#had a dr straight up tell me 20 was too young for degenerating discs so I must not have them

[switchelsweets]

Not a personal health challenge of mine, but a very important reminder. Gender binary has very real, very harmful consequences. And the people deciding what body you “should” have… do not have a fucking clue.

I forget why, but I was on the Wikipedia page for polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I started researching hirsutism in women, and I learned the following things in this order:

there's a diagnostic criteria used to evaluate how hairy a woman is

This is important because being too hairy is a diagnostic criteria of most disorders that cause hyperandrogenism

Disorders that cause hyperandrogenism can be diagnosed by...measuring how hairy you are (this is the main and most important diagnostic criterion for PCOS)

Disorders that cause hyperandrogenism are important because they are correlated with obesity, infertility, and...being too hairy?

I think to myself, wait, what is a normal range for testosterone in women? I find this article...which set reference ranges for "normal" testosterone levels in women...EXCLUDING WOMEN WITH PCOS?

Quote: "Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is another notable condition in genetic (XX) females, which is characterized by excessive ovarian production of androgens. This condition is included for comparison with DSD, as the affected females with PCOS are genetic and phenotypic females. The elevated levels of testosterone in these females can lead to hyperandrogenism, a clinical disorder characterized variably by hirsutism, acne, male-pattern balding, metabolic disturbances, impaired ovulation and infertility. PCOS is a common condition, affecting 7%-10% of premenopausal women."

So: the study claims to demonstrate a clear distinction between the normal range of hormone levels in "Healthy" men and "healthy" women...with "healthy" being defined in the study as...having hormones within the "normal" range.......................

So I researched what the clinically established "normal" range for testosterone in women is

THERE ISN'T ONE????

Quote from the above article: "Several different approaches have been used to define endocrine disorders. The statistical approach establishes the lower and the upper limits of hormone concentrations solely on the basis of the statistical distribution of hormone levels in a healthy reference population. As an illustration, hypo- and hypercalcemia have been defined on the basis of the statistical distribution of serum calcium concentrations. Using this approach, androgen deficiency could be defined as the occurrence of serum testosterone levels that are below the 97.5th percentile of testosterone levels in healthy population of young men. A second approach is to use a threshold hormone concentration below or above which there is high risk of developing adverse health outcomes. This approach has been used to define osteoporosis and hypercholesterolemia. However, we do not know with certainty the thresholds of testosterone levels which are associated with adverse health outcomes."

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

It's batshit crazy to make a diagnostic criteria for medical disorders by placing arbitrary cutoffs within 2-5% of either end of a statistical distribution. What the actual fuck?

"The results came back, you have Statistical Outlier Disease." "What treatments are available?" "Well, first, we recommend dietary change. You should probably stop eating so many spiders."

Another article which attempted to do this

Quote: "Subjects with signs of hirsutism or with a personal history of diabetes or hypertension, or a family history of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) were excluded."

"We're going to figure out the typical range of testosterone levels that occur in women! First, we're going to exclude all the women that are too hairy from the study. I am very good at science."

Anyway I got off topic but there are apparently race-specific diagnostic tools for "hirsutism." That's kinda weird on its own but when I looked more into this in relation to race I found this article that straight-up uses the term "mongoloid"