This isn’t just data: it’s a map

This morning, cartoonist Kate Beaton published an article about her sister’s diagnosis, treatment, and recent death from cervical cancer. It’s a heartbreaking story, and one that shines a light on yet another sector of society in which women are not believed—not often enough, not quickly enough, not enough to save our lives.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Becky Beaton today, nor about my own experience of not being believed by medical professionals: when I had a stroke four years ago, doctors spent two days telling me it was “just stress.”

I got through that process, because of luck and because I’m white and middle-class and fairly practiced at navigating systems. But not all women have those privileges, and black and indigenous women in particular are granted even less credibility by the medical community. This is a problem.

And it's a problem with wide-branching roots. See also: Brett Kavanaugh’s assault of Dr. Christine Ford is awful enough, but to see how Ford has been treated since telling her story—from constant disbelief to active death threats—is sickening. This morning my therapist said she finds hope in the fact that Dr. Ford is in the news at all; she sees it as a sign of change. All I see is a society that hates women so much, it would rather burn than believe us.

Doctors didn’t disbelieve me or Becky Beaton because individual men sat behind their desks and said, “I refuse to listen to a woman.” But men—even good ones—are socialized to see us as lesser, in subtle, intricate ways, and this socialization leaks into everything: medical care, parenting, academia, corporate hiring, law and order, internet culture, emotional labor, domestic partnerships. It’s in the water.

Believe women.

Consider supporting the March for Black Women, scheduled for September 29 and 30 in DC and NYC. The Violence Against Women Act expires at the end of this month; the march is in pursuit of policies that will stop “gender violence, the persistent feminization of poverty, the growing Black female prison population, restrictions to citizenship, the deportation of Black and Brown people, restrictions to health care [and] reproductive justice, and the ongoing war on women.”