dicrocoeliumdendriticum:

eccentric-nucleus:

imo the thing about certain diseases or disorders predominantely affecting one gender or the other is the criteria here isn’t someone’s essential “male” or “female” body. did you get exposed to a lot of testosterone in the womb? grats yr at risk for certain things. do you have working ovaries? do you have hypertrophic Skene’s glands (aka a prostate)? do you have a substantial amount of breast tissue? what’s the ratio of testosterone:estrogen in yr body? what’s the absolute amount of estrogen in yr body?

all of these things are risk factors for all sorts of different things, and if you want to break people down into risk categories, there are actual factual predictors for that kind of thing. and they’re not “is male” or “is female”, b/c those are incoherent categories

like make no mistake: “male” and “female” are easy categories, but they’re not really “medically accurate” wrt risk, they just happen to correlate roughly well for most people. and when i say “most people” i don’t even mean “non-intersex cis people”, i mean “people with a statistically average hormone load & sexual differentiation profile”.

kind of like how estimating yr height and weight from a statistical profile of people in yr country only works if you are, in fact, roughly close to being of average height and weight.

to add on to this, in many cases diagnosis based on being “male” or “female” is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy based on what is perceived to be common knowledge. for example, say a cis man and a cis woman walk go to the doctor with identical symptoms – they could very easily be diagnosed differently, even if the reason they have the same symptoms is because they have the same problem to begin with. this happens a lot with heart disease; men are statistically at higher risk, but that happens because women go undiagnosed, and they go undiagnosed because men are supposed to be at higher risk, not women. It’s a vicious circle (sort of like the whole “women are more emotional because they’re socialized to be more emotional because in general they’re believed to be more emotional” thing)

the point is that biomedicine is a LOT more subjective than we think. yeah sure we like to believe that we’re accurately sorting out what’s wrong with our bodies, but think about it – someone somewhere has to sit down and decide what groups of symptoms count as a disease, which means it’s all too easy for personal bias to get involved in diagnoses when they’re supposed to be completely objective. so we construct these categories of “male” and “female” and say they are useful and important, when really they just make it really easy to perpetuate cycles of misinformation