26/02/2026
I shared my story this week about 12 years of being told my chronic pain, flattening fatigue and blood loss was “just hormones.”
The article was about endometriosis, but the hundreds of comments were about something else.
Some kind, some cruel, but mostly predictable.
“Another undiagnosable nothing burger.”
“Girls’ bits problems. Yawn.”
“Just change doctor.”
“Have a baby, that’ll sort it out.”
It’s so familiar to me, not just online but in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices too.
When women talk about pain publicly, it becomes debatable, exaggerated, a personality flaw, a personal failure and a gender war.
Endo affects around 1 in 9 Australians assigned female at birth. Diagnosis still takes years.
And yet the reflex is often doubt.
Why is women’s pain negotiable? How do our cultural reactions to women’s pain shape what happens in clinics too?
I’m not done here.
