#transitioning is healthcare

[isawthismeme]

Case in point:

[floral-ashes]

The fact that leagues of smart and rational trans adults who are informed about the evidence base for puberty blockers wish they could’ve taken them in their youth seems to me pretty darn conclusive evidence that the balance of risk and benefit is favourable.

[brooke2valley]

Today is the day! WISH ME LUCKKK!!!💕🥳

It's just the consultation, but it's the first step in this long journey, so I'm ready 💕

[hellyeahscarleteen]

Maybe you’ve noticed: there’s been a shift in how people and movements that are anti-trans present themselves, and it feels designed to make them more palatable to people who would otherwise recoil at arguments that position trans people as threats. They don’t hate trans people! They’re very concerned about them! Think of the risks! Think of the children!! If that language sounds familiar, it’s because the anti-abortion movement uses this same playbook. Just like a crisis pregnancy center might advertise itself as offering pre-natal care, counseling or free pregnancy tests, an anti-trans provider might offer “gender exploratory” therapy or claim to offer valuable information on the “harms” of transition. Just like reporters being too willing to parrot unsubstantiated, anti-choice claims to the greater public, anti-trans groups are using places like the New York Times—and the fact that many people within those spaces were already held anti-trans beliefs-- to spread misinformation and position their “experts” as the reliable voices on trans care. Quite contrary to articles that claim people are being rushed through transition, accessing gender affirming care remains difficult for most people, especially young people. There are a limited number of places that provide it (and, due to transphobic violence both digital and physical, some of the places that used to aren’t able to anymore), waiting lists, and a dozen other barriers to access. Not to mention that plenty of elements of transition, especially physical transition, require at least a letter from a therapist. And now, on top of that, you have healthcare providers and resources who seek only to discourage or pressure all trans and nonbinary folks into not transitioning. This is a recipe for trans folks, or the people helping them access care, to walk right into a trap, and enables ongoing, anti-trans bias more broadly. Here's a guide from Scarleteen co-director Sam Wall to help trans people, and especially, adults in the lives of trans young people, to identify legitimate — and illegitimate — sources of trans care.

[narcissistcookbook]

boys i'm starting to think building a society where the primary imperative of business is to make as big a profit as possible might have been a bad idea

lads stop me if i'm wrong, but was it a mistake to make money so central to our society that rich people become functionally omnipotent?

gents i can't believe i'm saying this but am i wrong for not trusting the private sector to have my best interests at heart??

[thesocklesswonder]

Ohio's mental health authority is trying to ban transgender healthcare - esp for people under 21 years of age, BUT they are asking for public input! Hurry, though, as it's only through 5pm local time (US Eastern Standard Time) on January 19th!

Changes to the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services rule, "5122-14-12 | Private Psychiatric Hospital: Program, Specialty Services, and Discharge Planning", are to prohibit any kind of transgender care for those under 21 in a psychiatric hospital. Full document here, but be aware it is to a pdf

The rule includes the text, "Medical services shall not include any of the following: ...the prescribing, administering, or furnishing of any prescription drug or hormone...", which means if someone under 21 enters a private psychiatric hospital and who is already on puberty blockers or hormones, the doctors there would be prohibited from giving them the prescription they already have.

A new proposed rule for the same Ohio department, "5122-26-19 | Gender Transition Care" states the requirements for anyone needing transition care under this department. They are targeting the most vulnerable with these rules: young people who have mental health issues who also need transgender care. Full document here, but be aware it is to a pdf

Included in this rule: A doctor may only provide transgender care after three requirements have been met - a psychiatrist who has experience with the patient's age group must be employed by/contracted with the provider, an endocrinologist who has experience with the age group, and the provider has a comprehensive written plan that includes a detransitioning provision.

It also requires any such patient to have a thorough mental health evaluation and counseling period of at least 6 months prior to any transgender care. It also appears to become part of their medical record.

In addition to a ban on any transition surgeries, even if the patient jumps through all of those hoops, is a curious item that prevents doctors from referring patients out to other doctors that can provide care:

Another thing that made me pause was what seems like a scare tactic:

The terms "orchiectomy" and "penectomy" mean the removal of testicals and penis, respectively. The word "castration" could only be redundant or referring only to chemical castration, which seems to not fit in with gender reassignment surgery (correct me if you know it does fit). "Castration" is a scary word for most people with penises. I think it would likely provoke a knee-jerk response, like, "Oh, no, castration is bad. No castration! Enact these rules to keep people from being castrated!"

⚠️ The time is now to tell the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services what you think about this! ⚠️

The option to comment on these needless restrictions can be found at the link in the first paragraph, but it's just an link that takes you to your email app. You can also just email them directly at MH-SOT-rules@mha.ohio.gov no later than 5 pm EST on Friday, January 19, 2024.

Please reblog to get this message out! We all have a stake in how rules and laws are enacted. They often lead to more in other states/countries. So, even if you don't have a stake in this personally, please make sure others see it.

Why do I care? I don't live in Ohio, but I have friends all over, including Ohio, who need transgender care. You might know someone like that, too.

[reasonsforhope]

A surgeon who carried out the UK’s first womb transplant on a cisgender woman has said similar transplants for transgender women are probably about 10 to 20 years away.

In February, Imperial College London professor, James Smith, and his colleague, Isabel Quiroga, from the Oxford Transplant Centre, carried out the womb transplant on a married woman whose 40-year-old sister was willing to donate her own, having already given birth to two children.

The 34-year-old recipient, who lives in England and wishes not to be named, received the transplant during an operation lasting more than nine hours at the Churchill Hospital, in Oxford.

It is hoped that, in the future, womb transplants can be performed on trans women, giving them the chance to have a baby, but Smith said the reality of this is still decades away.

There is currently no “technical feasibility” to perform the operation on trans women due to a difference in the pelvic and vascular anatomy, the shape of the pelvis and issues with the microbiome – the network of micro-organisms that live in the human body, he explained...

Dr Narendra Kaushik, a surgeon in the Indian capital New Dehli, said in May 2022 that transplanting uteruses into trans women is “the future."

Uterine transplants are currently rare, costly and experimental surgeries that typically rely on donor organs. They are often done on people born without a uterus so they can become pregnant and give birth.

The first successful womb transplant took place at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in 2014. Two years later, the operation was carried successfully once more in the US.

About 50 babies have now been born worldwide as a result of womb transplants.

Kaushik, who has 15 years of experience in gender-affirming surgeries, said: “We cannot predict exactly when this will happen but it will happen soon. We have our plans and we are very optimistic.”

-via PinkNews, August 23, 2023

[inspiredtrans]

I'll get lynched, but trans women most definitely have privilege over trans men when it comes to receiving trans-related medical care, and yes that has to do with amab privilege, which is also very real, even if you transition and you're "no longer a man" for lack of better words. There's an inherent privilege to being amab. Obviously being a trans woman doesn't come without downsides, but you also retain some amab privilege, especially in healthcare treatment.

[caintooth]

I need a MINIMUM of $3,645.19 by the end of September to still get top surgery in October. (That is if I am able to charge over $350 to my credit card, and will not cover transportation and recovery time off work. The full $3,982 I’m asking for will, but absolutely barely.)

I once tried to post every day until my bill due date to help with exposure, but stopped rather quickly due to my brain injury and chronic illness… I’m still very sick, a year later, but I’m going to try that again, I think!

[bynux]

Detailed description of HRT's sexual effects below the cut. Can use some input from other transfems on this.

Minors please skip this one. :P

So I guess my body's nerves and responses to touch have just decided I have a pussy now.

I don't. Like, bottom surgery is likely a decade or so away from me at this rate, both because it's not a super high priority and because it's expensive af.

But being touched between my legs, having pressure put where the vaginal opening would be? It does so fucking much for me now. Being eaten out or rubbed when I'm bent over or have my legs spread is a surefire way to get me off…which leads to the other side of this.

Climaxing is now an entirely different experience than it used to be.

Like, I'm now capable of having two distinct kinds of orgasms. I still get the one I'm used to, that's stronger than it was pre-HRT but is still primarily based around my genitals. It's now actually a rare occurrence and extremely difficult to achieve, but it's possible.

But then there's the new kind. It feels like an extremely intense version of the relief you feel after a really good stretch. When I'm touched like a cis woman, these massive waves of ecstasy c r a s h over me and leave me damn near breathless.

On top of them being significantly more intense than "guy" orgasms, they can also happen much more quickly and frequently. I can cum again and again and have it absolutely rock me to my core every fucking time.

And, unlike "guy" orgasms that leave me tired and satisfied, cumming in this new way often leaves me craving even more until I'm too physically tired to continue. It's very reminiscent of how some cis lesbians have described their sexual encounters to me.

So I guess I'm just trying to ask…is this normal? Am I imagining something? Or is my body just this enthusiastic about me being a woman(-ish person)?

[sleepycatten]

Getting gender-affirming care from NHS England as a trans person can be like

Patient: I'm trans. I'd like gender-affirming healthcare please. NHS: No. Patient: WTF? NHS: Come back in a month. If you're still trans, we'll consider it. Patient: WTAF? NHS: Urgh. Fine. I'll refer you to a gender identity clinic. Patient: How long will that take? NHS: I dunno. Maybe 2-5 years for a first appointment, depending on which clinic you're referred to. Patient: WTF? Can't you give me healthcare now? At least HRT? NHS: Fuck no! We're not qualified for that! Patient: But you do it all the time for cis people. NHS: That's entirely different and no, I won't explain why. Patient: Urgh. Fine. If I get care from a private clinic, will you at least agree to work with them on a shared care basis? NHS: Hell no! Patient: Not even if I choose a clinic where the folks running it also still work for the NHS? NHS: No. Patient: WTF? I'll just turn to DIY HRT then. NHS: No! Don't do that! My sudden deep knowledge of HRT tells me that this will be unsafe! Patient: Then give me an alternative! NHS: No.

[floral-ashes]

The fact that I’ve had anti-trans academics publish two articles specifically against my work recently is a great boost to my ego. They’re clearly feeling threatened. 🥰

The first was my MIND article on gender identity. Read for free here.

The second was my paper on the ethics of adolescent medical transition and how it is analogous to reproductive healthcare. Read for free here.

[brooke2valley]

Hey yall, I just wanted to thank everyone for the luck and well wishes I received yesterday

The consultation went very well, and it seems like I should be able to move forward so long as I do the correct prep work. 💕

It's going to take a while, but I'm so lucky to have such an amazing support system in my chosen family, my partner, and in you all, so genuinely, thank you <3

[katabay]

lmao sorry to everyone in my inbox, this month has been a mess and I'm just not really around enough for it. someone in my immediate family got a new cancer diagnosis, my not-art job got restructured because management is a joke and it's been.... not great, to be honest! to top it off, my mom's cousin just died because the major hospital didn't have enough beds open for the provincial hospital to transfer him. etc etc etc.

anyway. it's been a lot and I'm Very Tired Of Things Happening 🙃

[librarycards]

The term “social transition” has a non-trans history in the psychology of adolescence. In the 1980s, it was an operative metaphor for describing adolescence through the American trope of a rocky period of self-making, what one psychologist in 1978 termed “the difficulty of adolescence as a transitional period.” The primary “transition” that concerned psychologists at the time was school, where social shifts in friend groups and hierarchies from middle school to high school affected a young person’s self-esteem and mental integrity, resulting either in positive self-actualization or, if the social transition went poorly, “problem behavior.”³

The term “social transition” was only later adopted by psychologists and psychiatrists looking to powerfully expand their jurisdiction over trans youth to include entirely non-medical practices that often spur parents to reject or harm their kids: wearing a dress, cutting or growing out hair, wearing a binder or a bra, wearing makeup, or adopting a new name and pronouns. Making those banal but concrete practices of changing gender into psychiatric events was intended to convince anxious and angry parents that they shouldn’t put down their children. By the same token, tying practices of clothing and self-description to healthy development overinflated them with a pathological degree of significance, upping the ante and creating a lucrative target, both for parents of trans youth who wanted to stop their children from transitioning and, now, politicians.

I don’t mean to imply that psychiatry directly caused HB 2885, just that it clearly holds one part of the blame for inventing the root vulnerability that Gragg has taken advantage of in Missouri. If anything, the attachment of sex offender felonies to a teacher complimenting a teenager’s haircut exposes, once and for all, how fraudulent the medicalization of transition has been all along. Gragg can claim the right of the state to control children’s dress and speech (masquerading as the rights of parents) through teachers and counselors, in part, because psychiatry and medicine first claimed the right to regulate trans youth’s practices of transition.

Still, the causal events that led to HB 2885 run far deeper than the shallow history of “social transition” as an especially foolish psychiatric fiction. Here lies the far bigger problem raised by this bill. Not only will psychiatrists prove to be the least effective political allies of trans youth in Missouri, but contemporary queer and transgender culture’s elevation of the private right to dress as the sine qua non of politics is also quite useless as a political strategy.

Part of what I gather stuns in bills like HB 2885 is their audacity. The law would target the most conservative, least politically subversive of all transgender practices: individual style, identification, and language-use. In the case of minors, “social transition” is also a cheap compromise offered to young people who are refused blockers and hormones by disapproving parents and doctors, but that compromise is offered in a broader queer and transgender culture that has elevated self-identification through style as the ultimate arbiter of being transgender, making it much harder to advocate for a genuine right to transition for anyone, teenager or adult.

[...]

Students have very limited First Amendment rights on school campuses, meaning that they cannot present themselves as private individuals enjoying the right to dress as they please.⁷Their self-expression is governed from the outset by a competing set of custodians, from parents to schoolteachers, to psychiatrists and doctors, to the Missouri House of Representatives. Trans youth’s interests are therefore materially extraneous to the mainline of contemporary queer and transgender culture, whose architects were wealthy, college-educated adults whose prior enjoyment of full-citizenship was the very reason they demanded only the affirmation of a right to dress.

I suspect that part of the genuine shock of bills like HB 2885 is that most people reasoned that LGBT liberalism’s elevation of the private individual over all other political concerns would inoculate dress and language from state interference. It evidently has not. What perhaps has been misunderstood, then, is how the state exercises power. The law cannot prohibit being transgender, for there is no such state of being. The state has no need to target people’s interior selves, either, for the law can seize people where it always has, in concrete social practices that it simply declares are the undesirable traits of transgender people—namely, practices of transition.

Jules Gill-Peterson, The Unimportance of Wearing Clothes. [emphasis added]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:

A completed draft Texas Republican Party platform refers to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and Drag Queen Story Hour as “predatory sexual behavior.” The platform has been voted on by state party delegates and will be formally adopted on Wednesday after a final vote count. The list of state party priorities calls for an end to legal same-sex marriages, same-sex parenting, all LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination laws, all transgender rights — including gender-affirming care for children and adults — a ban on LGBTQ+ content in schools and libraries, the defunding of all diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and legal protections for anyone who discriminates against queer people based on “religious or moral beliefs.”

Furthermore, the Texas GOP platform calls for a complete end to all of the following: pornography, federal welfare programs, minimum wage laws, mandatory sick or family leave policies, net neutrality, removal of Confederate monuments, pro-immigrant sanctuary cities, public education of undocumented children, no-fault divorce, non-abstinence sex education, abortion, birthright citizenship, professorial tenure in colleges and universities, cannabis legalization, anti-climate change legislation, contact tracing for the tracking of communicable diseases, federal regulations ensuring safe farm food production, and U.S. participation in the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The platform also calls for fertilized human egg cells to be legally recognized as people, the passage of a “state electoral college-style” law that would make it nearly impossible for Democrats to win statewide office, a ballot measure for Texas to secede from the United States, the invalidation of all federal laws not approved of by county sheriffs, and for Christianity to be inserted into public schools and government buildings.

[...] “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice,” it continues. “No one should be granted special legal status based on their LGBTQ+ identification…. We are opposed to same-sex parenting, intentionally subjecting a child to the loss of their biological father or mother, and other non-traditional definitions of family.” “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity,” it adds. “There shall be no attempt to engage in so-called ‘gender affirming’ medical or mental health intervention for persons between the ages of 18 and 26,” including the use of names and pronouns associated with trans people’s genders. The platform would require health insurance companies covering gender-affirming care to also fully fund de-transitional procedures. The platform says that any professionals who aid a minor’s gender transition in any way should face professional, civil, and criminal penalties, as well as lawsuits from anyone affected by their behavior. Furthermore, it calls for all gender-segregated facilities in prisons, schools, and government buildings to only be accessible to people based on their biological sex assigned at birth.

[...] It also calls for laws prohibiting the exposure of minors to “social transitioning” (that is, exploration of a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth), “predatory sexual behaviors” like Drag Queen Story Hour, and “the desensitization of children to sexual topics.”

The Texas GOP's platform reaffirms and expands its war on LGBTQ+ Texans, such as including anti-LGBTQ+, anti-trans, and anti-drag planks like baselessly calling Drag Queen Story Hours "predatory sexual behaviors" and gender-affirming care "child abuse".

This is in addition to calling homosexuality "an abnormal lifestyle choice" (a bigoted dogwhistle term used against recognizing LGBTQ+ identity) and opposing trans identity.