Speaking to a Room of Gynaecologists!
In June 2026, I was invited to speak at the 6th Annual Gynaecology Conference about my lived experience as a DES daughter.
DES, or diethylstilbestrol, was a synthetic hormone prescribed to pregnant women for several decades in the belief that it would prevent miscarriage and other pregnancy complications. It was later found to cause serious lifelong health consequences for some of the daughters and sons exposed to it in the womb.
My talk focused on what it means to live with the legacy of DES across a lifetime. I spoke not only as a patient, but as a woman whose life has been shaped by gynaecological surveillance, cancer risk, reproductive loss, structural difference, uncertainty, and the repeated need to explain a medical history that many clinicians have never been taught to recognise.
For me, this was not simply a conference presentation. It was an opportunity to bring the patient chair into the medical education space.
I wanted to show that DES is not a historical footnote. It is still present in clinics, consultations, smear histories, fertility stories, menopause conversations, surgical decisions and patient anxieties. DES daughters are ageing, and many of us are still navigating consequences that began before we were born.
My central message was that patients should not have to become the archive of their own condition. When medical harm continues across decades and generations, professional memory matters. Clinical awareness matters. Listening matters.
Speaking in a room of doctors about my own body, my own medical history and my own experience was not easy. But it felt necessary. Too often, DES-exposed women have been dismissed, misunderstood or treated as medically unusual rather than as part of a known pattern of harm.
This work now forms part of my wider DES advocacy, alongside my book A Life Lived Chronically: Memoir of a DES Daughter, media work, educational talks and patient-led conversations with medical professionals.
My aim is simple: to help ensure that DES-exposed people are recognised, heard and cared for with the knowledge, seriousness and dignity they deserve.
Never again dismissed as negligible.
