“Maybe you should wear a more supportive bra.”

It's not even a complete sentence, being a woman. When you are born female, you have made a mistake, an error in judgement before it even exists, because it was a mistake you made when you weren't even a fully formed human yet. Just cells dividing, commas forming an endless sentence; there are too many of them and yet you are not enough, never enough.

I'd like to think that this is what I was thinking before my breast exam, but alas, it was not.

I told a doctor, a medically trained professional, that I had a lump on my chest, on my ribcage, and that I wanted it looked at. In that moment, the word "uncomfortable" became a complete sentence. The doctor, a male, looked at me like I had just asked him to strip, or maybe I had revealed an embarrassing secret to him, telling him I was a woman.

It's in my medical chart, I promise. A big "F" next to my name, the grade I was given before I took my first breath in this world.

OK, he says. I need to get a nurse in here, as a chaperone.

Ah, yes, a chaperone. Lovely - a nurse, a woman, who can also watch as a doctor loses some dignity in helping me seek a professional opinion on my physical well-being.

Maybe, if my tone wasn't sarcastic, I could have told him that and he might have felt better about this experience.

It was agony, for both of us. That poor nurse. It was so awkward that I almost burst out laughing. But I've learned that laughing can make a lot of situations worse, like a sentence punctuated with too many commas written in permanent ink, the pause in between each word a life sentence, suspending it and and suffocating it.

Maybe if I had told the doctor that, he would have felt better about doing his job.

Then, I learned that breast exams are not, in fact, his job. He told me that next time, I should go to a gynecologist. An OB-GYN, for people like me, half the world's population; they are considered specialists, when there are dozens of specialists, just not specifically for fifty percent of the planet.

Sorry I'm female, I wanted to say. Let me go back to before my cells started dividing, when it wasn't too late for Y chromosome to make me the correct, less uncomfortable, gender for this particular field of medicine. For you, specifically. General medicine, which I assumed you were trained in, hopefully thoroughly. For I was at a Primary Care Office, but I guess women are Secondary.

That is sarcasm, but if it's true, is it still sarcasm? Or does it become like the awkwardness, felt distinctly by everyone in the room, sentences that have the comma in the wrong place and everyone is looking at you for an explanation.

Why are you here, the awkward silence asked. The comma doesn't belong there, it never needed to exist to begin with. Go away.

After the doctor finished explaining that he didn't "do" women's medicine - I mean, what else could he have meant? he was literally implying that - I said to him, "I thought OB-GYN's were for "this general area" (I pointed at my lap).

No, the doctor said. They're for everything.

My entire gender, shrunk to fit into one field of medicine, when there are dozens of fields of medicine.

Then he told me that maybe I should try wearing a more supportive bra.

Any questions? he asked. All done. Thanks for coming in, but next time, you could spare us both the embarrassment, the awkwardness, by going to the correct place. The place where only women go, like how I imagine men go to specialists to get their testicles checked, and have prostate exams, and exist in the world of men, where they weren't created a mistake when their cells first started dividing.

I'm all done with the sarcasm now, I promise. But I'm still not convinced he wasn't joking, but then I got home, and realized that what had bothered me the most was how unbothered he seemed by the lump on my ribcage. Remember that? Yeah, me neither. Another women's health issue to be ignored, forgotten, erased because the embarrassment was too great and the doctor wasn't comfortable with a body that had fused with the wrong chromosome, that had been born in the maternity ward where being a woman is relevant and they are not the awkward commas.