a year of infertility was the only thing that finally convinced a doctor to locate a cause. It felt acutely like they only cared about my childbearing abilities, not my day-to-day life – seeing me as an incubator not a person.)

But this being the South and him apparently being a religious man concerned about the sexual liberation of teenage women, he flat-out made up facts about my body and told me I was infertile and worse, could never have a sexual relationship without immense pain and possibly paralysis. That my womb’s position meant it would smack my spine with every thrust of sex. I didn’t find out he was lying until I was in college. I spent all my formative years imagining a life without ever having a romantic relationship or children.

That is a large part of why I had such a hard time getting married and having children. I literally had no concept of my life involving them and had spent so many years training myself to not want those things. Ironically, my mother had also been told as a child she could not have children (no idea why and she had already died by the time I learned this about myself) and she convinced herself that she hated children, only to be surprised by having one many years into her marriage. But growing up “knowing” you’re infertile was far worse in the TN of the 1960s than in the 1990s/2000s. She had to convince herself that she hated kids. I just had to convince myself they’re scary and ignore them, which our society has made so easy to do. (Children and the elderly are shockingly invisible in our society.)

That doctor was not just a lone a-hole, though he’s certainly a special one. He’s part of a larger system and society that dehumanizes and objectifies women and our bodies (even female children’s!).

Gdwilling these discussions will continue and break open this broken system and society so that we can all get the medical care we need and deserve. Healthcare is a fundamental human right that we should be prioritizing if we claim to believe all people are made in the image of Gd. Sexism and racism and fatphobia and transphobia in the medical world, above and beyond the individuals working in it, literally kills people.

Read this book. Get angry. Speak up.