The morning after the Four Corners investigation aired, I woke up feeling physically unwell. Not shocked. Not outraged. Just heavy.
The kind of heaviness that sits in your chest before you’ve even checked your phone. I lay there staring at the ceiling, replaying the women’s stories in my head. The surgeries. The pathology reports. The words “no evidence found.”
There is something uniquely destabilising about watching a story unfold that confirms what so many women already know: when something goes wrong, the system moves slowly. When reputation is at stake, it moves faster.
The investigation into Dr Simon Gordon, a Melbourne gynaecologist who allegedly performed repeated invasive surgeries on women despite pathology showing little or no evidence of endometriosis, is being framed as a scandal. It is. But it is also painfully predictable. Because this is what happens when women’s pain exists inside a system that has spent decades minimising it.
I was fourteen when I first experienced endometriosis pain. I didn’t have language for it then. I just knew that once a month, my body felt like it was turning against me. I’d sit in school bathrooms waiting for the nausea to pass. I’d calculate how long I could hold myself upright before I needed to lie down.
And on the worst afternoons, I’d knot a jumper around my waist to get the bus home, after bleeding through a tampon, a pad, my underwear, bike shorts, and straight onto my uniform. I stopped going to sleepovers. I started making excuses. I was fourteen, and the only thing you really want at fourteen is to fit in, to be uncomplicated, to be easy, to not be the girl who has to leave early or lie down or explain herself.
Instead, I felt defective. Like my body had missed the memo on how to behave. Like everyone else had been given a manual on how to be a teenage girl, and mine had been misprinted.
And when the pain escalated – when it stopped being something I could hide – I started moving from GP to GP to GP. A frequent flyer, some might say. Different waiting rooms. Different intake forms. The same story, retold.
I learned to clock the raised eyebrows at reception when they recognised my name. The subtle shift in tone when I booked “another appointment.” The quiet implication that perhaps this was anxiety. Perhaps it was stress. Perhaps it was me.
Each visit carried its own small humiliation. You start to wonder if you are the common denominator. I was told it was normal. That I had a low pain tolerance. That “some girls just get bad periods.”
It wasn’t until I was a medical student at UNSW that something shifted. Suddenly, I had language. I knew which questions to ask. I knew what to push on, what not to accept. I understood how to navigate referrals, how to escalate, how to sound credible.
It should not require anatomy lectures and clinical placements to be taken seriously. But it was only once I could advocate in the language of medicine that I was finally diagnosed with Stage III endometriosis at 21. Seven years after the pain began. Seven years of being told it was normal.
Seven years is a long time to be subtly taught that your body is exaggerating. That you might be the problem. That maybe you are just not resilient enough. Endometriosis doesn’t just injure tissue. It erodes credibility.
So, when a specialist finally looks at you and says, “I believe you,” something shifts. Belief feels radical. It feels like relief. It feels like oxygen after years of being told to calm down.
You don’t interrogate oxygen. That’s the power imbalance no one wants to name. Women with endometriosis are not naïve. We are exhausted. We have usually fought to be taken seriously. So, when someone offers intervention it can feel like the first adult in the room.
And now women are discovering that the intervention they consented to may not have been medically justified. Let’s sit with that. Ovaries removed. Hysterectomies before 30. Multiple surgeries stacked on top of each other. And histopathology reports that allegedly did not support the severity of disease described.
Complaints were reportedly raised. Concerns expressed. Processes unfolded… slowly. They so often unfold slowly when women are the collateral. The most dangerous thing we could do now is call this a “one bad apple” story and move on.
Because the soil matters. This did not happen in a healthcare system that robustly centres women’s pain. It happened in a country where endometriosis has an average diagnostic delay of six to eight years. Where women are more likely to have their symptoms attributed to anxiety. Where reproductive health research is still playing catch-up.
Systemic neglect doesn’t just create gaps. It creates imbalances of power. And power without urgent oversight is where harm grows.
Since the investigation aired, I’ve had women message me. Women who were never patients of this surgeon, questioning their own surgeries.
“I had a tube removed years ago. Should I request my pathology?”
“I trusted my doctor. Should I have asked more questions?”
That’s the part that won’t show up in court documents. Women with no direct connection to this case are now re-examining their own bodies in hindsight, wondering whether they were too trusting. Trust is everything in healthcare. It is what allows a 21-year-old to sign a consent form. It is what allows a daughter to believe her surgeon when he says removal is necessary. It is what allows women to seek help at all.
And already, the burden is sliding back onto us. We’re being told that perhaps we should always seek third opinions. That we should always request pathology reports. That we should be more vigilant.
But women are not quality assurance mechanisms for the healthcare system. Hospitals are. Regulators are. Governance structures are. If complaints were raised, why did urgency follow media scrutiny rather than patient harm? If red flags existed, why were they not treated as active risk?
Women living with endometriosis are already hyper-aware of their bodies. We track cycles, symptoms, flare-ups. We memorise medication names. We learn to read between the line in medical appointments. To now suggest that we should also be auditing surgical necessity in real time is not empowerment. It’s abdication. The answer cannot simply be “ask more questions.”
The answer must be accountability. Independent external review when complaints are raised. Faster, more transparent regulatory action. Mandatory, clear communication of pathology findings directly to patients – in language that makes sense! And a cultural shift that recognises that women’s bodies are not sites where bureaucratic delay is acceptable.
I founded my start-up, June because I was tired of watching women navigate sexual and reproductive healthcare like it was a maze designed without them in mind. Access matters. Transparency matters. Informed consent matters.
This case has shaken trust. And when women lose trust in healthcare, they don’t just become sceptical. They become silent. They delay seeking help. They doubt themselves again. That is the quiet, long-term cost.
Women are not hysterical for being angry. We are tired of absorbing the consequences of institutional comfort. We are tired of being told to tough it out. And we are tired of being told, after the fact, that we should have known.
Women deserve care that does not require suspicion as a prerequisite. We deserve systems that move quickly when harm is alleged.
And we deserve better than being the shock absorbers for structural failure.