Thread by @hatpinwoman

There’s an important case study, in Frontiers, about a detransitioned woman called Elizabeth

Doctors removed her breasts before she had accepted her sex and rejected the label “trans”.

She was later unable to breastfeed her child and found that distressing 🧵

The paper notes that future inability to breastfeed is not being discussed with patients and that some doctors even claim a reversal of mastectomy (breast removal) is possible when it is NOT.

No one discusssed this properly with Elizabeth

From the age of 10, when she developed breasts, Elizabeth was uncomfortable with her body.

She was teased by other children

I developed breasts at around the same age and I remember that kind of teasing, too. As well as the excruciating embarrassment a young girl can experience

Even worse,Elizabeth was sexually harassed by adult men

At the age of 15 she “heard about the concept of gender identity &became persuaded that her bodily discomfort was because she was transgender”

So the cultural stories we are telling about this altered her life irrevocably

She changed her name,compressed her breasts with a sportsbra &presented “as a boy”. At 18 she went to an adult gender identity service,got a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder &was put on Testosterone. By 19 she was being referred to have her breasts removed. By 20 it was done

Did anyone even read her history & talk to her about the obvious relevance of her formative experiences?

Or was she one more patient they pushed along the gender conveyer belt?

She had intensive scarring from the surgery

The results were itchy&it was painful to wear clothes

One nipple constantly leaked fluid, and the other accumulated a foul smelling paste that she kept having to squeeze out.

She had a further surgery to reduce scars. This left her without nipples,&with a sunken chest

Scarring remained, and so did the nerve pain she now lived with

Have you ever had chronic nerve pain? It’s awful.

The pain can be life-changing. It can also greatly reduce your quality of life.

So what did her trans friends say to her?

They told her not to tell anyone because “you’re making trans surgery look bad”

She became “persona non grata” because she was talking about what she was enduring.

All of this, alongside the vaginal atrophy she was suffering, as a result of testosterone, precipitated a psychological crisis

At 24 she abandoned the idea she was any kind of man, understood gender identity was not a “useful framework” for her, stopped testosterone &considered the medicalisation she had undergone to be “a terrible mistake”

She wishes someone had talked to her about breastfeeding too

But she also recognises she would have struggled to have that conversation when she was trans identified.

She describes gender dysphoria as a sort of trump card that once you mention it stops professionals questioning or exploring further, too.

Elizabeth got pregnant at 30. She wanted donor milk, instead of formula, which the midwife reacted negatively to and a doctor stepped in.

He, however, insisted on calling Elizabeth a man.

She described this as “confusing and frightening”

She worried her doctor was incompetent, or humouring her (as he thought).

The resulting confusion lead to a child protection report about *her*

Now she believes he was simply trained to prioritise gender identity over sex

As a result of the report and soon after birth Elizabeth had to “see a social worker…then go to a psychiatrist to get a mental health evaluation to prove I wasn’t insane....”

So her factually knowing she was a pregnant woman lead to her being treated as potentially mad

Elizabeth is speaking up precisely to protect the children currently being sterilised by the medical profession in the name of gender, many of whom will become women who are unable to have children

I’m going to link to the paper below but one more vital issue was raised here: how ideological claims like the idea men can get pregnant may lead to medical errors & poor patient care.

We know such errors stand to harm patients &potential harms are wide ranging, from distress to

unneccesary procedures, poor quality care, all the way up to risk of death.

A few years ago a trans identified female lost her baby because doctors failed to realise the nature of the emergency despite her telling them she was pregnant.

They mistook her for an actual man.

@lascapigliata8, in her brilliant book Born In The Right Body also details a case of a woman being medically mistreated when she needed a kidney transplant because doctors used male measures to evaluate her case.

This delayed the patient’s transplant.

There are real world and serious consequences for human beings when we go along with gender identity ideology.

This is true within medicine and it is also true outside of it.

You can read the Frontiers paper here

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…