Our Villain Origin Story
or: what happens when enough of us say enough at the same time
Act I · What we were told
We were told our pain was ambition. We were told our bodies were difficult. We were told our rage was hormonal, our fear was irrational, our grief was excessive, our knowledge was anecdotal.
We were told the rete ovarii was a functionless vestige. We were told the clitoris was what was drawn in the textbook. We were told the IUD insertion would be just a little pressure. We were told the FSH result came back normal.
We were told that one pad per 24 hours was sufficient.
“Trying to get healthcare as a woman in the United States is a humiliation ritual.”
We were told, by a physician who came to her home, that Sharon Stone’s tumors were certainly cancer. They were not. We were told that Emma Barnett’s endometriosis pain was produced by her ambition. A peer-reviewed paper in the flagship journal of reproductive medicine concluded that people with endometriosis are more attractive. It was retracted seven years later.
We were told none of this was connected.
Act II · What we learned
A 30-year midwife learned that the anatomical drawings she had trained on were wrong almost 100% of the time. An IVF laboratory director with a PhD and an HCLD learned about the rete ovarii by reading a paper published in 2025, in the course of building this collective. The rete testis was in her board examination curriculum. The rete ovarii was not. Both arise from the same embryonic tissue.
We learned that the ovary is a neuroendocrine organ. That sympathetic nerve density in the ovary increases with age. That chronic stress reduces estradiol through a documented mechanism. That derangements in sympathetic ovarian inputs precede the development of polycystic ovary syndrome. None of this was in the training materials.
“We are losing NOTHING through menopause. We are releasing the hormone drivers and taking the reins of culture-building, culture maintenance, or cultural revolution, as necessary.”
We learned that post-menopausal orca grandmothers lead their pods. That when they die, pod mortality increases significantly in the years that follow. That humans and orcas are among the only species to have evolved abrupt, mid-life cessation of fertility — not as a side effect of living longer, but as a genetically programmed transition into the most socially essential role the group has.
We learned that in 1590, James VI of Scotland supervised the torture of a respected healer and midwife to establish whether she had caused a storm. He was exceptionally educated. He spoke Latin. He wrote theology. He concluded she had caused the storm using a wax image and a dead cat, and wrote a book about it. Scotland executed more people for witchcraft per capita than almost anywhere else in Europe. Scotland also produced some of the finest minds of the early modern world. These two facts are connected.
Act III · What made us say enough
A Black woman died and her body was held on life support to gestate a fetus. A C-section was performed on what would have been her birthday. No agency in life or in death.
Alabama: 38.6 maternal deaths per 100,000. The Netherlands: 4.5. The Netherlands is worried about that number.
The programs designed to prevent the preventable deaths are being eliminated. The federal infrastructure for counting those deaths is being eliminated. The Senate confirmed the deaths have more than doubled since 1987.
The system is not broken.
It is working exactly as designed.
We are the ones who are going to redesign it.
Act IV · The ignition
Amanda Nguyen was raped at 22 and given a $4,863.79 bill for evidence collection. She was told the rape kit would be destroyed in six months. The statute of limitations was 15 years. She built a movement, drafted a federal law, passed it unanimously, and flew to space with her hospital bracelet as her zero-gravity indicator.
That is what the ignition looks like.
Fertility For Baddies began as a question: what would reproductive care look like if it were actually built for all of us? For LGBTQIA+ people, trans and nonbinary people, menstruators and hormone-cycling people of every age and identity — for anyone the system was never designed to serve. Hundreds of people who could not look away joined. A community formed. A collective was built.
Not because we are angry. Because we are done.
“Simply: people deserve better.”
This is the community villain origin story.
The individual one comes next.
The Collective
We are researchers, clinicians, coaches, advocates, and people who have lived these stories. We are not a clinic. We are not a corporation. We are a community of people who decided to rebuild what should have existed all along — for everyone the system forgot to design for.
Curchoe Care 