Twitter thread on this:
Cervix knowledge: a thread. My Grandma was diagnosed with a prolapsed cervix when she was 93. It caused her immense pain. Unfortunately, she had dementia and was in a home at the time. It was me listening to the things she said over and over about her 'minny' that made me guess.
When I told the staff what I thought it was and that they needed to get a Dr to check her out, they told me that old ladies don't have cervixes. I had to argue with them that they very much do. Of course, as soon as a Dr examined her, a cervical prolapse was confirmed. THANK YOU.
My Gran was a clever woman but had to leave school at 13 to go into service (be a maid). And no-one ever taught her words for her own anatomy. I taught her the word vagina in her 70s. But she knew women got problems "in their minny" and tried even when senile to communicate that.
If she'd not been senile and a Dr asked if she was experiencing cervical pain, she would've said no, because she would've not known what it was and been too embarrassed to ask. For all I know, she was asked before she got dementia and said no when the answer was yes (I hope not).
I should not have had to be the person who diagnosed my own grandma's cervical prolapse. But it is my proudest achievement that I did, and gave her 4 pain-free last month. Which I couldn't have done if I didn't know that being a woman is a biological reality, not an identity. END
twitter.com/ThrupennyBit/status/1007989301525860353
Public health must be for the genuinely marginalised (by which I mean people at the actual bottom, not blue-haired bourgeois narcissists). Policies like this won't affect middle class people - they know how to monopolise resources already. Public health has to reach out to people who don't access services - people with literacy deficits, language deficits, who are intimidated by "posh" words.