QueerTips Says (update): Pap tests and birth control matter, even if you’re queer
Hey queermos! Did you know the CDC released some new guidelines about when you should get a pap test? It also comes in a handy .pdf. Did you know and just not care, because you’re queer and figure that your awesome queerness makes your vagina and various vagina-parts coated in awesome Queer Titanium that keeps out infections, STDs and cancers?
We hate to break it to you, but if you have the parts— however much or little you use them, or with whom— and you’re over 21, you should get them regularly checked out. You never know when a family of goblins will move in there. Or, more seriously, whether you can detect cervical cancer early and save your own life.
Here is what the Center for Disease Control (otherwise known as the CDC) says about when you should get a pap test, what to do before the pap test, and all the stuff a pap test screens for. It’s incredibly important and can save your life. Even if you’re queer. Especially if you’re queer:
But here was a lesbian whose mother died of reproductive cancer, who has a history of painful and irregular periods, who just got left out, abandoned, and rendered invisible by a medical system that seems more comfortable with holding birth control hostage by requiring a Pap for pills than with peeling back the layers of paternalism, heterosexism, and health disparities to say, hey, yeah, you know what, it’s just really smart and super important for us to take a look at your cervix every now and then.
tl;dnr: Pap tests and HPV tests screen for cancer, and if you catch it early— which you will, since you should start getting screened when you’re 21— you can detect any cancers before they get out of hand and generally keep yourself and your reproductive organs safe and sound.
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