By Abby Norman, from Ask Me About My Uterus, which was published last month by Nation Books. Norman is an editor at Futurism, a science and technology website.

The novelist Hilary Mantel began experiencing pelvic pain, nausea, and fatigue, like I did, when she was a teenager; she had a hysterectomy when she was twenty-seven. In her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, she describes being repeatedly misdiagnosed with what she recalls as “stress, caused by overambition,” for which she was given tranquilizers. “Little Miss Neverwell,” one doctor called her. “The more I said that I had a physical illness,…