In keeping with Intersectionality theory, the perception of disabled people, diagnoses they receive, and treatment available to them is linked to the way they present their gender, both from a historical and a modern perspective.
"Hysteria is undoubtedly the first mental disorder attributable to women, accurately described in the second millennium BC, and until Freud, considered an exclusively female disease.
In the Middle Ages, Trota of Salerno approached the idea of hysteria from a different perspective, offering the explanation that "the suffering related to gynecological diseases was “intimate”: women often, out of shame, do not reveal their troubles to the doctor.
Studies done on both autism[6][7][8] and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder[9][10] suggest that "masculine defaults" [11] in healthcare influence diagnosticians by creating a mental platonic ideal diagnostic case, which often excludes women who present the same symptoms as men.
[20] In following with the concept of misogynoir, Black female patients, explained by intersectional feminism, suffer both from racism and sexism within healthcare and often find that the combination of the two synthesizes into something separate from each on their own.
[22] J. Marion Sims, often referred to with the epithet "Father of Gynecology", was notorious for operating on enslaved women without anesthesia, a practice common among medical professionals at the time.