Gender and organ donation - transplants are more likely to fail from bio-female donors

[Albadross]

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4964018/

The NHS organ donation registration form asks for gender NOT sex and allows people to select 'other' or 'prefer not to say', so if someone had had their medical records deleted after gender reassignment, potentially some poor recipient would get an organ less likely to last beyond 5 years and more likely to fail after transplant.

Yet another place where biological sex matters and yet we're allowing risks to go unaddressed for the sake of PC madness.

That's terrible.

No one is going to get an organ without the transplant team knowing the donor's biological sex. It's fairly obvious when you operate to remove the organ And, for live donors, there is an extensive work-up before donation takes place.

I'm very worried about many aspects of self-ID, but we can relax about this one

Thank you for the reassurance. I still think the creep is worrying though.

Agree!

That's interesting, I wonder why female transplants are more likely to fail, is it all organs?

I don't agree that this doesn't matter. Its not like there are loads of spare cadavers lying around so they can use a different one if the donor turns out to be a male.

I have been thinking about sex and nhs databases, and I think that, deep down in their data, a record of biological sex, rather than gender identified with, will be maintained. Otherwise they will lose out on selling the data on for research etc. I can't see them missing out on that.

irk that isn't how donation works. Even for cadaver donation, there is careful tissue typing. We don't rely on which box someone has ticked on a form to assess suitability - it's a sophisticated scientific process, not done snowflake's view of their gender fluidity.

Also, organ recipients very rarely have a choice of donor. For most, it's a choice between donation and death. They aren't going to be saying, "Hmm, this liver sounded perfect but, now I know it's a woman's, I'll pass, thanks".

Look, there are a 1001 legitimate reasons to worry about the GRA, but this really isn't one of them. Let's not get distracted by non-issues, when there are so many important battles to fight.

More worrying are the rules around blood donation.

Currently, if you're a 'man who has sex with men' (MSM) you have to wait 12 months after you last shagged a bloke to give blood. If either you or your partner self-ID's as a woman that waiting period no longer applies. If I ID'd as a man tomorrow, neither I nor DH could give blood.

I don't actually know how risky blood donations from MSM are. I find it trully bizarre though that in the same press release the government announce the GRA reform, they also announce the deferral period for MSM to donate blood will be reduced from 12 months to 3 months and this change is being hailed as 'world leading'!

These reductions are based on the most up to date scientific evidence and medical advances

I'd like to see the up to date scientific evidence that says that blood donations from MSM are risky but the risk disappears when one of them IDs as a woman.

BBC article from 2008 about male-to-female kidney transplants being 8% more likely to fail. Original study was in the Lancet. I'm sure there was a more recent study with the female-to-male failure rate (Science or Nature this year? I get journal alerts for both, but because the life sciences aren't my field, I tend to skim over those bits).

More recent study suggesting that the combination of different sex and large weight discrepancy can have a big impact on organ failure.

But wouldn't it add unnecessary delay to have to work out that this was an organ of the wrong sex? I think this is exactly the kind of example that may peaktrans a few people. Recipients are so vulnerable anyway, they should be able to expect that their organ isn't going to fail just because the donor didn't reveal their actual sex.

Honestly no. The medical history you take from any donor (including cadavers) is incredibly detailed. And, as I said upthread, organ recipients don't (usually) have a choice: you don't get a smorgasbord of organs and pick your fave - most recipients are incredibly lucky to get one match, male or female.

It's no good using non-issues to try to peak trans people- it plays into trans activists' hands as they will then claim that all our objections to the GRA are based on false premises. Trust me, no one is going to get a duff organ because some Owen Jones acolyte thinks he's female.

Yes, theXX is right, donor organs are so rare the recipient isn't in the position of being told "this one is 50% more likely to work than that one, which would you like?", it's "hey, you've got lucky, and although this isn't a 100% guaranteed, it's the best chance we can offer you." I agree that it's pretty much irrelevant to the trans issue (except insofar as it's another example that biological sex has real-world, material consequences, and is not a social construction).

While I agree that the work up around donation is extremely detailed there is creep here

DP has a familial cardiac issue. He has been treated, he was the first male in his family to live after 50…(lots of females died too but who cares…the Consulant was only intrested in the male line…)

Cardiac issues/pain presents differently in men to women. It’s taken years and years for medics to realise that cardiac pain presents very differently in women; they present with jaw/shoulder pain rather than left arm clutching chest pain. This goes through to reading ECGs you’ll read an ECG from a young black man differently to that of a black woman. I use black men here as the commonly have high take off.

But you need to know their biological sex; not their chosen gender to diagnosis correctly.

So recently DP was ‘invited’ to a medication review by the pharmacy his prescription is delivered to. They asked his gender, not sex. I pointed out that this was (1 stupid (I didn’t use that word but you get the jist) (2 dangerous.

I asked the Pharmacist the rationale, she shook her head and went its come from above, she totally agreed, and was just serving out her notice period. She didn’t want to be held responsible for dispensing a drug to a ‘female’ that is dangerous to male or more likely the other way.

Change in law or not it’s happening…

But surely suitability is being assessed when they carry out other tests so if you had two matches but one was female, presumably you'd go with the male one for the highest chance of success. Exactly right it proves biological sex is material - that was sort of my point!

But surely suitability is being assessed when they carry out other tests so if you had two matches but one was female, presumably you'd go with the male one for the highest chance of success

That's not how it works. You never have 2 equally good matches, with the only decider being biological sex.

I kind of have this scenario running through my head whan a tra woman has her birth certificate changed to say he was born female not male and he goes for blood tests to see if he suitable for a certain organ transplant
"Well miss, we have some good news and some bad news?
It's showing here in your blood sample you gave us that you are really male, so lucky for you we found this out and we are now transferring you to a male ward.... Noooo!"

@TheXXFactor so knowing whether the donor is male or female is never going to influence whether someone gets an organ - like for instance if the organ was going to be too big to fit inside the recipient?

Forgive my ignorance but I have no idea how this works past the point of donor death. It seems like maybe thinking the donor was the opposite sex might waste some time, or have the potential to lead to assumptions that were wrong on the basis of incorrect info.

If not, then great, but why would there be a study if this wasn't an issue?

Yes and the importance of not erasing medical history when it comes to something like donation.