This article further explains why I have little regard for the ridiculous doctor who claims that men and women cannot and should not be platonic friends. This doctor purports to be a feminist yet only serves to underline and support the patriarchy. On the one hand, he talks about women deserving respect, but then contradicts himself by talking about women needing to work and having to put their kids into child-care and then guilting them by saying that at child-care kids cannot receive more hugs and cuddles! This ridiculous doctor also believes that the gender roles should be preserved and wrote an article that spent around 400 words that could have been described in around a paragraph. Namely, the content should have been that men have to have greater responsibility around the house and raising the family. While this ridiculous doctor was purporting to sympathise or empathise with women, he was actually putting them down.

My mother criticises me because I feel more comfortable with a female doctor than a male doctor (I do have one exception, and that is, I saw a female doctor who was one of the rudest people I've met, and I have one male doctor I do like) and says that female doctors take time out for their children and two, that a male doctor might be doing some research into conditions I have. Well, hello, most of my doctors are older (one of my specialists is younger than me by a few years), and my neurologist is, wait for it, a professor. Yes, a female professor! It infuriated me when one of the older nurses at the day infusion centre would refer to my doctors as he, and I said to her one day, in frustration, regarding my gastroenterologist, "I would not be comfortable with a male gastroenterologist!" (sex abuse survivor, here) and she belatedly said, "I can understand that." And, shock horror, another female doctor is married to a doctor, and guess what? They both work, but on the days that her husband works, she's at home with the kids and on the days that she works, he's at home with the kids.

When I was four, my mother had two kids under five, and I spent Thursday afternoons with my grandmother while my grandfather played bowls. It was company for my grandmother and a break for my mother. Although, needless to say, my brother is neurotypical, and he always demanded attention; I have memories of sitting on the floor in my childhood home doing jigsaw puzzles and playing with a battery-operated train set and another game of lining up plastic pegs on a wooden grid according to colour. I do have memories of my mother being cruel to me.