Injustice 01 / 10

Medical Violence

To be told, again and again, that your agony is "just a bad period" is to be slowly taught not to trust your own body. Medical violence is rarely a single act; it is the accumulation of shrugs, the years on a waiting list, the pain that is measured against someone else's idea of what a uterus should feel.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: Your pain was real, and being disbelieved for years was not your failing — it was the system’s.
For your community: Whole communities learn to distrust care after watching each other dismissed; believing one another becomes survival.
For practitioners: Every “it’s normal” ever said to someone in pain is worth revisiting — disbelief is a clinical act with consequences.
For policymakers: Diagnostic delays are not unfortunate waits; they are measurable outcomes of how training, funding and guidelines are set.

How it shows up

Medical Violence

Dismissal & gaslighting

Years on waiting lists

Pain undertreated

Learned distrust of one’s own body

Sit with this

Where, in my own story or my practice, has pain been treated as exaggeration?

Injustice 02 / 10

Epistemic Violence

Whose knowledge counts? Epistemic violence happens when the person who lives inside the body is treated as the least reliable witness to it. We are asked to translate our suffering into a language built without us, and then blamed when the translation fails.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: What you know about your own body counts as knowledge, even when no one ever wrote it down.
For your community: Shared, lived expertise is a form of research; your group already holds evidence that journals do not.
For practitioners: Centre lived experience as primary evidence — not anecdote waiting to be confirmed by “real” data.
For policymakers: Fund and cite community knowledge; leaving it out is a decision about whose truth is allowed to matter.

How it shows up

Epistemic Violence

Accounts disbelieved

No language given for the pain

Self-censorship

Patient knowledge erased as "just a story"

Sit with this

Whose account gets called “evidence” here — and whose gets called a story?

Injustice 03 / 10

Reproductive Violence

"Just get pregnant — it will cure you." The myth is offered as treatment and as discipline, reducing a whole person to a reproductive function. Reproductive violence is the constraining of choice: decisions about fertility and futures made under pressure, without information, without consent fully given.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: Your choices about your body and your future are yours; pressure dressed as advice is still coercion.
For your community: Reproductive control falls hardest on some communities; naming it together resists the shame around it.
For practitioners: Informed consent means real options and real time — not a treatment pushed through under pressure.
For policymakers: Reproductive-rights frameworks decide who is coerced and who is heard — endo sits right inside them.

How it shows up

Reproductive Violence

"Pregnancy will cure you" myth

Infertility stigma

Consent rushed

Reproductive choice constrained

Sit with this

Where has “for your own good” quietly overridden someone’s own decision?

Injustice 04 / 10

Economic Violence

Pain has a price, and we pay it in lost wages, in surgeries we cannot afford, in the unpaid hours of tracking and advocating and explaining. Economic violence turns illness into debt and care into a luxury rationed by postcode and pay-cheque.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: The money, work and rest you have lost to endo are a cost the system quietly offloaded onto you.
For your community: Care labour and lost income ripple through families and networks — mostly unpaid, mostly unseen.
For practitioners: Ask what a treatment plan costs someone in money, time off and travel, not only in clinical terms.
For policymakers: Workplace protections and public coverage decide whether being ill also means becoming poor.

How it shows up

Economic Violence

Lost work & wages

Private care costs

Unpaid advocacy labour

Illness turned into debt; care rationed by postcode

Sit with this

What has this cost — in money, work and time — that no one ever counted?

Injustice 05 / 10

Digital Violence

The same platforms that finally let us name our pain also flag it as obscene, sell it back to us as data, and feed it to systems that were never trained to see a body like ours. Digital space is both refuge and trap — a place where endometriosis is at once hyper-visible and rendered invisible.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: When your health post is hidden or your symptoms misread by an app, the failing is the platform’s, not yours.
For your community: Online spaces are lifelines that also surveil and silence; building safer ones is collective work.
For practitioners: The apps and tools you recommend carry bias — “digital self-management” is never neutral.
For policymakers: Platform moderation and health-data rules are public-health infrastructure, and largely unregulated.

How it shows up

Digital Violence

Content censored / shadow-banned

AI fails to recognise endo

Data sold back

Hyper-visible and invisible at once

Sit with this

Where has a screen, an algorithm or a platform shaped who gets believed?

Injustice 06 / 10

Structural Violence

A strategy with no ring-fenced funding is a promise designed to be broken. Structural violence is what remains when consultations are held, reports are written, and still nothing reaches the clinic. It is harm by budget line, by the research that is never funded for a disease that affects one in ten.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: What happened to you was patterned, not personal — built into how systems share out care and neglect.
For your community: Naming the structure shifts blame off individuals and onto conditions you can organise against together.
For practitioners: Move from treating symptoms to addressing the structural neglect that produced them.
For policymakers: Structural neglect is made in budgets, guidelines and priorities — and can be unmade in the same places.

How it shows up

Structural Violence

No ring-fenced funding

Restrictive laws

Policy without delivery

Institutional reinforcement of invisibility

Sit with this

What system, rather than what person, made this harm possible and lasting?

Injustice 07 / 10

Environmental Violence

Disease is never only personal. The chemicals in our water, the pollution settling over particular postcodes, the dioxins accumulating in tissue — these decide who gets sick long before any symptom appears. Environmental violence asks us to read endometriosis as a wound made by an economy, not a body.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: Your body’s burden may be shaped by what surrounds it — exposures you never chose.
For your community: Environmental harm lands unevenly by place and class; mapping it locally is what makes it visible.
For practitioners: Consider environmental and occupational exposures, not individual biology alone.
For policymakers: Pollution and chemical regulation are reproductive-health policy — especially for the most exposed.

How it shows up

Environmental Violence

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals

Pollution by postcode

Unequal exposure

A wound made by an economy, not a body

Sit with this

What in the environment around me might be part of this — and who is most exposed?

Injustice 08 / 10

Racial & Ethnic Violence

The myth that Black bodies feel less pain was invented to justify cruelty, and it still circulates in clinics today. Racial violence means longer delays, smaller doses, fewer referrals — and online communities that were never built to be safe for women of colour. The injustice is layered, never single.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: If your pain was dismissed faster or harder because of how you are racialised, that is racism, not coincidence.
For your community: Racialised communities carry compounded, under-researched harm; centring those voices is the work.
For practitioners: Confront the racial bias in whose pain is believed and treated — it is measurable, and it is yours to change.
For policymakers: Disaggregate data by race and fund the research that has long excluded Black and brown patients.

How it shows up

Racial & Ethnic Violence

Pain believed less

Smaller doses, fewer referrals

Online spaces unsafe

Layered, compounded, under-researched harm

Sit with this

Who faces the greatest barriers here — and what makes that so?

Injustice 09 / 10

Psychological Violence

There is a grief that has no funeral — for the body you expected, the plans you cancelled, the self you were before the pain. Psychological violence is the "Endo Warrior" smile we are asked to perform, the trauma we are told to be positive about, the isolation dressed up as resilience.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: The grief, dread and self-doubt are not weakness; they are reasonable responses to being harmed and unheard.
For your community: Isolation is produced, not chosen; holding space for each other is a direct resistance to it.
For practitioners: Medical trauma is iatrogenic — the encounter itself can wound. Trauma-informed care is not optional.
For policymakers: Mental-health support belongs inside chronic-illness pathways, not bolted on as an afterthought.

How it shows up

Psychological Violence

Internalised ableism

"Endo warrior" toxic positivity

Medical trauma

Endo grief, isolation dressed as resilience

Sit with this

What has it cost me emotionally to keep being “strong” about this?

Injustice 10 / 10

Relational Violence

Relational violence is quiet. It lives in the partner who sighs when plans change, the manager who counts your sick days, the friend who stops asking. The work of being believed becomes a second illness, carried in the small daily negotiations of love and labour.
— Endo Violence (2025)

What this means…

For you: Being doubted by people close to you is its own injury, even when it is quiet or unintended.
For your community: Relationships can wound us or hold us; building believing relationships is part of healing justice.
For practitioners: The clinical relationship is one of these relationships — your stance can repair or re-wound.
For policymakers: Carer support and workplace culture decide whether relationships buffer harm or compound it.

How it shows up

Relational Violence

Disbelief from loved ones

Sick days counted

Friends stop asking

Being believed becomes a second illness

Sit with this

In which relationship do I most need to be believed — and where could I offer that to someone else?