hello?

i have severe endometriosis. i was diagnosed at 16 and had three major surgeries for it before i turned 19. i started birth control for my six weeks long, heavy, debilitating periods when i started having them at 12. by 19, i had tried every birth control under the sun (with no success) – except lupron. lupron, a gnrh agonist commonly used on males as a treatment for prostate cancer, on women in fertility treatments, on women with endometriosis, aaaaand yup, this is the exact same drug parents let be injected into girls with the euphemistic title of a “puberty blocker.” (i promise we’ll circle back to this hold on) 

luckily, i live two hours away from one of the most accomplished endometriosis specialists/surgeon in the world, and he is so passionate about finding a cure or at least better treatments for women with endometriosis. he’s an obgyn but he literally doesn’t do the obstetrics part, he purely focuses on helping each woman find their best treatment for this disease. he has such a vast amount of knowledge on surgery techniques and surgical robots and different treatment options, and he is incredibly thorough when it comes to informed consent. if something could happen or has happened– positive, negative, or neutral– he will tell you about it. in detail. now this is important, because after decades of observing treatment effects and listening to women and researching side effects, his personal philosophy is that the lupron injection should be a last resort. like, after major surgery last resort. if a woman wants to try it first thing, he won’t stop her, buuuut after he gives her all the possible short and long term side effects, she usually is eager to explore other options. 

(enter me) 19, three surgeries, dependent on opioid painkillers just to be able to get out of bed in the morning, and now, a fun new symptom! every time i begin to bleed, my heart develops an arrhythmia and i experience constant, burning chest pain. i begin to violently cough up blood. so, my endometriosis has spread to my lungs, may randomly cause my lungs to collapse at literally any moment, and i’ve exhausted all treatment options. except! lupron. the devil drug. the horror stories i heard from other women were insane, and that was just the short-term side effects. my doctor had to go through the process of explaining both short and long term side effects as i cried in the office chair because i knew that i had to take this drug. there was nothing else left for me, and things were getting worse. so i did. i was on it for a year. you want to know what that year was like? 

i was suicidal, homicidal, and fell headfirst into the most severe and detrimental manic episode of my life. i experienced psychotic symptoms, and that along with the aforementioned symptoms led me to a week long stay at the psych ward. i did not have one day without severe joint and bone pain. i broke three bones, all while running or walking, when i had never broken a bone before. i’m already epileptic, but i had two hospital stays for uncontrollable tonic-clonic seizures while i was on it. i couldn’t sleep. i got night sweats and night terrors. i either couldn’t eat a thing or felt absolutely insatiable. regardless, i was always nauseous and got sick a lot. now, six years later, i still deal with worsening osteopenia, making me at high risk to develop osteoporosis. at 25. and the kicker is, it did shit-all for my endometriosis. it made me sick on top of sick on top of sick etc etc. and i’m not a rarity. men and women from all ages and all walks of life have experienced this and worse, and many people, like me, are still dealing with the fallout of it, years or even decades later. i do not believe this drug should be on the market for literally anything at all.

or was the story of my side effects bullshit? the story about how i had a year of my life taken from me with side effects that have literally been noted by people who research and thousands of people who’ve been given this drug?

because if so, it’s REALLY, REALLY fucked up for ANYONE to dismiss a black woman’s healthcare and issues and concerns, especially when they’re reproductive health issues! do you have any idea of the relationship between sadistic white male “gynecologists” and the slave women, my literal ancestors, that they’d use as “test subjects” for things like, oh i dunno, having to receive random ass major surgeries with no anesthetic while completely nude on the stage of an observatory theatre? are you familiar with the concept of epigenetic trauma? do you understand that the dehumanization and torture of black women in the founding days of modern gynecology STILL shapes racial biases in healthcare that literally cause preventable injuries, complications, and deaths of black women to happen?  you must be out ya goddamned mind to read a black woman’s traumatic female healthcare experience and muster up all that fucking nerve, gall, and audacity to make a useless piece of shit garbage comment like that. all that vulnerability, all that sharing, and you are such a fucking sociopath that you cannot even muster up fake sympathy, or better yet, leave me the fuck alone like i told you before.

see, you may have hit a fucking nerve with yr “bullshit” comment, but yr not fucking special. yr dismissiveness of my lived, real, documented, diagnosed aligns perfectly with the attitude of nearly every white male doctor i’ve encountered. from 12 years old, my serious physical health symptoms were essentially given the “bullshit” response. and it’s continued on since. but im not 12 anymore. i am a grown ass woman who knows and has meticulous documents of every treatment and surgery i’ve ever received along with personal dated journals describing its effects, which is actually what i referenced when talking about my experience with lupron, and some dummy on the internet isn’t going to trigger me into a spiral of traumatic healthcare-based memories and experiences.

That a deck of stacked fucking fiction to take a swing at blockers.

You’re a transphobe and no other part of you changes the fact you’ll do anything to push a narrative that hurts trans people and kids.

Big pharma…. fucking terfs require conspiracy theory.

I hit a nerve because you’re fake as fuck your story reads like a 14 year old writing a horror story based on two wikipedia entries.

“Hundreds of thousands.”

^ BULLSHIT show me the count on the reports.

No one’s trying to”Trigger” you no one knows you, JFC you’re pathetic as fuck.

the whole point of this post is that i value trans identifying kids’ lifelong health and safety and don’t think a drug that has one of the worst reputations in medical history for on and off label usage being the first line of dealing with feelings of dysphoria is so fucking short sighted and that’s what’s actually, literally damaging to children. i do not think this drug is suitable for usage on any human beings regardless of their condition.

Also Japanese police have a 90+% rate of successfully arresting a “suspect” for every crime they investigate. At first this sounds really impressive, how they always track down the criminal, until you realize that they do it through a combination of refusing to investigate crimes which seem hard to solve or are likely to involve organizes crime or politicians (lots of “suicides” and “accidents” which are very blatant murder), and any time they do open a case but fail to figure everything out in the first day or two they just grab a convenient scapegoat (usually poor, frequently an immigrant or ethnic minority).

Now that I have your attention because you're pissed off, let me explain. No, I don't mean that in the dudebro meninist "men and women are on equal footing actually, if structural misogyny exists then clearly there is an equal and opposite structural misandry, checkmate liberals" way.

I mean that when it intersects with other axes of oppression, gendered power dynamics get a hell of a lot more complicated than "men big scary oppressors, women innocent victims!!" Like, despite how much the radfems and the terminally online people who treated them as the source of expertise try to redefine it to "the more axes you're marginalized on the more support you should win from progressive spaces, they're basically collectibles but otherwise totally separate", this is a major part of what intersectionality means.

Note how everyone becomes a "feminist" the moment a Black or brown man breathes in their general direction. He exists, suddenly EVERYONE knows toxic masculinity is toxic and violent, and aggressively police him in the name of Protecting Women(TM). Women of color face their own unique brands of oppression, yes! Including being ignored in a lot of these violence statistics or memed if they're actually noticed! But MANY cases of racist police brutality are because a MAN, OF COLOR - very specifically someone at the intersection of those two groups - was read as a threat for being A MAN, OF COLOR. MANY names and stories on any lynching memorial are Black MEN, who were lynched because a white WOMAN saw his very presence as a rape threat. The interplay of race and gender in these interactions is unique.

Or, queer men - when someone says "homophobia is the fear that gay men will treat you the same way you treat women," that's not just a snappy slogan, that's literally how a major facet of it works. The "gay panic defense", in 35 states, lets people reduce assault or murder charges to a lesser offense for "I found out they were queer and I was afraid they were going to hit on me". This is, overwhelmingly, invoked against gay men...

Or trans women - which, however much any radfem tries to tell you otherwise, are still people that mainstream cishet society sees as men, at least until it is convenient to gender her correctly to discount her opinion as the shallow mindless ramblings of an airheaded woman. Like, that's a major aspect of how transphobia intersects with gender in all directions - depending on what's most convenient for the accuser, you're just a silly brainless helpless pathetic woman...

Or a dangerous, predatory, burgeoning, toxic man.

Again, it's another form of "man (or 'man') sets one toe out of line and suddenly the whole world recognizes that toxic masculinity is bad."

And this is coming out in a fascinatingly disturbing way against trans men. There is a concept of "double discrimination" - a term with a frustrating dual meaning; it can refer to being marginalized on two axes and being, for instance, discriminated against for being queer even in spaces meant to support disabled people and vice-versa, or it can refer to being discriminated against by mainstream society, but also by marginalized communities for "not being marginalized enough" (in other words, a less maliciously "neutral" term for the effects of exclusionism). The latter definition has been heavily studied in bisexual communities and has been shown to have nasty adverse effects on both physical and mental health-

And that is also happening to trans men right before our very eyes. Mainstream society hates trans men because, again, depending on what's convenient to demonize us, we're either silly brainless shallow women just hopping on a trend to try and feel special because that's ALL women ever do don't'chaknow and anyone who helps us transition is a predatory drug-pusher, or we're horrible evil predatory dykes (because obviously all trans people are straight relative to our actual genders, which means gay relative to the ones cishet society reads us as) willingly morphing our bodies into a horrifying predatory form to hurt poor innocent cis women-

And among queer groups, we're ALSO treated largely as the latter, and then told "talking about your issues, and GOD forbid trying to come up with a NAME for them, is just Not All Men-ing, sit down and shut up like the good little girls you are, at least you're not being murdered in the streets (except when you are and get reported as women)". Even just sharing resources is treated as "stealing from" or "displacing" other "more deserving" queer groups.

Like, I don't know how to break it to you, but this whole idea of "men are bad, women are good, end of" isn't feminist at all. It's "oh, boys will be boys" in a pink-and-rainbow hat. It's the exact same tool wealthy, white, cishet men use to insist that their dominion over everyone else is just The Natural Order of Things(TM).

And yes, it oppresses most men. It is only the men who have all the other privilege qualifiers who escape it.

No, Men(TM) as a broad single-axis group are not an oppressed class, but there are unique, gendered ways that the hammer of oppression on other axes comes down on marginalized men, because the wealthy, white, cishet men at the top see men (or """"men"""") failing to live up to their platonic ideal of what wealthy, white, cishet manhood means as a threat to their rule - and they're laughably transparent about it; look at all their talk of how men failing to live up to it is "degeneracy" and "the downfall of society". Maleness as a real identity that actual people have, and manhood as a platonic ideal within the power structure of white cishet patriarchy, have a lot of overlap but they're pretty damned different things. The latter is fragile, and violent, and cruel, and hostile to everyone - yes, to women more than men, but very much so to men as well. The former is...literally just vibing.

And yes, women can be enforcers as well. Especially wealthy, cishet, white women. In fact, insisting that they can't be is often in and of itself a precursor to white supremacist patriarchal violence.

We have monuments to prove it.

That’s not oppression, or discrimination, that is a consequence

GOOD FOR HER.