Long, long overdue review of essential reading for anyone with a vagina or anyone who loves a person with a vagina.
Dr. Gunther is waging a war on sexist, ignorant misinformation that prevents women from (1) loving their very normal bodies, (2) understanding their bodies, (3) and getting the care they need when their bodies are in trouble. This books cuts through the bullshit to tell you what medicine knows today, what it doesn’t know, and to beg you to stop steaming your vagina. It does this without dumbing down any of the research, but also by avoiding specialized jargon unless absolutely necessary.
One of the best things about this book is that while it is about making the overall science understandable, it’s built in many ways like a medical textbook, in that it is designed to be easy to put on your bookshelf, and pull down when you need specific information. It’s organized wonderfully for this, and Dr. Gunther actually just gives you the TLDR at the end of every chapter, too, which might be a good thing to read to start if you only plan on using it as a reference book, just to get a flavour of the information in the book.
Note that this war she’s waging is not just on misinformation generally. She’s holding no punches for the medical profession. Not in how the medical profession has treated women and women of colour in particular. Not in how the medical profession has studied and diagnosed problems affecting women’s bodies and the utterly mind bending assumptions they’ve made to ruin our health for a thousand years.
Last but by far not least is a note on gender – Dr. Gunther is not only careful to include trans men, but there is a wealth of information for how being on gender affirming hormones or undergoing gender affirming surgery can affect a person’s health, and the ways in which trans men’s bodies are unique. The public discourse around trans bodies, when it reaches biology and medicine, is that trans men and women have the same physiology and should be treated the same by medical practitioners. Dr. Gunther busts that myth and intersperses the information across the whole book, educating every reader on at least some of the ways in which gender essentialism is not only untrue but actively harmful to people’s health.