Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

People really just fundamentally can't seem to get their heads around this concept, but even before this effort to make it explicitly legal, this has been a horrifyingly common scenario:

Some woman collapses/gets shot/gets stabbed and is unconscious on the ground.

Someone calls

for an ambulance.

An ambulance arrives. EMTs load her into it. They bust out scissors and slice her dress and underwear open because EMTs will just find any excuse to do that one.

"Oh hey, is that a penis? Come over here and check out this weird freak we have back here!"

During the time they spend gawking, staring, and prodding, the woman dies from lack of whatever emergency care these chuckling creeps were supposed to provide or rush her off too.

OR, they do their job, get her to the hospital, and some asshole doctor surprised by the novelty

wastes time gathering everyone around to stare and ask weird questions.

Also a thing: Someone finds out they have cancer. Their doctor recommends they have something surgically removed. This person happens to be trans, and what's being removed is something they were maybe going

to have removed anyway. So they go in to talk with the surgeon, and mention, hey, recently I started taking some seriously high doses of supplemental testosterone. Not sure if that's going to have any sort of impact on clotting or anesthetic interactions you need to know about.

The surgeon, not especially wanting to proceed today because his stats have been excellent but missing a clump of cancer can mess that up decides that this is maybe a good time to play very very dumb in response to that question, OR accuse this person of getting a doctor to lie

about what's wrong to get access to The Surgery, and hey, you know I read like 95% of people who get that regret it! (You know, in some incoherent message board post by a 4chan troll.)

Always hard trying to explain this to people, because if you say "trans" in the same sentence

as "life-saving medical care" people consistently read that as "Oh, so you're being some sort of huge drama queen and saying if you don't get your insurance to pay for this cosmetic surgery you're gonna kill yourself, huh?" And then you have to sigh, and temporarily cede ground

to THAT bit of horribly misinformed bigoted nonsense so you can explain that you're actually referring to stuff they'll agree is "really" life or death.

And while I'm addressing hypotheticals from the frustratingly clueless, here's another- "So if you're worried people won't

treat you if they know you're trans, how about you just don't show up at the hospital in a dress with your face all made up you big freak?"

Well, aside from that very real concern about how for a whole lot of things, it's actually quite important for doctors not to guess wildly

wrong about what mix of hormones is in your bloodstream, there's the little problem that being trans is not, as bigots continue to pretend, a costume you can just put on and take off. The last time I had to go to the hospital I actually figured, "they're going to end up seeing me

naked, and I don't want to deal with all the weird questions, so I'm just going to dig out all the old guy clothes I can find, wear those, and hopefully end up looking ambiguous enough that if anything surprises them they'll think they just guessed wrong at first.

Didn't work.

I walked into the hospital. Everyone saw a woman wearing dumpy baggy clothes. Had to take those off and wear one of those paper gown things. Everyone saw a woman wearing a paper gown. Had to take THAT off so people could attach a bunch of wires and tubes to my chest. Everyone saw

a naked woman. Presumably, at some point when I was fully unconscious, there was a point where everyone in the room got to see a naked woman whose genitals looked a bit off from what's expected. At which point I'm fairly certain everyone who wasn't present when I'd just randomly

volunteered that I was trans (because it was quite obviously going to come up) would clue into that.
If I were to have access to someone doing some surgical stuff to address that "genitals look weird" thing and a couple other touch-ups for what HRT doesn't have plenty covered, I

could probably hit a point where OK even under the most intense medical scrutiny, all anyone is going to see looking at me is a regular ol' woman (or a giant towering woman anyway), and no longer have the worry, but, reaching that point takes time, and medical worries don't wait.