written as observation, not accusation
I have lived long enough to recognize the pattern. Every time a woman learns too much, the world invents a new way to call her dangerous. When her hands cured fever, she was a witch. When her words questioned scripture, she was a heretic. When her data proved the model incomplete, she was an anomaly. The labels change; the architecture of disbelief remains.
We were told that knowledge is pure, that science is self-correcting, that progress is neutral. But neutrality is a monument built on selective memory. The first archives of Europe were monasteries, their walls echoing with male voices copying male ideas for male readers. The canon of knowledge was sealed before half of humanity was allowed to hold the pen. What we call data today is the fossilized residue of that silence.
Before we go further, the language must be clear. Sex is the body’s architecture: chromosomes, hormones, flesh. Gender is the language the world writes on that architecture: law, labor, expectation. One is biology; the other, bureaucracy. Both have been used to police what they could have helped us understand.
The Black Plague was the first crack. When faith and medicine failed, women’s hands kept the dying clean, their remedies grounded in soil and observation. They worked empirically, measuring by pulse, by fever, by the look of breath leaving the chest. When the plague subsided and authority staggered back to its throne, it rewrote the story. The women who had preserved life were recast as its destroyers. It was not ignorance they feared. Most definitely it was competition.
As the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer wrote in the Malleus Maleficarum (1487), “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust in women.” That line codified fear as theology, and theology as law. The female sex became the variable to be managed; the male sex, the constant to be obeyed. Order depended on predictability. Unpredictability was declared sin.
The pyres burned; the manuscripts burned; the names were deleted. Yet knowledge has a way of surviving in fragments. It exists in the recipes whispered from mother to daughter. It shows in the herbs that are in the same sequence in village gardens across continents. It thrives in the rhythm of healing that ignored doctrine and listened to pain.
Centuries later the vocabulary changed but the grammar stayed. The witch hunt became the clinical trial. The accusation of hysteria became the footnote: subjects excluded for hormonal variability. Until 2016, when the U.S. NIH issued its policy on Sex as a Biological Variable. Most biomedical research still used only male bodies as data. Researchers believed that female cycles “confounded” results. In other words, reality was too complex for the method, so the method declared half the species irrelevant.
They called it standardization. I call it fear disguised as efficiency.
When a heart attack strikes a man, the textbook symptom is crushing pain in the chest. In contrast, when it strikes a woman, the signs are diffuse. These include jaw ache, nausea, and fatigue. Often, the diagnosis arrives too late. Medicine inherited its templates from a body presumed universal but designed around one sex. Dosages, side effects, metabolic rates, all calibrated to that single biological baseline.
We were told this was objective science. But objectivity that begins with omission is not neutral; it is obedience.
The same logic governs our technologies. The datasets that train algorithms are descendants of the same archives that erased women’s handwriting. When the machine misreads a woman’s face, voice, or pain, it is not failing its job; it is remembering. It remembers the monastery, the trial, the lab that filtered out hormonal noise. It remembers the comfort of a world where variance could be ignored.
I watch it happen again and again. Women are reduced to their capacity for reproduction. Then they are blamed for the consequences of this reduction. Every argument about autonomy circles back to the same pivot – the womb as site of control. We are treated as potential mothers before we are treated as full persons. Our medical records begin with fertility and end with menopause, as if everything else is a footnote.
The archive of exclusion runs deeper than laboratories. Even the skills that keep a body alive were once considered intelligent. These include feeding, cleaning, and mending. They were exiled from the idea of intelligence once they were coded feminine. When men cooked, it was cuisine; when women did, it was duty. When men built shelters, it was architecture; when women cleaned them, it was servitude.
The knowledge of sustenance was reclassified as instinct, not expertise. Yet every civilization collapses first in its kitchens and its wells, not in its parliaments. The bare minimum that sustains life was never minimal. It is foundational.
Let me say this clearly: if reproduction is truly what the world fears and seeks to control, logic would dictate that regulation should follow abundance. Regulation should not follow scarcity. A single male body can impregnate hundreds; a single female body can carry a handful of children in a lifetime. Yet the chemical burden of contraception is placed entirely on the woman. The pill and the injection are all contraceptive methods. The device is also engineered to silence the cycle of the one who bears risk. It is not the one who proliferates it. We call this convenience. It is continuation of the same asymmetry: control the variable, not the constant.
They call it care. I call it engineered obedience. In the late eighteenth century, the first chainsaw was built not for forests but for flesh. John Aitken and James Jeffray’s 1780s invention for symphysiotomy, sawing through a woman’s pelvic bone when childbirth defied control. The intrauterine device, modern heir of that logic, still releases copper ions. Copper is a metal chosen for its spermicidal effect. It is not chosen for comfort. Early twentieth-century prototypes of steel and silver caused infection; efficiency mattered more than pain. Even the cotton meant for cleanliness carries chlorine bleach and pesticide residue, absorbed through a body treated as inert vessel. When we deliver life, we are ordered onto our backs. This posture was normalized in the seventeenth century by Louis XIV. He preferred to watch his mistresses give birth. His physicians called it efficiency. It was visibility. Control disguised as hygiene.
This is not accusation; it is arithmetic.
Our sciences are proud of their precision, yet they refuse to measure the obvious. They treat the female sex body as deviation from a model never tested for universality. They build instruments that record the smallest particle and miss half the human experience. They catalogue galaxies and ignore cramps. They simulate climate systems down to molecular turbulence but cannot model a menstrual cycle without calling it noise.
I am not asking for sympathy. I am documenting a pattern. Every era has its version of erasure, dressed in the language of reason. The inquisitors spoke of salvation. The physicians spoke of progress. The technologists speak of optimization. Each vocabulary hides the same premise: that control equals understanding.
Look closer at the archive. The medieval manuscripts that survived were written by men for patrons who paid in gold and obedience. Women’s work existed in margins, on scraps, in local tongues that the libraries did not deem worthy of preservation. When digitization arrived, scanners captured only what had already survived. Thus the corpus that feeds our neural networks carries the same bias as the parchment it was copied from. We have automated the monastery.
We build machines to learn from history and forget that history itself is corrupted data. Every predictive model, every medical algorithm, every linguistic tool inherits the omissions of its source. When an AI describes a nurse as female and a surgeon as male, it is not sexist. It is statistically accurate within a biased dataset. The bias is the artifact of centuries of classification.
So the question is not how to make the machines fairer but how to rewrite the archive they learn from. That is not a revolution. It is maintenance, meaning cleaning the lens through which knowledge reproduces itself.
Presence is not power if the blueprint remains the same. Token inclusion inside a biased system is not justice but just poor camouflage.
The forbidden body remains forbidden; only the vocabulary of its exclusion has evolved. She is no longer burned; she is normalized into invisibility. She is not called witch but “outlier.” Not exiled from the village but from the dataset. Her pain is anecdote. Her hormone cycle, interference. Her desire, still a threat to stability.
Systems can only replicate their source code. If the source is patriarchal, the output will be too, no matter how progressive the interface looks. The solution is not vengeance but reprogramming.
That begins with honesty: to admit that the canon of medicine and the corpus of AI share the same genealogy. It is a world that defined one sex as standard. All others are seen as exceptions. To admit that modern science still measures worth by predictability, and that unpredictability remains coded feminine.
I have no appetite for another war. What I want is recognition. Recognition that the witch hunts were not superstition but early quality control for patriarchy. Recognition that excluding women from clinical trials was inheritance, not oversight. Recognition that digital archives mirror medieval scriptoria more closely than anyone dares to admit.
The forbidden body was never about sin; it was about information. The fear has always been that the unpredictable might reveal the system itself as fragile.
I imagine a future where complexity is no longer treated as error, where variability is parameter, not flaw. A dataset that includes the whole of humanity, not as contamination but as completion. That future does not require miracles. It requires will. Because what they burned was not superstition…. it was data. What they silenced was not hysteria… but it was hypothesis. And what they still call deviation is simply another form of life.
The archive was never neutral. Every script, every ledger, every corpus that feeds our machines descends from those same monasteries. They built the data temple on missing bodies and called it clean. The cataloging continues, now in code.
One person cannot fix that; one essay cannot rebalance centuries of omission. But naming it is the first act of repair. I write as witness, not savior. I map the fracture. I leave reconstruction to those who come after. They include the modern suffragettes, the archivists, and the coders. These are individuals who know that progress without correction is repetition.
This is not accusation. It is documentation of a pattern. The pattern begins with the witch and ends with the algorithm. It loops until someone stops pretending neutrality is justice.
The forbidden body stands again as mirror. Not as prophet and not as martyr. Look closely: the reflection is not accusation; it is instruction. We have been called unstable, unquantifiable, unpredictable. Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the world’s stability was never the goal.
Because creation itself is unstable. And every system that tries to suppress that truth ends up destroying the very life it claims to perfect. We are not the noise in the data. We are the signal that reveals its limits.
Burning Violet 