Medical Misogyny: We're Still Fighting for Equality
Women's rights and needs are still not taken seriously
Here in Canada, every resident — whether permenent or temporary, in the case of work visas — has the right to medical care. As an immigrant, you typically have to wait a few months to apply for your card, but once you have it you’re in.
That safety net is one of the best parts of life in my country; I have the security of knowing that I will never go into debt as a result of needing medical care. If I break a leg or develop a serious disease like cancer, I will never have to stress about the cost of treatment.
Because I was born here, I am automatically covered by the taxes all Canadian residents pay.
I will never have to fight an insurance company or pay out of pocket for the procedures or hospital visits I’ll need throughout my lifetime. I might have to pay for my medication, but that’s what private insurance is for in my Province.
I don’t currently have that private insurance, but my prescription medication is inexpensive and I can easily afford it. My total out of pocket expenses in any given year is less than $100 Canadian.
Does that mean our healthcare is perfect? Of course not! No system is without flaws, and we’re especially struggling right now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have a shortage of doctors and nurses, which makes it harder for patients to access care.
Psst: If you’re a medical professional or healthcare worker looking to leave the States, please try for Canada! You are so, so badly needed, and we would welcome you with open arms!
Not impossible, mind you. I’ve just had multiple medical appointments back to back these past couple of weeks without a problem. It’s just more of a hassle than it used to be.
Every Province in Canada has its own healthcare system and each Province provides slightly different forms of coverage, but generally speaking it is required by law to cover anything medically necessary for a patient’s health.
If it significantly impacts your health, it can be completely covered and you’ll never see a bill. Elective surgeries that don’t impact your health might not be covered — that depends on the Province and your situation.
It’s nice to have that peace of mind.
What’s not so nice is that, as a woman, convincing doctors that I need that care can be a more difficult proposition. Due to my sex, my medical needs are still often dismissed.
Medical misogyny still exists here, just like it does everywhere else.
Recently I had my feminine health check up. This involves a pap smear —uncomfortable, but quick — and a discussion of my sexual history and medications. It was a typical, routine visit to the clinic.
During the course of the discussion we got to chatting about feminine reproductive healthcare in Canada while the nurse set up the room for my appointment. In that discussion, the subject of the HPV vaccine came up.
HPV is a virus transmitted through skin-to-skin contact. It’s extremely common, damn near every individual human will contract at least one strain of it at some point through their lives, and often more than once. If you’ve had warts, you’ve had a strain of HPV.
While many strains of HPV are passed through any contact with infected skin — I picked up warts as a kid, likely through contact with another kid who had them — the most dangerous strains are passed most easily through more adult activities.
Unlike with other sexually transmitted infections, condoms aren’t always an effective barrier for HPV. It’s sneaky like that. It also often doesn’t cause any symptoms, so it can be passed between people completely undetected and stick around for years. It’s damn near impossible to trace.
Usually your immune system eventually kills it, but if it fails to do so, some strains of HPV can linger in the body and cause cancer down the line. Fortunately, there’s a vaccine that works pretty dang well at preventing you from picking it up.
What I found out, though, is that after the age of 26, women in my Province are no longer offered the vaccine for free. Apparently this is because of an extremely outdated study from decades in the past — they found that women past the age of 26 are expected to be married and no longer seeking sexual partners.
They never bothered to update the data with the times. As such, if I were to get the vaccine at my ripe old age of 31, I would be charged up to $600 for the shots.
This is blatant, unthinking misogyny. Dating at 31 is no longer unexpected or even remotely surprising. Hell, I’m just now getting married after five years as a couple. This is mine and my partner’s first marriage, both of us in our 30s and him 6 years older than me!
And, shock horror, we’ve both had a couple relationships before we settled down with each other.
Late marriage, divorce, and dating all throughout a woman’s lifetime is the norm in 2025.
Note: I’m saying ‘woman’, but I’m not only talking about cisgender women. Female bodied people are more at risk for developing cancer from HPV, but it does impact male bodies and all gender identities. Transgender and non-binary people are equally at risk and should take their health very seriously.
Female health is often disregarded in medical science. Research into how female bodies function differently from males is often underfunded or not given priority.
Hell, even car safety tests are run using dummies built to mimic the average male body, causing a higher rate of severe injury and death for AFAB people in car accidents. They design vehicles to protect men, and leave us in the lurch.
Cisgender men remain centered in all discussions of health and safety.
And they wonder why we still talk about fighting the patriarchy!
Reproductive healthcare is a hot-button issue in the United States.
Here in Canada, we still have the legal right to choose whether we want to continue a pregnancy or terminate it. We have the freedom and privacy to make that decision with the assistance of a doctor, and that’s the way it should be.
Pregnancy and childbirth are still dangerous, even with our advanced medical knowledge, and both cause permanent changes to your body that you can’t always predict. Some people still die due to complications, and some develop lifelong illnesses that can be debilitating.
Both for your mental and physical health, for your financial wellbeing and that of a potential child, you should have the chance to weigh the pros and cons and make a judgement call.
Not everyone wants to be a parent, and that’s okay.
And while I personally see this as a completely obvious fact, there are people who still don’t agree. Some people have it in their heads that if a woman is pregnant — no matter how she got pregnant, willingly or otherwise — it’s her duty to carry the fetus to term.
They think that termination of a pregnancy is equivalent to the murder of a child, and that ‘my body, my choice’ doesn’t apply because it includes the death of a different body.
Leaving out the fact that most terminations take place before there is a body, and that so-called “late-term abortions” only occur when either the fetus won’t survive, or the mother’s health is at extreme risk, I find this idea faulty on its face.
To my mind, the argument about fetal personhood is understandable at an emotional level, but in terms of legal precedent it’s irrelevant.
Legally speaking, nobody has the right to force me to use my body to keep theirs alive.
You cannot legally compel me to donate my organs to another person for any reason; you need my fully informed and freely given consent to do that. I can withdraw that consent at any time.
You can’t even harvest my organs after I’m dead unless I gave you written permission while I was still alive and fully lucid.
So, if it’s a woman’s duty to carry a fetus to term against her will, then you think that the rights to her own body and who gets the use of her organs should be less than those of a deceased organ donor.
You think a corpse should have more legal rights and protections than a living woman.
Even if I grant you that a fetus in the womb is a distinct, living person with their own bodily autonomy, it doesn’t matter. My bodily autonomy remains intact, and I am not morally obligated to act as a life support system against my will.
If a person does not want to be pregnant, that ought to be the end of the conversation. At least in my opinion.
But the discussion of reproductive healthcare goes beyond abortion — sometimes the discussion is framed in terms of whether a person has the right to voluntarily prevent pregnancy or not.
Sometimes, the choice to surgically prevent pregnancy is still not available to women.
Another common instance of medical misogyny is the rejection of sterilization procedures.
The reasons doctors might reject voluntary sterilization are varied, but some common ones include:
You might regret it later
What if you get married and your husband wants kids?
You need to have birthed at least two children first
You’re too young to make that decision
And in a few memorable anecdotes, the reason given was: “What if you get re-married and the next husband wants children?”
As if a woman who was adamant about getting her tubes tied would date, have a long-term relationship and eventually marry a man who wants biological children.
The reasons that people might want to be permenantly sterilized can vary. Some people have serious health issues that make pregnancy dangerous, or have hereditary conditions they don’t want to pass on.
Some people have tokophobia, which is a severe phobia that makes pregnancy extremely traumatic. Some are on medication for mental illnesses that they could not continue to take through pregnancy, so it’s safer to avoid the issue altogether.
Some transgender people find menstruation and pregnancy a serious trigger for their dysphoria, and they may want to do away with it as part of their gender affirming care.
And some people are simply not interested in being parents and don’t want to risk pregnancy at all. They just straight up do not want to have children.
These are all perfectly valid reasons to seek procedures that prevent pregnancy.
Various forms of birth control exist and can be effective, although none of them are 100% perfect at preventing pregnancy. And even if they were, not everyone can safely rely on them for other reasons.
I myself can’t use hormonal birth control. I’ve tried multiple formulations, and every single time I got severely sick. My liver was damaged by the medication and I was forced to stop using them. Other people experience side effects that range from weight gain all the way up to clotting and strokes.
It’s unfortunate, because they can be very helpful for managing my endometriosis, but it’s not worth the potentially life-threatening complications. Even an IUD, though generally safe, carries potential risks that some uterus-having-folks may be uncomfortable with.
For people like me who can struggle to find effective methods of prevention, cutting out the middle man and seeking tubal ligation is an attractive option. I haven’t personally gone for it yet, but I’ve certainly considered it!
Legally speaking, voluntary sterilization should be available. Here in Canada, it’s entirely legal and available over the age of 18, so long as the patient is fully informed and aware that it is permenant and difficult to reverse.
But the difference between what is legally allowed and what a doctor will willingly do can be vast. Finding a provider who will sign off on tubal ligation is often extremely difficult.
And all of this doesn’t even count the religious crackpots who want to ban birth control altogether for ‘morality reasons.’ You know — the same people who don’t let their kids go through sex-ed and then throw their daughters out of the house when they get pregnant in their teens.
Sorry guys, I’m not pulling punches on this one. I’ve met these people and they piss me off.
Medical misogyny is a pervasive problem with wide ranging consequences. From making moralistic and outdated assumptions about marriage and kids, from denying a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, and even completely dismissing her concerns.
Hell, there are even doctors in this day and age who still think that the cervix — part of the vagina and uterus — doesn’t have the nerve endings to feel pain. They’ll not bother offering pain medication during biopsy or IUD placement procedures and tell her to ‘stop whining’ as she screams.
I’ve heard the horror stories. That ‘just a little pinch’ line is bullshit.
And so, people who are assigned female at birth are routinely treated with ignorance and disdain, told to suck up discomfort or put their concerns and bodily autonomy aside for the sake of the men in their lives.
Some are even conditioned to endure painful sex for the sake of their boyfriends and husbands. That ol’ religious bullshit again.
These issues are a stark and painful reminder of why the fight for equal rights, basic respect and dignity is not over. Not even close.
As long as our health is not taken seriously, as long as we’re treated as overly dramatic and hysterical when we report pain, as long as our bodily autonomy is treated as unimportant, we have battles that must be fought.
We’re stuck on the front lines from the moment we’re born.
It isn’t fair that AFAB people are routinely disregarded by the medical field, and it’s doubly unfair that so many of our elders have been trained to believe that this is normal, expected and nothing to make a fuss over.
Our health — especially sexual health — is treated like the kind of thing you should only talk about in private, and certainly not in polite company. It’s something shameful and gross, especially if it has to do with…you know…Aunt Flow.
Well, I call bullshit. I won’t be quiet. I’m blunt and up front with it, and I don’t give a damn; after my first ‘boyfriend’ — using the term loosely — indicated he was grossed out by menstruation, I made damn sure my later partners were aware that I would not be hiding my pain to protect their feelings.
My soon-to-be-husband doesn’t even blink at it. He’s there with pads and a hot cup of tea, and the only question he asks is how I’m feeling. He reacts the same way I’d react to him being sick; affection and support.
We should expect nothing less.
We shouldn’t settle for somebody who treats our bodies like objects of shame. And we damn sure shouldn’t settle for a healthcare system that looks at us the same way.
Medical misogyny is a serious problem, it leads to death and harm that doesn’t need to happen, and it is a problem that can be solved.
For the sake of the next generation, it must be.
Solidarity wins.
This is an excellent article, thank you for sharing. Important points and an easy read.
A seriously excellent article Sam. Both interesting and informative.