As someone who has gone on and office various medications to treat mental illness, this post has resonated strongly with me. I have received criticism for opting out of exhaustive and what I felt was useless talk therapy (no, I don’t need to find a better therapy, I just need to not be doing blah blah therapy) and for opting for chemical means to turn off the sad.

Since I do not benefit for the “why” I felt this was the best choice for me. I don’t why I was sad. I just wanted not to be. I am excited by this post for articulating the what I have felt about for a very long time as it relates to specific choices and how they are framed by feminists.

we can’t win – no matter our choice, we will be criticized or policed by someone. there is no option we can take that will let us escape that judgment.

Because of the locations of my pain (primarily spread through my low back and hips), I am fully expecting a “no easy answers” scenario — maybe nothing identifiable, maybe identifiable but not discretely removable, etc. And I’m prepared to be able to work out, with my provider, a “best bet” treatment/management plan that is not perfect. Unfortunately, I’m also preparing myself for that plan to be “not good enough” for various other people who I will tell about it.

I had the same reactions when I shared with my family about my endometriosis: when I was given birth control pills continuously so I wouldn’t have (as m)any periods, I was thinking it was good news, “hallelujah! my doctor just spared me a great deal of pain!” But I was informed by several family members (and, later, have encountered a quite similar view in certain radfem circles) that this was unGodly/unfeminine/not right somehow, to not have a period, and it must be sinful/misogynist (how dare I not enjoy my painful, painful ladybits)/extremely unhealthful to not have a period, and so on. And when I called home to tell them about my laparoscopy, everyone kept asking me when they’d be taking my uterus out — because that’s the natural thing to do, of course; uterus isn’t perfect, must be removed!

Those reactions are all over the map, but they’re all the things that get thrown at disabled women (& PWD in general), in part because our bodies are understood as “weird” or somehow especially corporal (by which I mean: when a different person’s body performs a function, it’s weird/gross/confusing, but when a normal person’s body performs a function, it just is; our bodies end up being viewed as more earthly or animal, and of course in a Christian culture you can make the connections from there).

The moon-goddess branches of feminism have always felt off-putting to me, not because I don’t appreciate the fact that it *is* a good thing to reclaim as positive what society has defined as negative for all this time, but because of the extremely ableist structure that ends up being reinforced. You see this in the “health-conscious” upper-middle-class-white-urban-liberal branches of feminism, too. You might have different tropes flung at you, but they’re both policing your body and your decisions about it.

I’m recovering from a diagnostic laparoscapy & hysteroscopy to diagnose debilitating pelvic pain; the working hypothesis was endometriosis.

Before deciding to have this surgery, I consulted with my GP and the gynecologist to whom he referred me. In separate appointments, we discussed what’s already been done to try to manage the problem as well as what my priorities were in terms of various pain/reproduction concerns. I decided — and my health care providers agreed — that this procedure was the best next step for me.

And I *am* grateful to my partner and my friends who were supportive of *me* making this decision.

That said, there were also a fair number of people — to whom I’m close enough that I even talk about this with them — who let it be known that they thought I was doing the wrong thing. Who thought that I was taking an unnecessary risk for problems that could be managed with hormonal contraceptives — despite knowing (or, where they didn’t know, not bothering to *ask* about) the history I’ve had with those. Or, on the flip side, who thought that I was remaining a “slave to my uterus” by not having the whole thing cut out — despite not knowing that I may want to become pregnant in the future and that removing my uterus may not actually fully relieve the pain.

And yes, had they *asked,* I may very well have felt comfortable explaining this to these people. But they did not ask; they told. And they did so in a way that clearly suggested (*at least* — some people said this explicitly), that what I was doing with *my body* was the wrong thing.

And, yeah, it’s hard for me to mesh that experience with my ideas of what feminism should be.

So, if we point to commenters as Super Anna’s Blog Of Awesome Feminist Stuff as being particularly prone to policing bodies and demanding people follow certain medical procedures to be Health Enough To Be Worth Caring About, other spaces where such behaviour is also tolerated won’t be considered as a problem. “Well, FWD called out the commenters over here, so they’re obviously letting the commenters as meloukhia’s Blog Of Feminism & Awesome OFF THE HOOK!!!!” (Or, alternately, “Obviously what the folks do at meloukhia’s Blog of Feminism & Awesome is okay, because only the commenters at Super Anna’s Blog of Awesome Feminist Stuff were called out.)

Focusing on generally trends rather than specific instances invites people to think about general trends in their own readings and interactions. When we say “Don’t police women’s bodies regarding medical treatments they choose or do not choose to undergo”, we’re asking you to not only think about “Well, that feminist blog over there”, but also your own social interactions, the books and other material you read, the PSAs that you see every day, etc.

This gets into issues like “the personal is political” and “consciousness raising” and the like – we talk about our experiences because our experiences are meaningful, and in talking about them, we challenge dominant ideas on what is okay and what is not.
.-= Anna´s last blog ..*hides* =-.