I was told passing out due to period pain is normal for women

Medical misogyny is the reason behind women enduring endless pain, writes Hannah Shewan Stevens. What will it take for women to be taken seriously?

Pain claws at my stomach like a chainsaw ripping through wood. Each cramp feels like it’s conspiring to kill me. I stumble into the shower, hoping the heat might dull the agony. Minutes later, I wake on the floor, hot water pounding my face as I struggle to breathe. It’s period time again.

“It’s just part of being a woman; you’ll get used to it,” my female GP told me when I was 15. Her smirk felt like a slap. I had almost sprinted to her office after my fainting episode, naively thinking she might offer a smidge of sympathy – or, better yet, some investigation into my abnormal period pain.

I should’ve known better, because misogyny comes baked into all medical care.

By then, I’d already spent a year enduring periods so brutal they brought me to my knees. Each cycle only worsened, but this doctor’s dismissal marked the start of a nearly 15-year battle to be heard – a journey defined by relentless medical misogyny.

Male or female, it didn’t matter; GPs refused to listen. I was called “overdramatic”, told my pain was “totally normal” and mocked for “overthinking a natural process”. They handed me birth control like it was a magic fix, prescribed painkillers that wrecked my gut and left me to spiral into depression as my suffering grew.

One even told me to “wait it out” until I had children to fix the issue. Something I knew wouldn’t work, considering my mum faced the same gauntlet of misogynistic disbelief, birthed three children and never found relief. Neither she nor my grandmother ever got an accurate diagnosis for their recurrent gynaecological crises.

I fought for a diagnosis, in part, for them. I wanted answers for generation after generation of mysteries trivialised as “normal” by medicine. Over and over again, doctors dismissed my pain as “standard”, insisting that “most women deal with such pain”, but that shouldn’t make it normal for any of us. No one born with a womb should suffer through extreme pain alone, and yet so many of us do.

The source of my shower faint took almost 15 years to identify, however it takes an average of seven and a half years for someone to be diagnosed with endometriosis. It can only be discovered through exploratory surgery because it often doesn’t show up on ultrasounds or MRIs.

In 2021, after years of begging and essentially diagnosing myself with endometriosis following in-depth research, I got lucky: the NHS farmed out my referral to a private hospital where a five-minute phone call fast-tracked me to surgery. Given the agonising bodywide pain and debilitating stomach issues, the gynaecologist was astounded no one had identified it earlier.

The procedure revealed extensive lesions on my urethra, bladder, both ovaries and around my cervix. But medical misogyny didn’t end with my diagnosis. After the operation, despite it being far from curative, I was discharged without so much as a follow-up call. It was another cruel reminder that women are often left to manage the fallout of our pain alone.

Now, three years later, I’m back on the eternal waiting list, desperate for more treatment as my endometriosis symptoms reach ever more excruciating heights. Medical misogyny extends far beyond the diagnostic stages; women are regularly left to languish in agony, trying to cope with conditions our medical research is decades behind in understanding with barely any medical intervention.

The culture of disbelief and dismissal discussed in this week’s Women and Equalities Committee Report is just the tip of the iceberg. And it is an iceberg, one of monumental proportions. Women’s health is in dire straits – and too many of us are being drastically impacted by the gender health gap.

One in three people born with a cervix in the UK will suffer from a reproductive or gynaecological health issue in their lifetime, however less than 2.5 per cent of publicly funded research focuses on these areas.

One study from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company estimates that the women’s health gap equals 75 million years of life lost due to poor health or early death every single year. Those figures should shock us all into action, but we’ve understood this crisis for decades, and still, too many of those with power sit motionless, apparently happy to accept this tragic status quo.

Misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our society that it has become accepted as the norm. Women expect to be disbelieved and constantly anticipate misogynistic dismissals and assumptions that “being in pain is part of being a woman”.

We hope, often in vain, that one day, a doctor will listen without allowing misogyny to infect the conversation. My journey to a diagnosis should’ve started after I collapsed in that shower. Instead, I spent years wasting precious energy begging someone to listen.

Somewhere in this country, a girl is speaking to her doctor, listening to the same derisive dismissal I endured. We all owe her so much more than this.

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