Gender surgeon saying the quiet part out loud

Archive link to article.
A New Way to Be Mad

There was a surgeon in the UK doing this a little over 20 years ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/625680.stm

There's a longer article about the amputation of limbs and its similarity to gender surgery here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

Paywalled, but can be viewed on one of the archive sites. I'll post an archive link in a separate post in case it gets hidden or deleted.

Someone's just posted a classic from Sheila Jeffreys in a thread.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5010490-article-from-november-2011-eugenics-and-the-practice-of-transgendering-children?

Decades after the sterilisation of the unfit was mostly abandoned, a similar practice is increasingly being carried out on children who are considered to be innately “transgender” because they are disobeying culturally acceptable gender roles.
As happened with eugenic practices of the past, many progressive people including many feminists, feel that transgendering children is a reasonable practice and have not yet begun to criticise it.

https://theconversation.com/eugenics-and-the-practice-of-transgendering-children-3838

Absolutely this, I have worked with a number of patients like this when I worked in psychiatric hospitals. We dont affirm that, we call it a mental disorder and treat it.

I say this a lot. Why dont we allow anorexics to have weight loss surgery, weight loss injections, join slimming clubs, affirm their belief that they are fat/ugly/need to eat less

Why dont we affirm that belief and sense of feeling?

The therapy isnt allowed to empower the current body feelings though, any therapist will be careful not to challenge or to help the person explore why their misery has manifest itsself in dysmorphia.

Its totally different to the therapy that any other person who hates their body would get and thats wrong. Most of these patients have a history of trauma/MH issues/ASD/sexual abuse or all of those factors. That is never unpicked and concluded that this is the cause of the person feeling physically uncomfortable with their identity and self and that needs work on.

And Im interested in why it isnt considered FGM for women

Assuming that Canada is the same at the UK, definitely a doctor.

Forgive my ignorance but is a Medical Director an actual clinically-trained person, or is it just a senior management role?

It's no different to those loons who want to chop healthy arms and legs off.

People consented to lobotomy. They paid for it. It was a surgical procedure to treat various states of mental distress. It many ways it made more sense than surgeries for gender dysphoria; it was a surgical procedure on the brain, where the distress lay. There were even people who did better as a result. But it was still banned because of how ultimately barbaric it was. It is the precedent for society deciding that surgeries such as these on people’s genitals to treat mental distress are unethical and should be banned.

It's a study of the patients that one particular clinician has treated.

There is a scarcity of data because, as we know from the Tavi scandal, providers of gender-affirming care are generally reluctant to follow patients up - which is telling, given how much surgeons like to boast about successful outcomes.

Anyone get the sense that they were getting the information from the medical equivalent of Father Dougal?

The difference being that Dougal was hapless, rather than malignant.

Meanwhile, the Trust has refused to reveal how many births in its hospitals have been to trans women, acknowledging only that it is a 'very small number'.

Anyone get the sense that they were getting the information from the medical equivalent of Father Dougal?

"A 'very small number', Dougal?"
"Yes, Ted."
"How small are we talking here?"
"Oh, very, very small."
"Would that very small number by any chance be zero?"
<Shifty expression>
"Remember we talked how things in your head might not be totally real?"
"Yes, Ted."
"Okay, and these transwomen who gave birth are...?"
"In my head, Ted."
"Like...?"
"The talking horse who does the accounts."
"Exactly. Please stop putting things in your head into press releases. It just makes them send the inspectors around. And we can't be having with that. Especially with the accounts."

Here's a related story, also from the Mail. It's rammed full of lies and misinformation from the Medical Director of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13095965/Row-hospitals-say-hormone-filled-milk-trans-women-born-male-just-good-baby-real-thing.html

Drug-induced milk from transgender women who were born male is as good for babies as a mother's breast milk, an NHS Trust has said. A leaked letter from the Medical Director of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust describes both as 'human milk' and says that they are the 'ideal food for infants'.

It defends the controversial practice of 'induced lactation' by means of powerful medication to enable trans women to simulate breastfeeding. It also claims that the term 'human milk' is 'meant to be neutral and is not gender-biased'.

This was done to death and beyond last year, numerous linked articles were posted and the conclusion was that male secretions are thoroughly unfit for purpose, so why is the Medical Director director pushing this dangerous, unsubstantiated rubbish?

And:

Meanwhile, the Trust has refused to reveal how many births in its hospitals have been to trans women, acknowledging only that it is a 'very small number'.

Even that's wrong, because no transw has ever given birth at all, full stop.

For elective surgery all one needs to have it is the money, time and ability to consent.

I think the issue here is that it isn't currently informed consent, if the risks are not adequately communicated? It isn't quite true to say that anyone can have any surgery or procedure they like; all countries have guidelines. You can't ask a surgeon to remove your heart because the presence of it distresses you.

The Guardian supports gender-affirming care.

For elective surgery all one needs to have it is the money, time and ability to consent. If adults want to do whatever they want to themselves then they can. Whether you or I think it is ill-advised or butchery or stupid or whatever is neither here nor there. I think it is sad for the people having it to have complications and other consequences that they didn’t foresee but you pay the piper…..
Of course surgeons and pharmaceutical companies come in to fill this void, but as with all things, follow the money, who created this cult? They did.
Decades ago people with dysphoria were treated, some had operations others not, somebody somewhere along the line realised there was billions to be made and here we are.
Stupid is what stupid does. It’s like bloody Darwinism writ large.

People with anorexia suffer great agony because of their denial of the physical reality of their bodies. No one has ever suggested treating them with surgery or drugs to endorse their dangerous delusions. Instead, attempts are made to treat their distress with therapy - it doesn't always work, but it often does buy the time they need to recover.

Why only 21 people in the study? That's a tiny number

And a lot of people will discount this article because it’s in the Mail, and the Guardian is either too scared to report on this or doesn’t care enough.

This reminds me of the Edinburgh Action for Trans Health manifesto, which includes the right to any form of surgery they want, as often as they want, including the option to have it reversed and the right to be trained to perform surgery on each other.

https://www.tumblr.com/edinburghath/163521055802/trans-health-manifesto

Exactly. Demonise therapy as “conversion therapy”. Remove gatekeeping. No age restrictions as per WPATH. Insurance companies funding it now (USA). Petition for the government to fund surgeries (Australia). All so people can get surgeries with terrible complication rates quicker and cheaper.

And before you say no one goes into surgery without years of therapy anyway -- some do. Some very much do. And TRAs are trying to make it very hard to get the therapy.

'Biological reality' isn't an irrelevant optional extra. It's a source of great anguish to many people - great enough to drive us to seek out drastic surgical routes toward addressing our physical dysphoria

Fuck's sake. WHY are you opposed to explorative therapy then? It could save those who don't need drastic surgery from having drastic surgery.

Yes. Some with much worse. But the difference is they’re being used to treat life-threatening physical conditions, so the risks are worth taking. Gender affirming surgeries carry significant risks and are undertaken on previously healthy, fully functional bodies, which makes the risk profile much less acceptable.

There haven’t been any developments in genital surgeries on trans people. In some ways it’s gone backwards. Lack of puberty development for the younger cohort means using colon to create a fake vagina. That’s not progress; it’s a forced change due to the consequences of puberty blockade. It was seen as the only option when there wasn’t enough penile skin to invert.

Phalloplasty surgeries are no better or safer than they were 20 plus years ago.

It’s all butchery. Thousands of people underwent lobotomy under the pretence it was beneficial to mental health. In decades to come this will be viewed as the same.