What Happens When Reality Becomes Negotiable?

This is a sexual assault—unknowingly captured by a mom filming her daughter’s wrestling match. Kallie didn’t know her opponent was male. But she knew something was very wrong. Today @ADFLegal helped Kallie sue the WA officials who placed gender ideology above her safety. 🧵⬇️

Woman of the Day Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, born OTD in 1836 in Whitechapel. First woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon, co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, first woman Dean of a medical school, first woman elected to a school board, first woman Mayor. How did this remarkable woman manage to achieve all of that in her 81 years? She was inspired by her meeting in 1859 with Bristol-born Elizabeth Blackwell who became the first woman doctor in the US some ten years earlier. The following year, 23 year old Elizabeth confided in her 13 year old sister Millie her friend, Emily Davies, as they were brushing their hair by the fireside at home. Emily pointed out, “Women can get nowhere unless they are as well educated as men. I shall open the universities.” “Yes,” said Elizabeth, “we need education but we need an income too and we can't earn that without training and a profession. I shall start women in medicine. But what shall we do with Millie?” Emily knew exactly what was needed: “After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote. You are younger than we are, Millie, so you must attend to that." Elizabeth’s first hurdle was to overcome the opposition of her parents. Her father believed “the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment”. That wasn’t uncommon. Victorian beliefs about women’s physical, mental, and emotional natures led to men — well, you know how expert they are on all matters pertaining to women — arguing that menstruation and education were incompatible. She applied to the medical school at Middlesex Hospital. No women allowed, so she enrolled as a nursing student instead and employed a tutor privately to study anatomy and physiology three evenings a week. When she sat in on some medical classes, male students complained. In fact they raised a petition against her, so she was obliged to leave but did so with an honours certificate in chemistry and materia medica. Next, Elizabeth tried applying to other medical schools. They turned her down, all of them, so armed with her certificate in anatomy and physiology, she applied to the Society of Apothecaries. Its charter meant it could not legally exclude her on account of her sex and so on 28 September 1865, she sat the exam in the Apothecaries Hall with 51 men. She was one of just three who passed. Top marks too. This meant she could lawfully practise medicine, so how did the SA celebrate this success? It immediately changed its rules to prevent other women from using the same loophole. Elizabeth couldn’t persuade any hospital to offer her a post despite her excellent academic record so she opened her own practice in London. It took off when cholera broke out and people panicked. Well, even a mere woman was better than nothing. By then, she had opened St Mary's Dispensary for Women and Children, and in the first year, treated 3,000 new patients in 9,300 outpatient visits. Learning that the Sorbonne was considering admitting women as medical students, Elizabeth studied French until she was fluent and finally obtained her much prized medical degree in 1870, at the age of 40. In the same year, a letter was published in The Lancet representative of the views of many male medical practitioners, particularly specialists in gynaecology and obstetrics: that women lacked “the coolness and strength of nerves” required of a doctor, and “the constitutional variations of the female system, at the best are uncertain and not to be relied upon”. Those pesky periods again, sapping our brains. The British Medical Register refused to recognise Elizabeth’s degree. Still unable to find a hospital post, Elizabeth did the only sensible thing she could do. In 1871, she opened the New Hospital for Women. It staffed entirely by women and Elizabeth Blackwell came on staff as a professor of gynecology. It was hugely popular and enjoyed an excellent reputation for patient outcomes. In 1873, she became the first woman to be admitted to the British Medical Association. It immediately voted to bar any other women members and held that position for nearly twenty years. Ever heard of Patriarchy Chicken? Welcome to Patriarchy Snakes and Ladders. When one of the Edinburgh Seven, Sophia Jex-Blake, opened the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, Elizabeth taught there and in a 1877 meeting in support of the school, said that there was "nothing injurious to the health, the morals, or the manners of women in a medical education, and that the results were likely to prove beneficial to the female sex and to the nation". The two women didn’t always see eye to eye but in 1883, Elizabeth was elected as Dean of the LSMW. She continued to lobby strenuously for women to enter the medical profession. The British Medical Register eventually capitulated in 1877 and agreed to register women as medical practitioners. The BMA capitulated in 1893 because its members “needed no convincing of the justness of her demands…she had already by her professional and public life done this very thoroughly", and overwhelmingly voted in favour. Six years after she retired in 1902, she became the first woman mayor in Britain, Mayor of Aldeburgh. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died in 1917 at 81, having kept her promise to Emily and to her sister, Millie. Millicent Garrett Fawcett. "Women can less easily afford to be second-rate, their professional work will be more closely scrutinised; mistakes will ruin them more quickly than they will men.”

One of my favorite parts of having adhd is how failing yourself numerous times every single day on a micro level infinitely reinforces the self-hate neural pathways until they are so strong that even your high-achieving perfectionism and severe anxiety can’t balance them out so you’re just perpetually disappointed in yourself and convinced you’re incapable no matter what you achieve

November 1971. Chiswick, West London. Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor. She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house. Then the door opened. A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking. She didn't want tea. She needed somewhere to hide. Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police. Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter. When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one." Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed. Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority. She didn't stop. By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere. In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief. Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords. She kept the doors open the entire time. That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York. The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world. MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical." She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million. Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86. She never stopped. It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no. Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go. She made room. Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world. Follow us Lost in Yesterday

I'm a cardiologist. A 42-year-old mother of two came to my office complaining of jaw pain and crushing fatigue. She ran half-marathons. Her EKG was normal. Another doctor had sent her home with anxiety medication. When I got her into the cath lab, I found severe microvascular disease — plaque choking the tiniest vessels of her heart, the ones standard angiograms routinely miss. Her heart had been starving in silence while everyone told her she was stressed. She is alive today. Too many women like her are not. Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. And medicine is still diagnosing it through a male lens. 84% of cardiologists report having patients in the past year whose heart disease was misdiagnosed by another physician. Women with a STEMI heart attack have a 59% greater chance of being misdiagnosed compared to men. Women with an NSTEMI — 41% greater chance. The reason is structural. For decades, we screened, tested, and treated women using a template built for men. Men's heart attacks announce themselves — the crushing chest pain, the clutched fist, the Hollywood collapse. Women's hearts whisper. Crushing fatigue that feels like wearing a lead vest. Jaw pain written off as TMJ. Nausea blamed on a stomach bug. An ache between the shoulder blades blamed on a long week. Shortness of breath blamed on being out of shape. For years, medicine called these "atypical" symptoms. They are not atypical. They are female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant. And the biology runs deeper than symptoms. Women have smaller hearts and narrower coronary arteries. Plaque doesn't only clog the big highway vessels — it hides in the microvasculature, the tiny branches feeding the heart muscle itself. A woman can have a heart attack with a completely "clean" standard angiogram. SCAD — spontaneous coronary artery dissection — occurs 90% of the time in women. Often young, fit women with zero traditional risk factors. It's the leading cause of heart attack in women under 50, accounting for roughly one quarter of all cases in that age group. Most doctors have never diagnosed one. And some of the most dangerous cardiac risk factors are hidden in women's medical histories where no one thinks to look: Preeclampsia or gestational hypertension doubles to quadruples lifetime heart disease and stroke risk. Pregnancy is the body's first cardiac stress test — and these complications are early warning sirens, not closed chapters. Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis — far more common in women, turbocharges inflammation and plaque formation at any age. Cardiovascular disease in women aged 20-44 is projected to surge nearly 50% by 2050. The youngest patients in my practice keep getting younger. What every woman should ask her doctor — and what every doctor should be asking: "Given my pregnancy history, autoimmune status, and family history — what is my full cardiovascular risk?" If they don't ask about preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, volunteer it. "Should I have an Lp(a) test and a coronary calcium score?" Standard cholesterol panels miss too much. Lp(a) is genetic, one-time, and most women have never been tested. "My tests came back normal but my symptoms haven't stopped — what's next?" Normal stress tests and angiograms can miss microvascular disease, spasm, and SCAD. Persistent symptoms warrant coronary CT angiography or cardiac MRI. And if something feels wrong — say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart." That single sentence changes the workup. Do not soften it. Do not apologize for it. 80% of heart disease is preventable. But the playbook has to be built for female biology. Two decades ago, I wrote one of the first books warning that heart disease was the number one killer of women and that medicine was diagnosing it through a male lens. It was recognized by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House during the early years of the national conversation about women's heart health. I'm haunted by how much of that book I could republish today unchanged. The science has advanced. The awareness has grown. But the gap between what we know and what happens in the exam room is still costing women their lives. Share this with every woman you love — and every doctor who treats them. READ MORE: open.substack.com/pub/afshin…