Having a pain-free pelvic floor is about more than just sex
If you’re a queer and/or trans person and experience pelvic pain with any internal input or penetrative sex, you might be ambivalent about seeking support. After all, queer people know best that what we perceive as “sex” is socially constructed, and there are a million, creative ways of having sex together beyond anything centering penetration.
Despite this, you might be someone who still dreads getting a pap smear, or maybe is putting off getting pregnant because imagining the internal aspects of having an IUI (Intrauterine insemination) feel overwhelming and painfu
Moving towards a pain-free pelvic floor doesn’t have to ever be about penetrative sex. It’s just as, if not more important, to feel empowered as you approach whatever kind of reproductive or gynecological care that you might need.
Benefits of pelvic floor therapy beyond pain-free sex
We all have a sensory map in our brain of different body parts, and the size of a body part’s region is dependent on how much attention and use it gets. For example, the sensory map of our hands is quite large, because we are getting so much sensory input into our hands throughout the day. The pelvic floor, however, has a much smaller sensory map, and for the internal parts, even less so. For many of us, if we aren’t actively developing a relationship with the internal parts of our pelvic floor, we might not know how it feels. Especially if we’ve experienced pain in the past, there can be many reasons our nervous systems might automatically assume there would be pain there in the future. Working with a pelvic floor physical therapist or occupational therapist and developing tools to know how to self-evaluate and release your pelvic floor can be a vital part to seeking any kind of reproductive care that involves pelvic exams.
Empowering your reproductive care
Imagine what it might feel like if you were able to go into any gynecological or IUI appointment with a clear sense of what your pelvic floor feels like, and how to relax it with intention and conscious effort. How might that change your sense of what’s possible in terms of your gynecological care? How might that improve your psychological well-being, both leading up to your appointments, as well as during and after, knowing that you have the skills to reduce the risk of having a painful experience? Knowledge truly is power, and the more you understand about your own body, the more agency you’ll have to advocate and take of yourself.
There is so much more to having a pain-free pelvic floor than just being able to have pain free sex. If you’ve been avoiding reproductive or gynecological care because you’re nervous about your pelvic pain, pelvic floor physical therapy or occupational therapy might be right for you.
