Every damn time we try to talk about our bodies, our boundaries, our safety—here they come. A loud, disruptive chorus of women trying to shut down the
Every damn time we try to talk about our bodies, our boundaries, our safety—here they come. A loud, disruptive chorus of women trying to shut down the conversation.
Right on cue.
We’re not even allowed to speak about pain, discomfort, trauma, or our own right to say “no” without some woman—usually untouched by the experience—jumping online to tell the rest of us how we should feel.
This time? It’s mammograms.
And before I even get started, let me say this plainly:
I do not want males performing mammograms on me.
Period.
I’ve had enough strange, uncomfortable, and outright traumatic experiences with male gynecologists to swear them off for the rest of my living days. I am not alone. I’ve worked one-on-one with Survivors. I’ve facilitated healing circles. This is not just me.
And now here we go again. Male inclusion into deeply intimate, sensitive procedures involving our breasts, our chests, our pain. Of course they want in. But when I raise my concerns? When I talk about the pain—not just “discomfort”—pain—I’m met with a gaslight parade of women saying, “It didn’t hurt me.”
Okay.
It didn’t hurt you.
But this ain’t your body.
You don’t have my breasts. You don’t live in my skin. You do not speak for me.
There’s a significant amount of touching involved in these procedures. Maybe not with your body—but with mine, yes.
So stop telling women what hurts.
Stop saying it’s “just uncomfortable.”
Stop pushing women to silence again—to stay polite, compliant, and invisible—again.
We are still healing. We are still surviving systems that have tried to kill us off, quietly and politely.
Let me be clear:
I don’t owe my body to medical “progress.”
I don’t owe my privacy, safety, or sacredness to the comfort of others.
If you trust men in these spaces? That’s your call. But it doesn’t work for me.
And you don’t get to take that from me just because you’re louder or have more approval from institutions who never protected me anyway.
Because this is the same world where Black women and babies die from indifference in hospitals.
Where the Black maternal mortality rate is a national disgrace.
Where many women all over this planet are groomed to feel like objects, and then expected to act like tools.
We don’t even stop to ask what’s being taken from women when we’re forced to act like it’s all fine.
And here’s what gets me:
Men will fight you for stepping on their sneakers.
They will defend their barbershop chair like it’s holy ground.
But women? We’re expected to open our legs, our breasts, our silence, and our souls—on demand—and smile through it.
Absolutely not.
If you’re fine with it, fine.
But don’t gaslight the rest of us who are drawing sacred lines.
Don’t shame women who refuse to make their bodies available to strangers in the name of “modern care.”
And do not tell me what hurts.
I know my body.
I know my boundaries.
And I am done begging for them to be respected.
And, to our readers all over the United States and in Singapore, France, and Germany—your healing matters here. WE see YOU!
