Something I read recently on Twitter prompted me to write this thread. It concerns the days when gender identity clinics were generally associated with university hospitals (roughly, 1970’s and 80’s), and when these clinics operated on the “gatekeeper” model. 1/7
One sometimes hears or reads transsexuals brag that they “told the clinicians what they wanted to hear” and so manipulated clinical staff into writing prescriptions for sex hormones or letters of approval for sex reassignment surgery. 2/7
In fact, clinical authorities had been writing since 1972 (at the latest) that some adult gender patients were “unreliable historians,” who retrospectively distorted their childhood histories to give the onset of their gender dysphoria an earlier date. 3/7
Evidence that some gender patients distorted their childhood and sexual histories included discrepancies in patient interviews given at different points in the patient’s transition, from interviews with family and spouses, and sometimes from the patient’s vocational history. 4/7
Patients may have believed that clinicians were taking their self-reports at face value because clinicians did not react to their claims or express any skepticism. Of course, old-time clinicians were trained to be impassive and to avoid confronting patients’ directly. 5/7
At my clinic (Clarke/CAMH) we simply required written proof that the patient had been working, attending school, or performing bona-fine charity work in the cross-gender role before considering them eligible for hormones or sex reassignment surgery. 6/7
What I find remarkable is that, in these days of “informed consent” clinics, some trans still trot out their old-time stories of the cunning, manipulative gender patients who tricked their way past the naïve, credulous clinicians who staffed the gate-keeping clinics. 7/7
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