“You have Endometriosis”: Making Menstruation-Related Pain Legitimate in a Biomedical World
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This essay explores how biomedical and gendered perceptions can trivialize menstrual pain, arguing patient self-advocacy and knowledge are crucial to legitimize illness experiences.
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Abstract
In this essay, the author reflects on how biomedical and gendered perceptions of reproductive health can impact an illness experience. Using a narrative lens, she relays the frustration of attempting to have her excessive menstrual pain legitimated and treated when loved ones and medical professionals trivialized it and refused to let her take on the sick role. She recounts incidents that demonstrate the embedded and limiting persistence of gendered perceptions of pain. In the end, she argues that only through strong patient self-advocacy and knowledge can one rewrite the social scripts assigned to how women cope with menstrual pain.
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References (21)
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Cited by (12)
- Mecanismos de gobernanza de los itinerarios terapéuticos de la endometriosis. En búsqueda del diagnóstico 2025
- 'A name to the pain': A mixed methods analysis of diagnostic delay and perceptions of diagnosis importance in Australians with endometriosis 2025
- Associations between stigma and depression among college-attending women with endometriosis symptoms 2024
- Exploring Medical Egg Freezing as a Disease Management Strategy 2023
- Endometriosis afflicts millions of women, but few people feel comfortable talking about it 2023
- "So It's Like a Painful Period?" Living with Endometriosis: My Journey 2023
- Agency in endometriosis pain communication in English and Spanish 2022
- Psychological adaptation in women with endometriosis: current knowledge and future research perspectives 2022
- Endometriosis diagnosis buffers reciprocal effects of emotional distress on pain experience 2022
- “The bloodiness and horror of it” 2021
- Hysterics and Heresy: Using Dialogism to Explore the Problematics of Endometriosis Diagnosis 2019
- “I feel like I’m being stabbed by a thousand tiny men”: The challenges of communicating endometriosis pain 2019
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-06-16T06:07:01.518242+00:00
- openalex
- last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
- pubmed
- last seen: 2026-05-13T22:19:55.107525+00:00
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