Ethics of gender reassignment surgery

The ethics of talking about suicide in a deliberate way to create social contagion go against the Samaritans guidance on suicide for a reason.

Yet no where do I see this social contagion on suicide being challenged when it comes to trans.

It isn't hard to argue when put into this context.

You do something about the unethical social contagion....

I think for adults who have had a full psychiatric assessment and have tried less invasive interventions such as therapy, surgery can be an ethical offer for clinical disphoria.
But if not meeting above criteria it’s unethical, same as offering a medication before therapy for other mental health issues.

SRS in women involves removing skin from one arm & using that to simulate a penis.

There are pictures of these flayed arms online. They are as awful as you’d expect them to be.

I'd like consent forms that lay out suicide stats and immediate and longer term risks from surgery or hormones.

The young person I know is prepared to risk side effects of experimental treatments because the life expectancy for trans people is 30, die to suicide.

When they've been taught that, it's hard to argue.

From some personal connections who’ve had the euphemistically named ‘top surgery’ it was most definitely an expression of self hatred in an autistic young woman with very black/white thinking. Heart breaking.

Mids yes it makes no sense - but no one ever comes onto defend/explain the no surgery decision - this is all my supposition from reading the other thread and similar. There will be genuine reason for some, the availability, the awareness of shite outcomes so we might hear those sorts of reasons but the out and out I’ve got a penis and I’m a woman aren’t in the business of explaining themselves or answering a direct question cos it’s all a load of illogical bollox

Surgeons dont amputate limbs because the patient doesnt feel it belongs to them. anorexics are not encouraged by doctors to starve themselves. There is no good evidence that surgery helps those with gender dysphoria and those that do it are not practising science based medicine. In this country that normally gets you struck off.

There are no ethics in saying that surgery provides relief when it still doesn't change your sex and is just fueling a fantasy, it risks life changing complications and there is no proper follow up study to demonstrate any of the claims.

It's quackery exploiting vulnerable people who are unhappy with their bodies.

They ARE amputations, 'similar to' almost fudges the issue and I think it's important that we are very clear here, no euphemisms or minimising. SRS in men requires amputation and in women, well, god knows; "easier to make a hole than a pole" as someone said to me once.

Should it even be called gender 'reassignment' surgery?

Especially as it is not medically possible to change a person's chromosomes or biological makeup. By removing a penis you're not creating a woman.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4721731-complications-from-trans-surgery

this was the thread

I think ther are two things going on here - TP who want surgery (I saw a trans person saying you should only ever have surgery if you genuinely hate your body, not because it’s part of the journey, or you feel it’s expected). Maybe young people are more likely to think surgery is the answer because of the rubbish they are exposed to. There was an horrific thread on here with surgical outcomes a while ago - one being that kids who have been on PBS don’t have genitalia that’s developed enough to use in the surgery that adults who have been through puberty have.

The other group have no intention of every cutting off their dicks, are part of the trans umbrella and just want to push our boundaries, scare us and erase us

The other issue not discussed is that plastic surgery has been found ti be ineffective for other types of body dysmorphia. After an initial high, more surgeries are sought and none of it dispels the mh issues related. Only intense therapy.

Cosmetic surgery is hugely questionable in terms of medical ethics, though.

If you take it from the pov of what medicine is supposed to be, and what doctors are supposed to do, it's very difficult to see how 99.9% of cosmetic procedures can be justified. Significant risks for no medical purpose.

Personally I don't think people who do this kind of work should be considered doctors, whatever their training is. What they are doing is something totally different from medicine, and medical professional and ethical organizations can't regulate that while maintaining their core responsibilities. The metrics are opposed.

Weird how it's very accepted when it's to do with sexuality and sexual organs and also children.

Interestingly when a Scottish surgeon started to write articles extolling (and I believe actually performed) removal of limbs for body dysmorphia it was hastily quashed as a recognised treatment due to ethics.

the problem then becomes that a medical team have performed radical surgery but the public won't necessarily validate that decision in terms of sport, access to shared space etc. and won't this add to the patient's mental health problems?

Yes quite possibly, and trans-activists will probably blame society and say that society needs to change, and that it's the attitudes that are causing harm.

Rather than, it's just a reality that you can't change sex, society is within its rights to accept this correct viewpoint, and the trans person is unfortunately suffering because of unrealistic expectations that everyone should go along with their own belief about themselves.

the problem then becomes that a medical team have performed radical surgery but the public won't necessarily validate that decision in terms of sport, access to shared space etc. and won't this add to the patient's mental health problems?

No radical surgery can ever change a person's biological makeup. So I wonder whether the cost and risk is even worth it?

Is that part of the reason why we're seeing that some people on the gender ideology side are apparently unable to form coherent arguments in support of their views, beyond "you're nasty if you don't agree with me"? It's got to stay at primary-school reasoning levels because otherwise too many people involved genuinely couldn't understand it.

It's an interesting theory, but most of the people who are guilty of arguing like toddlers in this debate do not have the excuse of having been on blockers.

I think you could argue that an individual undergoing gender reassignment doesn’t pose a direct risk to women’s rights, the risk to women’s rights come from the politicians or organisations who make the laws and/ or policies which decide whether gender reassignment affords individuals the right to single sex spaces in line with their gender reassignment. The rights of individuals don’t change because they have had gender reassignment unless the country/ state/ organisation etc within which they’re in recognises that, it’s not like you can have gender reassignment and then go to any place in the world and automatically be seen as that sex, there are many places globally where gender reassignment would not afford you entry into a single sex space of that gender. I suppose there are maybe a small number of individuals who after gender reassignment manage to ‘pass’ as the other sex and may therefore be able to gain access to single sex spaces even if it’s unlawful or against individual policy to do so but in most cases even after gender reassignment the true sex of most trans individuals is obvious and so they can only enter single sex spaces if laws or policies allow them to do so, regardless of which surgeries they have or haven’t undergone.