New book: "Unwell Women" by Elinor Cleghorn - history of women & medicine

[yetanotherusernameAgain]

Found this review on the Guardian website (of all places!)

www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/08/unwell-women-elinor-cleghorn-book

It's a history of how medicine has been (and still is) detrimental to women.

Unwell Women shows how the legacy of disenfranchisement and discrimination persists even today, resulting in the underrepresentation of women in medical trials, prevailing ideas that women’s pain is psychological or emotional, and an inadequate, at times hostile system that’s more likely to offer women antidepressants and tranquilizers than referral for further diagnosis and more targeted care.
…
Cleghorn places hope for the future, with a concluding chapter titled Believe Us. Women have long been thought of as unreliable narrators of their own bodies. Although modern medicine now allows women to educate themselves about their bodies (a luxury forbidden for centuries) and has provided women with opportunities to join the medical community, Cleghorn believes understanding women’s health remains a back-burner issue.

So well expressed. One for the reading list - thank you for posting the review, OP.

It looks great.

[looks at TBR pile]

[sobs]

@ArabellaScott

It looks great.

[looks at TBR pile]

[sobs]

There'll be some upside to the Gulag if we're allowed library privileges (what with it being next door to a holiday camp, if I recall Goldsmith's explainer correctly).

I saw this today but haven't read the full thing yet. Looks very interesting.

A Gulag with a library I could live with. Spa baths, too, hopefully?

Oh, there'll be a library, but only for re-education purposes. Judith Butler, Andrea Long Chu :/ Nothing focused on women or women's bodies will make it.

Thanks for sharing this OP.

Jesus, Precipice. Will there be cyanide pills available?

@ArabellaScott

Jesus, Precipice. Will there be cyanide pills available?

We'll have to become the Book People:

Another book I'll put on my wish list!
Also could do with some quiet gulag time to read all the others. Can you smuggle a kindle into a gulag?

I was about to buy this, looked promising, but then three paragraphs in (thanks amazon "Look inside"), I found:

Of course , not all women have uteruses, and not all people who have uteruses or menstruate, are women. But medicine, historically, has insisted on conflating biological sex with gender identity. Over centuries, medical knowledge about the organs and systems marked 'female' have been imbued with patriarcal notions of womanhood and femeninity. As medicine's understanding of female biology has expanded and evolved, it has constantly reflected and validated social and cultural expectations about who women are, what they should think, feel and desire and -above all else- what they can do with their own bodies. We understand today, that our biology does not determine our gender identity. For centuries, feminism has fought for the rights of all people not to have their lives limited by their basic biology. But medicine has inherited a gender problem. Medical myths about gender roles and behaviours, contructed as facts before medicine became and evidence-based science, have resonated perniciously. And these myths about female bodies and illnesses have enormous cultural sticking power. Today, gender myths are ingrained as biases that negatively impact the care, treatment and diagnosis of all people who identify as women.

How can anyone get it so spectacularly wrong?

😱How can anyone get it so spectacularly wrong? 😱

That is still in my wish list, it's coming out. Cleghorn is contributing to women's health being permanently relegated to the backburner and shrouded in ignorance.

not all women have uteruses, and not all people who have uteruses or menstruate, are women. But medicine, historically, has insisted on conflating biological sex with gender identity.

The conflation gets no better when it's Cleghorn wilfully confusing them rather than medicine.

The compulsory genuflection to the colonising men who are currently erasing women. Even appropriating our historical oppression.

I wonder if Caroline Criado-Perez has read It?

I used to know the author and keep meaning to read the book. She's extremely bright, sad to see she's swallowed the nonsense

@Completeginasaur CCP recommended it. I read it. It's changed my views on lots of things to do with women's health and opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. Notwithstanding the quotes on this thread. It's worth the read for the history alone.

medicine, historically, has insisted on conflating biological sex with gender identity.

WTF has gender identity got to do with the price of fish? Is it required to not make any sense? I can't parse it. Can anyone explain?

• and I'd missed your post, Embarrassing. Makes me nostalgic for a time when novels seemed to be meaningful.

@derob, @Missproportionate - I do not doubt that, but what I find mindblowing is how anyone can have all that knowledge which is clearly directly related to the biological aspect of being a woman, and then, switch off their brain, and say, but anyone can be a woman!

Further in her introduction Cleghorn makes it clear that the book is focused on women. And the rest of the book (with an occasional lapse into "people with") is so. I suspect there has been a touch of editorial interference...

"My focus on how medicine has insisted on pathologising 'femaleness', and by extension womanhood, means that my discussions have not extended to the medical history and experiences of trans, non-binary and gender-non conforming people. I do not, by any means, believe that gender identity is defined by the biological sex a person is assigned at birth. But I want to show how medicine, since its very beginnings, has enfolded discriminatory myths of binary gender difference into the formation of its knowledge."

I just had a little sci-fi flash of wishing we were already at the (totally fictional) stage where you could just push a button to order a book in either the GC or the TRA propaganda version. Very Philip K. Dick..

(Wanders off humming 'Where is my mind..')

discriminatory myths of binary gender difference

Remember the word 'discriminating' has three meanings:

1. Able to recognize or draw fine distinctions or judgments.
2. Serving to distinguish; distinctive.
3. Marked by or showing prejudice; discriminatory.

Lots of people act as if definition #1 was equivalent to definition #3.

Now that the female body she is writing about can be found in all new gender identity categories, what is the language that she can use about medical problems people with that body face today?

My understanding is that it is only allowed to have pejorative names (menstruators, ovary-carriers etc.) or that it is neutralised ('people'). Those changes will make future work like hers impossible.

I wish authors didn't accept impossible compromises of this kind, or at least acknowledged that they are contributing towards the erasure of the female body.

Also, I breathe fire whenever I hear 'gender non-conforming' lumped together with trans and non-binary. Old style feminism was all about everyone becoming gender non-conforming, but now it is both the right and the left who define women as people in pink dresses and makeup.

I’ve just bought copies for myself and DD, both of us have chronic conditions.

Marking place now and will report back.