To think men should not be allowed to be gynaecologists

[CaragianettE]

Just that, really. Saw one last week. He was trying to be helpful, but I really really really don’t want to discuss ‘do you get clots’ ‘do you experience flooding’ ‘do you find intercourse painful’ with a strange man. Yes it would be awkward with a strange woman too, but at least I know she likely has some lived experience of what we are talking about. TBH I also question men’s motives for choosing this job, not just the licence to look at strange women’s vaginas, but I think there’s something deep in the male psyche that just loves laying down the law to women about their reproductive systems. It’s a job for a woman, and while I know men were allowed to train for it in the past, I think they should now be phased out.

I have significant reservations about male midwives, breast surgeons and gynecologists. It is unfair to just dismiss these reservations as 'silly' when I may have good reason to feel this way. Women should be offered the choice of a female in hospital settings.

As I said before, there is some sort of internalized misogyny that leads to so many women saying “The best [insert traditional women’s role here] I ever dealt with was a man”.

It’s not. It’s just a self-selecting group. This is a thread against male OBGYN, so posters are sharing experiences to the contrary. I myself have never had a male OBGYN despite having ongoing issues and seeing quite literally dozens of consultants over the years (tbf most of those were since moving to the US where there are even fewer male OBGYN than in the UK, but still). So this thread has been an eye-opener, to the ‘post code’ lottery aspect of the NHS and the fact that patients seem to often not get a choice of doctor, which seems bonkers to me now I’m in the US.

The male midwife stories are a little odd though, I agree with you. Seems strange that so many MNetters have experienced a male midwife and all those experiences were nothing short of fantastic.

So it’s not possible that people can experience great care from a man and it’s just because women hate women?

You know some women are crap at their jobs, or someon doesn’t gel, even at that level?

I was diagnosed with a large invasive breast cancer l didn’t even know was there until a routine mammogram. It never occurred to me to ask if my consultant would be male or female, and yet I’d always thought that in that scenario l would prefer a female doctor. I guess when you hear the word ‘cancer’ your priorities change.

but lived experience can be different even woman to woman ?

Historically there have been more male gynocologists than female, so I don't know that I would call it traditionally a woman's role.

Regardless, I've been to men and women, I've always preferred a man. My family doctor is a woman, she's the best I've ever seen; my whole family sees her. Is that misandry, since general practitioners are traditionally men?

General practitioners are not generally men though, are they? That hasn’t been the case for over a decade.

Traditionally is is the operative word. Maybe there have been more female general practitioners in the past 10 years, but in the zillion years prior to that, it was a job primarily held by men. Thus, I think it could be considered traditionally a man's job.

I think most people have just talked about their own experience. If you have had serious medical issues and received excellent sometimes life saving care you can feel quite defensive of the doctor who gave it to you (particularly when it’s being suggested that there is something perverted about a man wanting to go into that speciality and there are assumptions being made about women having more empathy through having shared lived experience etc which may not always hold up in reality).

I have had two male breast surgeons. Both were excellent and very sensitive to my concerns about my appearance etc. I haven’t had a female breast surgeon (they literally do not exist in this country for the specific operation I had). If I say that my surgeons were very good, that is no comment on female surgeons. Nor would I usually make their maleness part of a conversation about them.

Not really, no? We could say that about jobs that continue to be male-dominated e.g. pilot, but when a job has been female dominated for 12 years and - most importantly - will get more and more female dominated based on the pipeline of trainees, then it’s not really a “man’s job” anymore, is it?

There used to be more male teachers than female until 1993, but no one would say teaching is traditionally a male job because of the “zillions of years” before 1993 when there were more male teachers than female teachers, would they.

Before gynaecology, women were historically tended to by other women during childbirth and probably sought advice from other women with regards to issues relating to sex, menstruation and menopause. This is still the case in many societies across the world without access to modern medicine. I think this is what people mean when they say gynaecology is historically female-dominated.

It's only relatively recently in modern medicine that gynaecology has been practised and at the time of its inception, medicine was dominated by men.