It's going to be even harder for disabled people to safely talk about medical abuse after this.

If this concept isn't on your radar, it's probably because it's hard to talk about. It's hard to talk about our experiences with sexual assault by medical professionals. It's hard to talk about our experiences with forced sedation. It's hard to talk about being refused care.

It's hard to talk about medical personnel mistreating us and gaslighting us about it because these folks are seen as somehow immune from society's attitudes and the privileges it likely took to put them through medical school. Or who got to teach them medicine. About what bodies.

And how those bodies were acquired for research and whether those people ever consented to it. More on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Apartheid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks

There's also a lot of info in Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39732783-histories-of-the-transgender-child

This obviously isn't unique to disabled people - but I named disabled people initially because there is a lot built-in to disability where you are constantly at the mercy of healthcare personnel. No one deserves to be forced to be at the mercy of anyone.

Academia and pursuit of "knowledge" is often violent. Living beings are organic, growing, sometimes stagnant, and flawed. There is no person within society that is exempt from the prejudices of the society they live in. Including me, including you, including doctors.

Please don't take a strict one-or-the-other, good-or-bad, non-nuanced approach to your opinion of doctors.

There is a major problem with the way disabled patients are at anyone's mercy in the start. We need to demand a more equal dynamic in order to prevent abuse of power. We need patient advocacy and information outside a clinical setting to be refined and destigmatized.

I could talk on this forever but basically just: dehumanizing people by way of hero worship (removing the complex capabilities to have flaws, prejudices) is violent, whether or not it's violent to the person you're worshipping.

(Altho it can be that too, like when a marginalized person gets backlash from people with privilege because they deal with internalized prejudices. But that's a tangent.)