radicleeze

I mean it. You’re getting the attention you think you want, all eyes on you. Except ours. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” Your fellow waiters ask us, concerned. Behind the triage window, you can’t hear our teeth grinding. You’re in pain, i understand that. This might even be the worst pain you’ve ever felt. But you’re probably not dying.

Dying isn’t loud. A patient having a heart attack does not scream and thrash and gasp for air. It’s a whisper, a tightness, with slow flexing fingers. A stroke happens in a fraction of an instant, and never makes any sound. More whispers, halves of sentences and muscles that don’t quite match up anymore, a puppet with a few of the strings cut. Alarmed and wandering eyes, maybe, but never yelling. Or the more common killers, infections that shut down organs or the pipes of blood that sever. Cardiac or respiratory failure. If a person can talk they are, in fact, breathing just fine.

They left a child in the nurses break room for 30 minutes with no explanation. Just wheeled me in there and left me crying my eyes out surrounded by people playing angry birds on their phones.

When I finally saw a nurse she gave me TYLENOL and told me to go home with my mom because my foot was “a little swollen”. They wrapped it in gauze. They were mad because I was making so much noise but my foot literally felt like it was on fire.

four hours.

someone prodded at my stomach and decided that since the pain wasn’t in the right place to be a ruptured appendix, it was just gas. after that, the only nurses who even came near me only came to tell me to be quiet.

my parents begged for someone, anyone, to listen – he never cries, they said, he never whines, i’ve never heard him make this noise before, something is really really wrong! this kid fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone and got up laughing! when he stepped on broken glass he just said ‘uh i guess you better fetch a towel’! jesse does not scream, please someone at least try to find out what’s wrong, isn’t this a hospital?

all anyone said was, kids make such a fuss. stop being dramatic.

meanwhile, i was entering an altered state from the unrelenting pain, hallucinating and giggling through my sobs, having mini blackouts. i bit clean through a paperback book before someone finally came around to take me to x-ray “though i’m sure we won’t find anything.” the x-ray technician snapped “you don’t need that” and snatched my teddy bear, tossing it on a counter, where it would’ve been left behind if my mother hadn’t noticed me coming out of the room without it (they didn’t let her come in with me) and gone charging in to get it.

more waiting, because x-rays took time to develop back then. more contempt and cold shoulders, and me wondering if i could maybe walk just enough to get out to the highway and dive in front of a semi, because hell cannot be any worse than this.

and then suddenly, here’s a doctor who is in a huge hurry and we are going to give me a great big enema right fucking now because the x-ray found a bowel obstruction as hard as stone and my intestines are going to rupture any second! hurry hurry, don’t you know how high the fatality rate is for sepsis from a ruptured bowel? terrified eleven year old, dehydrated and seeing double and too weak to stand, gets what feels like a garden hose full of lava shoved up his butt, and then they point me at a toilet and leave me there.

result: child on the floor, erupting from both ends. nurse’s reaction: anger and disgust.

pretty much everything from the x-ray on, i remember as if i was watching myself on tv. by the time they left me in the bathroom i wasn’t crying anymore. i was just sort of… nearby, while things happened to my body. i wondered if my bowel was still in danger of rupturing, but i couldn’t find it in me to care.

i was finally quiet.

Cause I clearly remember when I was and I sure as hell was not quiet.

I got out of a c-section, which I’d been allowed to be put to sleep through because my anxiety had me disassociating and having consecutive panic attacks for an hour past when I should have been in, at which point my child should have already been born. I woke up and I can remember screaming and crying. My stomach had literally been sliced open and I could feel it. I don’t think I’d screamed or cried that hard ever. I eventually was able to stop only because it hurt worse.

Imagine if someone came into your ER screaming their head off because they felt pain like this. You would ignore them.

Surely she wouldn’t post pictures of her fiance (with his real name) linking to an Instagram account (with her real name and location) to make it so easy to find her job and ensure they know that she’s setting them up for a heap of malpractice lawsuits, right?

The only kind of gender-non-conformity that’s worth anything is the behavioral kind: Do the laundry, learn to cook, stop interrupting women, start the process of kicking that porn addiction you’ve got going on, learn to listen don’t just hear, stop knowingly engaging in behavior that scares or makes women uncomfortable, learn to sew.. it’ll come in handy someday. Eyeliner won’t.

Edit: I’d like to make a controversial yet true addition

Like, you do even a cursory look at how some people are mistreated during actual, like….giving birth? Like non-consensual episiotomies or “the husband stitch.”

The fact that only 17 states treat marital rape the same as non-marital rape? That marital rape  has less severe penalties, or excludes situations where no violence is used, or has shorter reporting periods.

The fact that young women routinely have their requests for tubal ligation denied. 

Forced sterilization has been a huge issue: for native american women, for women in prison, and some countries even require trans women and intersex women to be sterilized before they can legally change their names.

Incorporating Sex As a Biological Variable in Neuropsychiatric Research: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Be?

“That sex effects may be context dependent also means that one cannot easily generalize from a single study to other conditions and other species.”

Sex Differences and Opposite Effects of Stress on Dendritic Spine Density in the Male Versus Female Hippocampus

“I realized that if certain areas of the brain could change from the typical ‘female form’ to the typical ‘male form’ under stress, there was no point in talking about the female brain and the male brain,” Joel told Haaretz (paywall).

Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic

“Under absolutely no internal consistency, ∼80% of “brains” showed substantial variability compared with 0.1% that showed internal consistency (Fig. S1E). A comparison of the ±5,000 simulated condition to the actual data, in which 6% of brains showed internal consistency and 35% showed substantial variability, suggests that noise cannot explain the pattern of results we obtained, because less noise is expected to account for the percent of internal consistency but more noise to account for the percent of substantial variability.“

–> this study drew criticism for having standards of internal consistency that were too high and unrealistic, to which the researchers replied:

“Sex affects the brain, but the prevalence of mosaicism does not support the view that sex effects on the brain produce two distinct types of brains. Current data are not sufficient, however, to fully characterize the relations between sex and the brain (4). Such characterization is necessary for studying sex effects on the brain as well as for studying brain structure, function, and dysfunction in general (4). We hope future studies will soon fill in this gap.”

–> some asshole wrote an article about how any study concluding that there are no significant brain differences between the sexes must have been subject to impartiality and bias, which is the natural conclusion you’d come to about a study created by women if you believe in the existence of the lady brain, the lovely ladies responded to this also:

“Thus, a critical point that is absent in Cahill’s article is that the effects of sex on the brain can be opposite under different conditions. That is, what is typical in one sex under some conditions may be typical in the other sex under other conditions. Moreover, the specific interactions between sex and other factors (environmental, developmental, genetic) are different for different brain regions, and are not necessarily stable over time. As a result, the brains of women and men each comprise a unique, ever-changing ‘mosaic’ of features, some of which may be more typical in males and some of which may be more typical in females.8Thus brains, in contrast to genitals, do not come in distinct, fixed male or female forms.”

Men and women are from Earth: Examining the latent structure of gender.

“Average differences between men and women are not under dispute, but the dimensionality of gender indicates that these differences are inappropriate for diagnosing gender-typical psychological variables on the basis of sex.”

This is important. There are generalized physiological differences between the brains of females and males but they are wildly inconsistent and there is no reason to believe they can cause gender dysphoria, that the gender dysphoria didn’t cause them, that gender is a biological trait or that the brain can somehow code for gender on a biological level. Some non-trans people have brain structures associated with the opposite sex and some trans people don’t have those structures.

Sex differences in the adult human brain: Evidence from 5,216 UK Biobank participants

“There were very small correlations between brain variables and the cognitive tests, and these associations did not differ by sex (consistent with a prior meta-analysis on thelink between brain volume and intelligence [49]). Mediation modelling suggested that, for verbal-numerical reasoning, a very large portion (up to 99%) of the modest sex difference was mediated by brain volumetric and surface area measures. Smaller fractions (up to 38%) of the modest link between sex and reaction time could be explained by volume or surface area.”

Basically, there are physiological differences between male and female brains but they don’t necessarily inform sexually disparate outcomes in terms of cognitive performance

From an article about the study:

“….there do appear to be many differences between male and female brains, but there’s also tons of overlap. The obvious question, when it comes to sex-based brain-structure differences, is whether they are the cause of behavioral differences. Differences alone don’t necessarily explain anything: If women are socialized to act differently than men from a very young age, this could lead to different sorts of brain structures, especially in a set of brains whose owners are all middle-aged or older.”

Beyond sex differences: new approaches for thinking about variation in brain structure and function

“ We argue that the existence of differences between the brains of males and females does not unravel the relations between sex and the brain nor is it sufficient to characterize a population of brains…given that sex interacts with other factors to affect the brain, sex effects on the brain must be understood as context-dependent, where context relates to the specific environmental, developmental and genetic conditions under which sex effects were assessed and under which the animals developed. “

I had wanted to remind the room that in my lifetime, women were excluded from sport outright. I had few female role models to look up to in athletics, and they did not exist at all in the racewalk. Even though the men’s racewalk had been an Olympic event since 1908, the women’s racewalk wasn’t included for another 84 years. Women who excelled in the pole vault, triple jump, hammer throw, steeplechase and distance events were also excluded. So many opportunities denied, so many milestones that never materialized – all because we are women.

I wanted to remind the audience of the backward logic behind excluding women. Until 1972, women were unable to compete at racing distances longer than 800 metres, because the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) was concerned about women’s bodies – specifically, our reproductive systems. The major worry with the triple jump, for example, was that women’s uteruses might fall out. The fear around the gruelling training regimen of distance athletes was that it would lead to amenorrhea (a stop in menstruation) and the loss of reproductive capacity. Ironically, when I did become pregnant, I had to prove that my ability to reproduce did not affect me as a competitor. My funding under the Sport Canada Athlete Assistance Program was cut by 30 per cent because – and here, Sport Canada was referring to “my having a baby" – I had “intentionally jeopardized my high-performance status.” If I were to have had a second or third child, I would have had my funding cut further. I won that fight after filing a human-rights complaint – but it only reaffirmed that these organizations get you both coming and going.

The fight is not over – in a way, there are even more fronts that demand our attention.