When "Good-Enough" Treatment Is Not Good Enough: Epistemic Injustice, Pain-Related Motivational Deficit, and Epistemic Deflection in the Treatment of Gynecological Pain

While treatments exist for gynecological conditions such as endometriosis, these treatments often fail to treat the root disease or disorder and entail severe side effects. This paper joins recent calls to challenge the normalization of menstruator's pain. We argue that the side effects of hormonal treatment for gynecological pain conditions have been problematically coded as expected and therefore "good enough." Drawing on the work of Miranda Fricker and Jada Wiggleton-Little, we argue that hormonal treatment's normalization harms menstruators as knowers of their own bodies and experiences, and also reflects a subset of a broader lack of uptake that reinterprets and deflects the salience of menstruators' pain utterances. Because of the simultaneous invisibility and expectedness of menstruators' pain, treatments for gynecological pain conditions are considered "good enough" when they return women's bodies to silence.