Thread by @hatpinwoman

If medicine chooses to call all the reasons people try to escape their sex “gender identity” it can give them an easy prescription instead of helping them. No one has to deal with a patient’s eating disorder,borderline personality disorder,paraphilia or their struggles to fit in,

No one has to try to address a patient’s reaction to their own same sex attraction (or the reaction of a homophobic society). No one has to consider what it’s like to be female in this world or how it impacts female patients, especially if theyve been raped,abused or traumatised

If it’s all “gender identity”, even though gender identity is a concept built on sand, no one has to take time to consider what is happening to the volume of children coming in from foster care situations who want to flee their sex. No one has to do much work for them at all.

No one has to figure out if their patient might be schizophrenic, or autistic or part of the social contagion we’re seeing.

No one has to address, or investigate, a complex mental health issue. No one has to find better resources for these patients.

And resources are so hard to come by, especially enough resources to allow doctors to do painstaking work over many years to help a person flourish

Much easier to reduce the possibilities to one answer.

Streamline all of the complexity into a simple line of action

If they’re suicidal or depressed or struggling to function you can explain it, instantly,if they think they are trans.

Gender identity is always the answer so it doesn’t really matter what question you are asking

Trans must be affirmed, so doctors know how to act and what to do

They can hand out blockers or hormones, comply with pronouns and the patient’s beliefs, and then send them out the door to make room for the next patient.

& when it doesn’t work out for some of these patients, medicine can say “society is still so transphobic, it’s not on us”

& if patients are lost to follow up, as so many are, they can shrug and shuffle papers and mostly do nothing to really find out why.

And if someone detransitions,irrevocably altered because of this total lack of care,everyone can talk about patient autonomy and patient choice

As though, at any point, patients are choosing for “experts” to offer them a total lack of ethical care and to do so under the guise of their medical authority.

When sex and “gender identity” clash for these patients, as they have in cases like the one where a woman who

identified as a man lost her baby because they thought she was male, professionals can write worthy papers about how to fix the problem they created and then completely fail to do so.

The thing about the medical profession, which is a noble profession when it works,

is that when it doesn’t people just get lost in its machine.

They get lost in the bureaucracy and the human prejudices that colour objectivity, and in the instances of absolute certainty which turn out to have been based on nothing more than a whisper of a theory.

They fall through the cracks &no one stops to pull them back out again because there are so many people,everyday,needing treatment,medicine &help. And everyone is trusting other experts,in other places,who surely know more&surely wouldn’t be sterilising children or offering

life-changing medical interventions to adults if they didnt have a very good reason

But what is the reason for any branch of medicine to be operating without a solid evidence base,without gold standard studies, without rational theories &without patient well-being at its centre.

Reading the history of ideas behind this&the origin of “sex change” medicine its clear the medical profession knew far too little&presumed too much

That they acted so long without scientific evidence is bad

That they then vastly expanded the patient group involved is even worse