This is funny because as a teenager the main argument for why I (amab) was allowed to get the hpv vaccine was to prevent risk to any potential afab partners. These days we know that hpv causes all sorts of cancers in anyone with any functional anatomy (if someone has neither a throat nor genitals I’m very sorry for their situation, but they’re an extreme outlier).
The ubiquity of HPV reminds me of the ubiquity of chickenpox. Neither was immediately fatal and most people got them so a lot of people didn’t get that these were very bad diseases that needed to be actively controlled. I stand by my disgust at the parents who refused their daughters the hpv vaccine on the grounds of sexual purity. I don’t have kids, but I can’t imagine not giving my child a vaccine that can prevent cancer, no matter how much I disapprove of the actions they’d have to take for them to get that kind of cancer.
This is funny because as a teenager the main argument for why I (amab) was allowed to get the hpv vaccine was to prevent risk to any potential afab partners. These days we know that hpv causes all sorts of cancers in anyone with any functional anatomy (if someone has neither a throat nor genitals I’m very sorry for their situation, but they’re an extreme outlier).
The ubiquity of HPV reminds me of the ubiquity of chickenpox. Neither was immediately fatal and most people got them so a lot of people didn’t get that these were very bad diseases that needed to be actively controlled. I stand by my disgust at the parents who refused their daughters the hpv vaccine on the grounds of sexual purity. I don’t have kids, but I can’t imagine not giving my child a vaccine that can prevent cancer, no matter how much I disapprove of the actions they’d have to take for them to get that kind of cancer.