I want to talk a bit about how women are treated when retrieving medical care, especially fat women. Now, while I myself am not a woman, everyone around me doesn’t actually know that, and therefore they still treat me like one.
Here are a few things that have happened to me:
- When I first started developing stomach pains, no one really took it seriously, telling me that I “don’t know what real pain is” and that I was a “just” a teenaged girl who wanted to skip school and get attention. We blew through so many doctors bc they just weren’t taking me at my word that something was wrong. It took literally two years of searching for us to get an answer.
- Even though my dad also has crohn’s disease, no one considered it as a possibility for my symptoms. It wasn’t until I landed in the ER with an obstructed intestine that I actually got diagnosed. Doctors not taking my pain and symptoms seriously literally almost killed me.
- Similar things were said when I was getting treatment for mental illness as a middle schooler. I’m just an immature girl, I’m too soft and sensitive, I’m crazy and hormonal and melodramatic.
- When I lost 60 pounds in two months due to constant nausea and vomiting bc of the previously mentioned blocked intestine, my GI at the time wasn’t concerned at all bc it’s not like I didn’t “have mass to spare.” Any weight loss is good weight loss, apparently.
- Last year I had a similar thing happen and lost 40 pounds in one month. A nurse commented on how it must be “a nice perk” to lose so much weight so “easily.” At the time, I was vomiting multiple times a day and was often bed-ridden bc I was just too nauseous to even walk from my room to the bathroom.
- The year before that, again, constant nausea and vomiting that meant 30 pounds in a month and no one at all found this to be a problem.
- Just in general, people lauded the fact that I had lost weight, considering it an obvious improvement. You look so good, you look so healthy! I’m not healthy. I was literally starving to death.
- Speaking of starving to death, the first time I tried to seek out treatment for anorexia and bulimia as a teenager, I was told “Oh sweetie, you would be skinny if you actually had those.”
- A dozen people have told me the reason for my full-body muscle and joint pain is because I’m too heavy and it’s straining my body. If I exercised and lost the weight, the pain would disappear. Well hey guess what, I do exercise regularly and I still never lost weight except for those periods of times when I was, that’s right, starving to death bc I couldn’t keep food down. Also, no amount of exercise in the world is going to vanish away my fibromyalgia.
- Symptoms totally unrelated to weight were still always contributed to said weight. Got weird stomach pains? Lose weight. Getting regular headaches and migraines? Lose weight.
- I lost my appetite for about a year (and it’s still something I haven’t really gained back all the way yet), and when I asked if there was anything I could take to help that, I was basically told “You don’t have to worry about not being able to eat just yet. But we can revisit this if you ever become underweight.”
- When I got started on a crisis medication after my latest stint in the hospital, everyone was so concerned about it and wanted me to wean off of it as soon as possible. The reason why? It can cause weight gain. Because weight gain outweighs the benefits of having my symptoms managed.
- And yknow what? It DID cause weight gain, and even though I know the medication helped me significantly, I still struggled a lot with suddenly being 20 pounds heavier bc all my life I was told that being fat is the absolute worst thing I could ever be, even worse than being so sick that I ended up in the ER five times in the span of three months, with two of those visits ending in emergency surgeries.
- At another point, a doctor was reluctant to start me on a new medication bc I was “female.” Apparently if you get pregnant while on the medication, it can cause such severe birth defects that you have no choice but to get an abortion. And even though I assured my doctor over and over and over again that 1) I’ll literally never have sex and 2) I don’t want kids (to the point where if something DID go horribly wrong and I got pregnant, I already knew I would get an abortion), that wasn’t good enough. He literally said “If you ever a man, I’d have no problem prescribing it for you.”
- Another pregnancy related incident: A doctor not wanting to prescribe something that could possibly result in me becoming infertile. Once again, I don’t want kids. Not to mention that, with being how sick I am, I wouldn’t even be able to sustain a pregnancy as it is. Yet my doctor has no problems starting me on medications that could destroy my kidneys and liver. A hypothetical fetus that I don’t even want is more important than working organs, right?
- When my pain doctor told me about two medications that, when taken together, could limit estrogen production (thus the result of my awesome new sideburns), he immediately assumed I’d want to try a different combination of medications. He doesn’t know I’m trans but even if I wasn’t, I literally wouldn’t care? I’d rather become hairier than usual than to live with pain and anxiety. He just couldn’t wrap his head around it.
- When I had a weird growth on my neck, we got it checked out; it was benign but could leave a scar, so my doctor offered a cortosone shot in my goddamn neck and obviously I said no. He was so surprised that me - a “girl” - wouldn’t mind having a scar
Anyway, I’m sure there’s plenty more, but this is all I can think of right now. There seriously needs to be an overhaul of how medical professionals treat dfab patients bc at best it’s awkward and uncomfortable and at worst, it leads to a lot of suffering and possibly even death.
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