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Emails Reveal How a Hospital Bowed to Political Pressure to Stop Treating Trans Teens
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Medicalization of trans children, even those who are entering puberty or beyond, is a bad idea. There needs to be more research on the safety of puberty blockers and cross sex endogenous hormones for long term medical outcomes including cancer and heart disease risks. Once you are an adult, sure, do whatever you want to your body; but there is a different ethical consideration for minors.
You're not a doctor. There have been studies and there will be more.
What about the ethical consideration of teens suffering and killing themselves because of gender dysphoria? Does that not matter?
This isn't some "nice to have" this is important medical treatment to save lives, improve quality of life, improve outcomes.
Politicians have no fucking business denying healthcare to trans people.
The "they will die if they don't get gender affirming care" narrative is so harmful. Women who should qualify for gender affirming care (eg, hair removal from PCOS-induced hirsutism) aren't considered the same way. Do their feelings matter less? Are they really commiting suicide in large numbers because they do not have this treatment (perhaps it's unaffordable because health insurance doesn't cover it)?
Do you know a lot of girls with PCOS who are being bullied to the point of violence? Because that's exactly what happened to the trans girl I grew up with 30 years ago. Long before she ever said she was a girl or presented as a girl in public. When she just "looked like" an effeminate little boy, another child wrapped her scarf around her neck and around a piece of playground equipment and started pulling her off the ground by her throat.
You know why? Because she was wearing a glittery purple scarf. And you know what the school administration did about it? Not one fucking thing. Her mother and my mother had to go on a crusade to even get the incident acknowledged.
Yeah, I wonder why trans kids have such high suicide rates. It's not magic, you ignorant FART. You're part of the problem driving these kids to experience high suicide rates.
(Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobe, for anyone who isn't familiar with this much more appropriate acronym for a TERF.)
bro that's fucking horrible and nobody should have to go through that but making people go through irreversible chemical, hormonal, and physical "treatments" instead of even trying to help their mental anguish is even worse. That's literally saying that cutting body parts off and gaslighting yourself into being okay with it is a reasonable fix toward feeling uncomfortable in your body, they should have the root issue addressed rather than having the entire medical field shit on them by making them think mutilating themselves is the right and empowering choice. they've fooled everyone including you, and it's all for money, because these "treatments" rake in ridiculous amounts of money and would bring in more money than just fixing their real issues so they can live a happy life phisically and chemically intact.
I knew this child from BIRTH. She's the same age as my younger sister and they were very good friends growing up. From the instant this kid could express preferences - I'm talking 18 months-2 years old - we knew something was up because here's this little boy who wants to wear dresses, play with dolls, and sneaks into mom's high heels and makeup at home.
We just assumed she was a gay boy because none of us had ever even heard of a transgender person 30-35 years ago. Believe me, everyone discouraged this. The constant battle finally met a stalemate agreement to just keep it at home. Even then, this kid was irrepressible, hence the glittery purple scarf at school.
When she told us in high school that she was really a girl, it was the most face-palmingly obvious thing, like of course that's what we've been seeing your entire life. That makes so much sense.
SHE initiated that conversation. No one EVER pushed her to do anything. She was a very active participant in her own medical decisions, which is medically appropriate for a teenager. (I'm a nurse. Teenagers should participate in their own medical decisions.)
She started puberty blockers, started living openly as a girl in RURAL OHIO 30 YEARS AGO and it was not a big fucking deal until you assholes suddenly decided it was a few years ago. She didn't receive any permanent medical treatment for transition until she was 18.
Believe me, son, she's PERFECTLY INTACT, happier than you, and you can fuck the fuck right off with that horse shit terminology.
what part of any of those things is female? you don't have to be female to enjoy "stereotypically" female things. that's pretty sexist and shortsighted of you, so I'm not surprised why, when surrounded with assumptions like that, they would feel the need to justify those preferences with being "female". maybe if you and the rest of their family were more open minded and accepted them for who they are, they wouldn't feel they had to transition in the first place.
Oh fuck off. You know damn well that 90% of society would raise an eyebrow at a 3 year old boy trudging around in high heels and getting into mom's lipstick.
NO ONE TOLD HER SHE WAS TRANS. SHE SAID THAT.
What part of this was self-determined is hard for you to understand? Transition was 100% initiated and driven BY HER. It's what she wanted because it's what she understood herself to be inside her own mind.
Umm... You have fallen for some massive misinformation friend. The first stages of a transition are a trial period where one figures out what their individual needs are. Medical providers are actually pretty cagey about regret so if you are a trans youth this involves a therapist and a social worker who talks woith thw kids and their guardians.
As an adult this means basically doing dry runs of everything. Name change, social transition, binding, packing and talking to other trans people to see what worked for them. Inside the community itself there's a lot of people don't medically transition ever. For a solid chunk the social aspects alone give them the tools they need to get by okay...which is why if someone is pointing to someone and screaming about how their pronouns are going to destroy society it's really not great! Adding pressure by removing all the mental tools they need to get through their day in the body they have and telling them they are fake and just wanting attention doesn't achieve the aim of dissuading people from desiring medical transition. Quite the opposite.
Look a little bit further into non-binary identies and you will find a lot of trans people who have embraced halfway transition. Sometimes it's just a single sex characteristic you can't get over, sometimes your sense of identity isn't stable over the long term so a medical transition doesn't work for you. The point being is there's a lot of different trans people out there who have all approached being trans very differently. What works for one doesn't work for all so you share your experiences to find differences and similarity, experiment, really drill down into how you react to everything and I mean EVERYTHING... You lay out your values, fears, life goals, relationships, body image issues, spirituality - all of it and you itemize it. You figure out what you really want out of life, what you stand to lose and what you hope to gain by either staying as you are or pursing something else.
Trying to figure out your gender identity happens as a period of self experimentation over the course of years before you go to a doc about a physical transformation and pushing someone towards a medical transition as the only option is a subsect of "trans medicalism" which inside the community itself is generally policed as an asshole thing to levy at someone.
So when you come out the gate with "The first thing they do is chop off their bits!"... No. That is not how any of this works.
I understand your point of view, it's good that there's a lot of care taken to make sure the mental impact of transitioning is minimal, but the point is this is a huge amount of work to help someone try and cope with "being" something that doesn't align with what what they were born and biologically formed as. It's a noble sentiment, but we should be approaching the whole issue in a way that helps people realize that they don't have to change to be themselves.
You kind of have it backwards. When you're trans there's a lot of work that you have to do to try and align with your physicality. The mental aspect is often very isolating because you don't see yourself as having very much in common with people of your phenotypic sex. Like you can be friends with them and feel close emotional connections but your brain doesn't register as them being like you the same way it does with cis people of your gender. Your brain also rewards you with a huge dopamine hit when someone actually recognizes who you are inside. It's a feeling like being invisible and nobody even knows you're there and then someone actually notices you.
Seriously a cashier just automatically coding me as my gender makes my whole gorram week. It's like someone shot sunlight directly into my brain and I get to carry that around for a few days.
The jealously of physicality is also not super subtle. I am riddiculously jealous of people with fairly unremarkable features. We're not talking movie star levels of beauty just- has a sex characteristic I want. I did not medically transition and chose to keep my birth sex characteristics because my partner really isn't attracted to the opposite set of characteristics. I value that romantic attachment enough that I would easily take a bullet for them. If I could make that sacrifice I figure essentially living in a body I wish every day I didn't have to live in tolerable. But so much has to be going right in my life for this to be okay.
But even then sometimes it's a lot. Like I know I will never not be hideous to myself. I might very well die having never really liked the way I look. I have a massive issue going to weddings and formal events because when I try to look good to myself it brings to light how even when I try it's so very far off from what I wish I could look like on a good day. People are actively mislead from how I would prefer to be treated, referred to and recognized because of my body and putting up with that takes additional energy and frustration daily. If I don't want people reminding me of the body I am in I have to tell everyone I meet to please use different pronouns for me and think of me differently so I can try my best to not be reminded of my body.
A lot of people when they come out as trans do so because they are already tired of trying so hard. A lot go through a stage where they try to be the best version of their birth sex they can be to try and make it work and find it has done nothing to make them happy. Part of why so many of us are complete hot messes when we socially transition is because by the time we give up trying to pretend to be cis we realize that we are dying from being so invisible and isolated from the people who we see as being the closest to us. That nobody actually knows us.
Even with my close friends who know my deal I sometimes see the wall that keeping this physicality maintains. Your brain does a lot to code everyone you meet as male or female and that translates unconsciously into how people reacts to you. Your brain prioritizes that information and we trans folk intimately know this. We can tell who is humouring us as best they can because they want to do the right thing by us and who actually has the switch flipped to their brain properly recognizing us as who we are... There is a cognitive load on the people who deal with us and we recognize that and a lot of that is based on our physicality. We see that cognitive work cis people go through lessen as we change. We see it in ourselves when we deal with other trans people who transition around us. (There is actually a kind of really funny thing with trans people who pass perfectly as a cis person where the transphobes have to fight the cognitive dissonance in the opposite direction. You see it in the micro hesitations they when they use a pronoun associated with somebody's birth sex and they get around it more by saying "they and them" more often, something we refer to as "the coward's they" because they are actively fighting their own brain's mechanisms that register the proper gender to maintain their meaness)
We recognize that gulf in you but we can't change you. The only thing we have the power to change is ourselves.
i'm genuinely sorry you have to deal with that. The world would be a better place if there was a greater focus on helping people feel comfortable in their own skin rather than seemingly embracing those cold feelings and letting trans people suffer through things like that.
I understand your viewpoint and that you understand how many people feel, and wish that core discomfort you feel could just be destroyed and replaced with the warmth that should fill you without having to make compromises to yourself or others.
You and everyone else deserve to be happy the way you are, and the medical field is doing you wrong by focusing on the wrong part of the issue, and I'm sorry so many people are so hateful toward those who suffer from that without understanding what they're going through. I'm sorry if what I'm saying is coming off as hateful, but I just want to see that core, inner coldness be replaced with happiness without people having to change themselves, and without that issue being ignored or glorified.
Yeah, you don't get it. Even when people try it's hard because they aren't the full problem. We react to our own bodies and we have an inner sense of gender. That's hard to communicate to a lot of cis people because they don't have an inner compass that registers gender. A lot of them figure their sex means basically nothing to them and it's like trying to explain color to the blind when you have an inner sense. There are cis people who do experience gender euphoria and deep connection to their gender but they are kind of rare and a lot of people don't really explore something when it works.
Moreover... The medical field actively resists people who want to medically transition. We have to prove beyond shadow of a doubt that it is what we want before anyone even starts considering it. YOU focus on the wrong part of the issue. You are not our therapists and endocrinologists. You aren't a researcher or a parent or partner of a trans person. Our medical transitions aren't your business. You have been lead to believe you know better than we do because when you only listen when other cis people talk about us in ways that register your confirmation bias from being cis that feels true to you because you are primed not to see us as reasonable. You have probably been informed we are delusional or crazy and thus unable to make our own informed choices. You want to try and save us from ourselves... But you do not know us you have just been lead to believe your opinion is reasonable because no joke being trans is really hard to empathize with properly.
When you say " I just want to see that core, inner coldness be replaced with happiness without people having to change themselves" you basically are just saying "I just wish you weren't trans. " If someone gave me the option of changing my gender to match my birth sex just so that I was happy in this body, I would not do it. Because gender lies so close to the core of who you are to just change it would be so fundamentally violating to my sense of self I would essentially stop being me anymore. For as long as I remember my gender has consciously or subconsciously colored every relationship and social interaction I have had in my life. It is in the bones of how I think about myself and my life. For all the frustration of not having the body I want this IS me. Changing my body is nothing by comparison.
saying that I wish you weren't trans by wanting to see your anguish disappear simply doesn't compute to me. From what I've been hearing from each of you, being trans is a response to what is being clearly acknowledged as discomfort with yourself.
The point is that you and everyone else said they are not content with their sex, which is an issue because you shouldn't have to feel like the opposite sex to feel they way you are.
If you're a biological male, you should not have to feel that you must label yourself as female in order to present yourself the way you feel and vice versa. In fact, having to feel the need for a gender separate from your sex shouldn't even be necessary, because you should be able to just present yourself without essentially stating you're a different sex.
Men can be as stereotypically feminine as they want, and women can be as stereotypically masculine as they want.
The point is that you shouldn't have to present yourself just the way you are and then justify it to society by labeling yourself as something other than your sex in order to conform with it.
Just be yourself. The issue is that you seem to think you have to justify it by labeling yourself differently.
That is the thing though, we are not just tomboys and femboys. It is not on you to tell us what should and shouldn't be nessisary. You are not us. That you believe in your heart that you are an authority is something you need to sit yourself down with and really think about because your experience does not represent the entirety of humanity here and you keep demonstrating to me that you have zero idea what it going on with people like me while trying to tell me what I am. You can't change my position on what I am, I live it every day. When you tell me something that is conflicting directly with the experience I have and the experience of the community where I have a bunch of close friends to compare notes to it comes off as more than a little self centered. To you gender is just something you perform. It does not connect to anything deeper because for you it's basically just clothes and affect. For you gender is superficial and that is part of the experience of being cis so that really doesn't help. The majority of cisness could probably be best described as not as a strong conception of gender that aligns with your body but an absence of strong feelings about gender at all.
If I change my clothes people still treat me as my birth sex. Even the ones who are trying their damnedest to do right by me their brain is still coding me as the other sex and that is disappointing at a basic level. Being trans is not just about dress up. Gender is NOT just something we perform for your benefit. It is also not fully about pain. We do routinely have to tell cis people about our pain to try and break past the inertia to get people to help us we routinely have to prove to you that we are suffering an untolerable level of permanent unhappiness because otherwise you just prioritize your baseline of not having to do even a little mental work on our behalf. It's easier for you to rebel against having to take on that cognitive load rarely when you meet one of us than it is to accept someone needs this.
But talking about pain doesn't cover the joy when we actually get to catch glimpses of ourselves in the mirror because we get to see some glimmer of us in there. It doesn't cover the deep connection we feel immediately with other human beings who react to us as though our gender is a given. It doesn't account for the fact that so many of us literally dream we are not in the body we were born in so we wake up in the morning wanting something that feels so good and natural when we are asleep. A thing about transition is that so often trans people only find their very first actually fulfilling romantic relationships once they are on the other side of their transition. You can't really love someone deeply when you don't like the person you are and your partner doesn't actually recognize what you want and need. It isn't about reducing pain, it's about being happy in a way that resonates with who we are.
And we understand gender expression. Ho boy do we. There are a lot of binary trans people who wish they didn't have to conform to societies binary customs but if they don't then people code them as their birth sex and treat them like their birth sex. There are plenty of trans femmes who desperately envy tomboys for their ability to wear comfortable clothes and still be recognized as their gender.
What makes a trans person feel trapped inside themselves and invisible to other people is the lack of recognition they are their gender. Not just that their body looks like it though we do have strong feelings about our bodies for the sake of them as well. Dysphoria and euphoria, the two halves of the experience of transness, are very good at telling you exactly what the heart wants. It screams it at you even when it doesn't make a lot of sense. Longing is a killer. Because of my circumstances I basically just altered my clothes and style and it sucks. Every time I pass a reflective window or speak and hear the timbre of my voice it makes me lose confidence. I used to pass so effortlessly when I was a kid so I get that sense of loss of something that made me so happy that I just won't experience again. Strangers still automatically gender me incorrectly about 90% of the time which makes me feel like I am a fucking human in a chimpanzee body trying to prove to them I'm human and everytime they treat me like a chimp I just don't want to be around people just that little bit more.
Identify exists in two parts your conception of yourself and other's conception of you. It's basic Heigel. Transness is mostly dealing with the disconnect of these two halves of identity. The constant is our own identity. Gender is a primary key to how we conceptualize ourselves. From everything you have said I can tell that gender is not a component of how you conceptualize yourself... but that's just comfort because of absence. If you are completely ambivalent about something you aren't the best spokesperson for people who cannot live without that thing. Trans people work hard to express gender because if nobody recognizes that in us they do not see us and if we are not seen we are not understood and if no one understands us we are the truly alone.
After I had my mastectomy I woke up briefly out of anesthesia, looked down, smiled and went back to sleep. I didn’t gaslight myself into being okay with it. Every time I get to go swimming or running without a shirt, every time I get a pizza from the door in an A-top and cargo shorts, I feel amazing in my body. I used to wear nothing but hoodies and jeans, covering every single inch of my body. I grow out a Duck Dynasty beard if I don’t shave for a couple months, it’s absolutely spectacular.
I don’t feel fooled, I’m not spending ridiculous amounts of money. It’s ~$25 a month for my shots, I paid $5500 for the mastectomy years ago. I see my primary care doc twice a year to get blood work done, the only issue with my T is that I make too many red blood cells and need to donate blood occasionally.
I’m a neckbeard that likes craft beer and D&D - that is my real self. The “real issues” that prevent me from a “happy life” are entirely related to being part of a group that fascists have decided to scapegoat.
PSA: Anyone this far gone is not worth arguing with. They're so deep into the ignorant conspiracy shitbox that they're not coming out.
Okay buddy, I'm glad you're content with the way the world is and clearly don't care to see improvement in people's mental health without having to go through a whole body mod process first
I'm sorry you're so willfully ignorant, and don't bother to educate yourself on topics you clearly have strong opinions on, even though it doesn't directly affect you. I hope things get better for you.
Nobody is forcing trans people to go through medical transition. But medical transition is what helps them relieve their mental anguish.
Being transgender is not a mental illness.
if destroying the physical and chemical makeup of one's body is necessary to make them feel "right" in it, then it's definitely not a non-issue either, the fact that someone feels that way in the first place goes against their genetic and chemical makeup, as well as their physical formations resulting from that makeup, which gives you the undeniable truth of what you "actually" are, rather than any thoughts or emotions one might have.
The emotions are entirely and completely immovable, the body is not; this treatment is the best of a shit situation. And even if we could transplant our brains into different bodies entirely, you'd just start calling us Frankensteins Monster
I strongly disagree. Our minds are the most malleable part of ourselves and should be the focus of any fixes the medical field innovates toward. The fact that you feel they are so immovable is proof that the medical field is failing to truly fix what plagues so many people with those feelings. If the proper treatment target had been identified from the beginning, you wouldn't be suffering in the first place.
Why do you think people actively choose to adapt their bodies to better fit the idea of themselves if they could just "change their minds"? And do you really think most haven't tried that first?
This to me feels very much like shaming a depressed person for taking antidepressants by telling them "the medical field has failed you by giving you pills, have you considered just being happy?"
I'm very much not shaming anyone, I'm trying to tell you that the "treatment" you're receiving is actively detrimental to your body and only exists because the medical field doesn't care enough about you or is too scared to give you a real fix. I understand that you might find any sort of criticism as an attack against you, and I apologize for it, but the truth is that you should be demanding more from the system that's using you without you realizing it.
I do appreciate your concern but what do you think is the "real fix"?
Educate yourself https://genderdysphoria.fyi/
This is an attempt to normalize an issue people are suffering from. This is something that should be addressed and fixed, rather than left for the victim to deal with as if it's something acceptable to be forced to suffer in the era we live in, with the medical innovations we (should) have.
After I had my mastectomy I woke up briefly out of anesthesia, looked down, smiled and went back to sleep. I didn’t gaslight myself into being okay with it. Every time I get to go swimming or running without a shirt, every time I get a pizza from the door in an A-top and cargo shorts, I feel amazing in my body. I used to wear nothing but hoodies and jeans, covering every single inch of my body. I grow out a Duck Dynasty beard if I don’t shave for a couple months, it’s absolutely spectacular.
I don’t feel fooled, I’m not spending ridiculous amounts of money. It’s ~$25 a month for my shots, I paid $5500 for the mastectomy years ago. I see my primary care doc twice a year to get blood work done, the only issue with my T is that I make too many red blood cells and need to donate blood occasionally.
I’m a neckbeard that likes craft beer and D&D - that is my real self. The “real issues” that prevent me from a “happy life” are entirely related to being part of a group that fascists have decided to scapegoat.
Honestly that's pretty cool, and I'm glad you're happy with how you are now, I just wish we lived in a world where you didn't even have to go through that process to feel happy with yourself. People deserve to be able to feel happy the way they're born
My little brother was born with a hole in his heart which had to be corrected via surgery. No one demands that he be happy “the way he was born.”
Having a hole in your heart is not a deep seated mental anguish that is being socially normalized to the detriment of its victims, it is a physical issue inhibiting the proper functioning of a vital organ.