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Lucy May Dawson on Medical Misogyny, Gaslighting & Reclaiming Her Body

The Pieces with Bimini

Tuesday, 27 October 2026 - 39 minutes

Lucy May Dawson is a disability advocate and survivor whose story of resilience against medical negligence has become a rallying cry for disabled women everywhere.

At 20, she contracted the anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis - a treatable brain disease - but was misdiagnosed as having a psychiatric breakdown and sectioned involuntarily in a psychiatric ward for three months. During that hospitalisation, hospital negligence resulted in a third-degree burn to her sciatic nerve from an uncaged radiator pipe, permanently paralyzing her lower left leg.

What followed was a devastating decade of medical gaslighting, financial abandonment by the welfare system, and the journey to rebuild an entire life from scratch. Today, Lucy uses her platform to expose medical misogyny, celebrate disabled sexuality, and prove that a life that’s changed doesn’t have to mean a life that’s over.

On this episode of The Pieces, Bimini and Lucy dive into the formative moment that changed everything and the shocking reality that medical conditions are routinely misdiagnosed as hysteria in young women.

They explore the systemic failures that left Lucy permanently disabled, and the turning point when she realized she had a voice to use for those who lost theirs.

The conversation tackles medical misogyny head-on, exploring how symptoms are dismissed as a mental health crisis when a young man with identical symptoms would likely receive immediate testing. Lucy also shares the vulnerability of being fetishized as a disabled woman, her period on OnlyFans as a survival mechanism when the NHS abandoned her, and how she’s reclaimed her body and sexuality on her own terms.

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