March 23, 2023
Bleed, by Tracey L. Lindeman
The first time I heard about this book was last fall while I was drinking tea in Jennifer Knoch’s garden and asked her about amazing books she’d edited that were coming down the pipeline, and she talked about BLEED so passionately and made clear that this was a book that everyone should read, not just people with experience suffering with endometriosis.
And then two more people I deeply admire—@aborshpod’s Rachel Cairns and @yellowmanteau (Julie L. Lalonde)—started posting about it on Instagram, weaving its threads into the stories they tell online about reproductive justice and feminism/violence against women respectively—and showing too that all these stories are connected, for worse (because such tangles makes everything so much more *complicated* and difficult to resolve) and also for better (improving healthcare for people with endometriosis means better outcomes for *everyone*).
In BLEED, Lindeman uses a mix of memoir and reporting to show how her brutal and painful experiences with endometriosis since age 11 is representative of the suffering of so many other people, and also how the lack of care endo patients receive highlights sexism, racism, classism, anti-fatness within the medical system. Most doctors aren’t aware of how to diagnose endometriosis, let alone how to treat it—thanks to the influence of pharmaceutical companies, patients are usually given pills before surgery, pills that are ineffectual at best, harmful at worst.
Those who ask for surgery receive push-back from doctors who wish to preserve patients’ fertility, even when patients are adamant that they do not want children. Patients are caught in a catch 22 where they’re able to mask their symptoms and remain high functioning, which comes to undermine their complaints, or else they’re overwhelmed by the physical and mental toll of endometriosis and dismissed as just hysterical.
It was interesting to read BLEED in the context of another book I’ve recently read, Felicia Kornbluh’s A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE about the parallel battles for abortion access (by white middle class feminists) and against forced sterilization (by working class activists of colour). At first glance, these two through-lines seem entire separate, even opposed, from each other, let alone Lindeman’s narrative. In a politics of either/or, black and white, this is certainly the case—but life is not like that. And—as Kornbluh’s book made clear—insisting that it is undermines justice and progress for everybody.
Lindeman’s narrative overlaps with Kornbluh’s when she writes about how birth control drugs were tested on people in Puerto Rico…and then ultimately dispensed in huge amounts to the general public in what purported to be a kind of liberation, but perhaps at a cost that most people don’t like to talk about, mostly because the people who are talking already are religious zealots seeking to control women and also because who wants to be opposed to liberty?
This narrative is messy and demands attention to nuance, and it also challenges me as someone who has mostly been served by the medical establishment so far throughout my life, never meeting with the roadblocks and suffering that becomes standard for Lindeman and others with endometriosis (and PCOS, and a litany of other chronic illnesses, and also [the much feminized and therefore maligned] chronic pain). It’s also a narrative that doesn’t come with neat and tidy ending, for the patients themselves or the system at large. The end of BLEED is just the beginning, after all, of—hopefully—a powerful reset and reimagining of how our medical systems are structured, and what reproductive justice/’my body my choice’ really means.
