I’ve been on that journey myself being a chronically ill (from a young age which doesn’t help with the patronising and assumptions made, and apparently autistic, which I only found out as an adult because “autism is a boy’s condition”) woman.

I still, decades in, get the doubt and the “it’s all in your head” and the “just emotional” and all that nonsense. I’ve stopped going to the doctor because it’s just too distressing to try and break through that judgment and get any actual care. I won’t even call an ambulance at this point (in the UK, so not to do with cost) because I’ve been treated so poorly on several past occasions I’ve had to.

And yet I’m one of the lucky ones because eventually after years of fighting I was diagnosed with the illness I have and I’ve not been locked up on a psych ward for it (yet, though of course I was prescribed psych meds as first second and third resort to my pain complaint).

This is one in so so many ways that the patriarchy quietly keeps us down, and it’s so fucked up that when you try telling those who aren’t impacted by it about it, even if they don’t mean to, the easiest thing for them is to gaslight you because they’ve never experienced or witnessed this kind of treatment, and doctors are seen as infallible, so you must be imagining it, making it up, exaggerating - that’s all easier than accepting the reality of just how fucked up and oppressive such deeply respected institutions like that of medicine actually are (not just misogyny of course, but ableism, racism, queerphobias and so on). The people in these jobs are still just people, they are socialised in the same oppressive world the rest of us are, and carry the same biases as the rest of the population (if not often worse due to disproportionate privilege in the field).

I hate that this is just going to keep happening, and in many places get worse.