When Private Reasoning is Public Property

Womanhood and the Medical Establishment

So, this happened:

Reading my consent paperwork for refractive eye surgery, I did a double-take at the section above. (You can tell my eyes were dilated by the blurry photo — looked clear to me at the time!) Yep. There’s no context missing.

Mandatory paperwork for a common elective outpatient surgery asks women to disclose their personal reasons for having the procedure, but not men.

Of course, I don’t mind discussing my reasoning for having a surgery with the surgeon performing the procedure. I talked about it in detail during my evaluation. If you’re curious: I’m trying to get rid of my glasses because I do an extreme outdoor sport and it’s a pain to need prescription sunglasses and then worry about breaking or losing them in the wilderness.

It’s a different thing entirely when paperwork states, in black and white, that women are required to disclose their private thoughts for entry into their permanent medical record, while men are not. It’s a different thing entirely when the reason given for this is that I am presumed to have a uterus, if I identify as female. This, apparently, means I’m in a permanently pre-pregnant state. Even on birth control. Even though I don’t menstruate.

And, naturally, if women are permanently pre-pregnant, we are permanently in a state where at any given moment our right to privacy may be suspended in favor of the best interests of a fetus. Whether or not it’s a wanted fetus, from the time a fertilized egg exists within an adult female body, it will be viewed by many people as more important than its host.

A woman who has an abortion is expected only to disclose that history if she’s also prepared to disclose why her abortion was acceptable. Maybe she was crushingly poor and couldn’t support a child. Maybe her life was at risk. If she doesn’t have a sympathetic reason — if she just didn’t goddamn want to be pregnant— she is expected to lie, or not to reveal her abortion at all.

A woman with a functioning uterus, who wishes to choose permanent birth control, cannot find a doctor willing to implement it unless her personal reasoning is disclosed and found acceptable. Usually, “I already have children and feel my family is complete,” or “childbirth would threaten my life” are the two (the only two) reasons considered sufficient for a woman to make a permanent and irrevocable choice about her own fertility.

And what of the trans women who must read a form that shouts, “WOMEN ONLY” before a paragraph about pregnancy and nursing?

What of women who are unable to bear children? Cancer survivors? Intersex people who present female, but weren’t born with a uterus?

No, it’s not a big deal to reveal to my doctor’s office that my personal reasons for having my vision surgically corrected range from “not worrying about lost glasses in the wilderness on a horse” to “I’d like to be able to wear false eyelashes occasionally.”

But, yes, it’s a big deal to be reminded that my privacy doesn’t matter, not because nobody’s privacy matters to their doctor, but because when I check “female” on my patient information form I’m presumed to have a uterus capable of growing a human being within it, and that means the hypothetical future possibility of a fetus in my body is more important than whether or not I prefer to keep something to myself.

I will be returning my patient consent form with those lines filled in with the words, “I am neither pregnant nor nursing. I will not disclose any non-medical information that isn’t also required from men for this procedure.”

Because most doctors are reasonable people, I don’t anticipate that will be a problem. I doubt they’ll even notice. I won’t have struck any major blows against the patriarchy.

But, goddamnit, it’ll feel a lot better than letting myself be seen as an empty incubator.