"In 1907, state governments began to approve the sterilization of female prisoners and mental patients, with devastating results for the poor, minority, and disabled women who made up the bulk of female inmates. In Virginia, a program that launched in 1924 and con- tinued for fifty years resulted in the sterilization of more than 7,500 people. Not all were women, but the program's emphasis on curbing the fertility of people deemed socially transgressive would seem to have disproportionately targeted them; per a report from the Washington Post, those sterilized included 'unwed mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals and children with disciplinary problems' -- but not, one notes, unwed fathers or men who solicited sex workers."

"the US government evidently decided that the prison sterilization model held promise when it came to culling other 'undesirable' populations: beginning in the 1930s in Puerto Rico, nearly one-third of all women between the ages of twenty and forty-nine were forcibly sterilized as the result of a population control program supported by the US government. And in the 1970s, the Indian Health Service sterilized thousands of Native American women, nearly halving their birth rate within the next ten years."

See also War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Antonio Denis

"There is no situation in which a thirty-five-year-old healthy man would have his testicles removed to prevent testicular cancer, and would not be given back full-blast testosterone, even if there was some small future risk of cancer," she says.

Indeed, it's striking that even as we've made incredible progress into treating diseases that used to be a death sentence, the medical system has not matched this progress with an equal commitment to ensuring that patients not only survive but thrive -- and that in our mad rush to keep women from dying, we aren't doing things that make their remaining years a misery. But when it comes to women's health, medicine still struggles to weigh the costs and benefits of survival -- or the question of quantity over quality of life -- in the same way it has always done for men. As Roche points out, "We don't say to old men, 'Hey, your erectile function is part of "natural" aging, accept it.' We developed a billion-dollar industry to help them. But women... We resign that it's 'natural' for them to suffer."

TIL: the ketogenic diet started as a treatment for epilepsy.

"Lindsay Lief, an ICU/critical care/pulmonary specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, tells me she's trying to change this, saying, 'I'm constantly drilling into my residents: anxiety is a diagnosis of exclusion in the hospital. You must first prove that you have explored everything else. I don't want to hear, "I think she's just anxious," when a patient presents with shortness of breath.'"

"'But no normal woman was ever satisfied without marriage and children.

"She might, however, be satisfied by cigarettes, Brill suggested to Bernays-not just because they represented freedom, but because they 'titillated the erogenous zones of the lips.' (In other words, despite the insistence of his mentor tor Sigmund Freud that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Brill wasn't so sure that in a woman's mouth, a cigarette was always just a cigarette.)"

It's sexual for women to enjoy smoking, but not homoerotic for a man to enjoy a much more girthy cigar...

"When doctors conducted the first medical trial to establish a link between cholesterol and heart disease in 1982, their data set included 12,866 men -- and no women. In 1995, the seminal study establishing that aspirin could reduce the risk of heart attack included 22,000 men -- and, again, zero women."

Meanwhile, the normalization of sex testing by the IOC led to its widespread implementation by other sporting organizations, including the 1967 Pan-American Games in Winnipeg. American shot-putter Maren Sidler was present for the Winnipeg incident, and gave a disturbing account of the "science" behind women's elimination from competition: "They lined us up outside a room where there were three doctors sitting in a row behind desks. You had to go in and pull up your shirt and push down your pants. Then they just looked while you waited for them to confer and decide if you were OK. While I was in line I remember one of the sprinters, a tiny, skinny girl, came out shaking her head back and forth saying. 'Well, I failed, I didn't have enough up top. They say I can't run and I have to go home because I'm not 'big' enough."

And complicit in this humiliation of female athletes were doctors, who advised that a woman's eligibility for competition be determined via roughly the same methods that farmers use for sexing livestock.

This is what they want to subject teenagers to in the name of their transphobic witch-hunt.