This week’s materials at some point felt hard to continue reading because of the amount of humiliation it described. Not that I did not know about transphobia in the health field, but to immerse myself in the personal experiences was quite powerful. The article “12 reasons it should be illegal for doctors not to treat a trans person” shares messages from people who stand against the proposed law that would allow denying medical care to transgender people. Many of them have faced discrimination based on their gender personally, while some were speaking for others. I cannot point a specific quote out of it – they all seem equally sad to me.

While reading “A Birth Story,” I once again thought of how obscure oppression can be. The article illustrates one of the many examples of obstetric racism, which impacts a patient’s medical treatment or diagnostic decisions based on their race. It can be taken as medical negligence that has nothing to do with racism, but the article shares a statistic that proves the opposite: “Black Women are more likely to have C-sections than any other group of women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” One quote from the story that made me emotional is this: “No wheelchair was provided and she had to walk to another room, pushing her newborn in the mobile crib and her IV…” On top of being exhausted and perhaps traumatized by her difficult labor, and on top of all sorts of emotions that postpartum brings, LeConté had to also bear this humiliating experience and I can’t imagine how painful it was for her.

Not only the readings, but the film “Period. End of Sentence” made me emotional in many ways. In the beginning, when both men and women are asked about periods, no one seems to have a willingness to answer or actual knowledge about it. One of the comments under the film on YouTube states that it “Broke my heart when those boys called periods a disease,” and I can totally relate. But later on, when I saw men, who are husbands and relatives of interviewed women, joining the pad production, I also got too emotional in a happy way. The documentary also served me as a reminder of how precious my life is, after seeing those women finding so much joy in things that are ordinary to me (like pads or having a routine job).