Teenager struggling to get a hysterectomy

[TheletterZ]

But she is having to really fight for it and from the article wont get it until much older.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-44439735

Simple solution, identify as a man. Go down that route as it will probably be quicker then identify back again.

Does all seem a bit odd that she might get the treatment she needs quicker.

I had a hysterectomy at 39 and dont feel any less of a woman, im on HRT and its wonderful to be free of PMT, bleeding and pain. I never even think about it now and life is better, including sexlife, best thing i ever did

Saying that, i do think 15 is too young for that sort of decision though

Yes I agree with all of that,

I just really feel for her. IYSWIM.

I’m not coming at this from a ‘she’ll change her mind’ or ‘pinnacle of womanhood’ or ‘I thought that when I was 15’ place BTW I have never been broody, only have children because of abuse, would rather not have had any, have found my position as mother hard.

It’s horrendous Sardine. Reading through it lots of the things made me angry - the lack of medical support, wrong treatment, lack of social support for the girl and her family and all while dealing with really horrendous symptoms which are bad enough on their own.

Healthcare for women and girls needs to step up.

It's been too long that we have been experimented on, told to put up and shut up, ignored, dismissed etc.

The recentish study about mental health and hormonal contraception in teen girls should have brought about massive changes and what happened - nothing - and girls are still having these new (to me) long acting things inserted into their bodies. At least with the pill you can stop taking it. As long as they can get fucked and not get pregnant then all is AOK apparently.

The vaginal mesh scandal - just the scale of it - and the way women were dismissed - awful.

The heart attacks thing.

On and on.

Friend of a friend recently didn't get diagnosed with the cancer she had - instead her symptoms were attributed to mental health problems - by the time they realised she was physically ill not just a silly unhinged woman it was too late and she died shortly after.

I knew things like this happened but to have it closer was a real shock.

Now I have my diagnosis of MS they believe my medical history shows two prior relapses (first one 8 years prior to diagnosis) which could be attributable to MS. I did say at the time I felt it could be MS as my aunt has it and I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis but they were attributed to an ear infection and back problems which I didn’t have other symptoms of.

I do wonder if sexism affected that.

Plus I’ve been told I am ‘depressed and anxious’ and need meds for about 20 years until recently when a really great psych and therapist have independently decided I am not depressed and anxious at all, just stressed and possibly autistic.

It would have been good if my GP had checked/noticed my massive swollen thyroid and checked my blood as a teen (my mum pointed it out after I had been put on ADs for depression) or discussed my home life (abusive) before deciding I needed ADs. It would also have been good if the NHS had not gaslighted me in CBT re ‘needing to see my anxiety re X is irrational’ when it wasn’t irrational at all, he was abusive and the things I was upset about were actually happening, not made up!

Histrelin is a pretty powerful drug by the way - it will have lifelong negative effects on the patient. Cognitive damage equivalent to about 8 IQ points, osteoporosis, altered metabolic processes for fat metabolism.

Eep, no wonder it's saved for end-of-life care. I am not happy that the Americans are using it as a puberty blocker, trans kids are not guinea pigs.

@SardineReturns: The recentish study about mental health and hormonal contraception in teen girls should have brought about massive changes and what happened - nothing - and girls are still having these new (to me) long acting things inserted into their bodies. At least with the pill you can stop taking it. As long as they can get fucked and not get pregnant then all is AOK apparently.

Why don't we just freeze teen boys' sperm and then give them the snip? It would stop all the unwanted pregnancies, give men an absolute veto over fatherhood because their sperm would only be released with their written consent, and spare women and girls the side-effects of contraception.

My mum complained to her (male) GP that the pill was making her depressed. Her GP said the depression was because she secretly wanted a baby! Medical misogyny is real.

Oh my word bd67th. Thing is this kind of shit happens every day. And whilst if a GP said that to the average FWRer, they’d have their arse handed to them and complaints to their practice manager +/- regulatory body made - most women will say nothing, or doubt themselves because a doctor said so.

I saw this BBC article yesterday and I really really felt for the girl, and her mother & grandmother who have dealt with a lifetime of the same.

I agree with the concern that surgery is permanent, and 15 (or even 18) is very young to be making permanent decisions about one’s fertility. But in the absence of any alternative medical treatment that is effective and safe - a doctor should be able to do this for a patient on a case by case basis.

There needs to be research put into finding antiprogestins that can effectively manage premenstrual syndrome/dysphoric disorder/menstrual psychosis etc. It must be possible, we can put people on the moon, it just takes funding and research. The current available options seem to target GnRH and therefore have much wider effects than just blocking progesterone.

we can put people on the moon

That's actually relatively easy: orbital mechanics is well-understood and building the vehicle is a collection of engineering problems. The primary barrier is cost.

Biosciences is hard, you've got a system that evolved rather than being designed and there are all kinds of left-over bits (e.g. the appendix) and bizarre interdependencies (e.g. my menstrual cycle in my abdomen affecting my migraines in my brain). These left-over bits and interdependencies are found from chromosome-level up. Plus, every specimen of a species is slightly different from the others, so a drug that works beautifully for one person can be inappropriate for another. And you've got the ethics of experimenting on people who are consenting to an unknown raft of side- and after-effects to consider, whereas the test pilots who flew in the US and Russian space programmes had already agreed to be test pilots for aircraft, knew full well what the possible outcomes of their work were (asphyxiation, fireball, vacuum exposure, null-gravity side-effects), and signed up eagerly.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03wctdg/the-fantastical-world-of-hormones-with-professor-john-wass

I watched this last night - it was an overview and not complicated at all. But I was struck by how little we have known about endocrinology for so long - it is fairly new. Having said that, it is no excuse for not finding out more now.

People on the moon is a figure of speech - that many things that may seem initially insurmountable, can be achieved with enough effort, will, work, and basically - money.

Am lol @ the idea that landing people on the moon and getting them back safely again is "pretty easy"

And fails to skip over the bit that it is people who are being sent with all the ? around what would happen to them in space, can they cope with the acceleration, what about being trapped together etc etc which surely falls into the "hard biosciences" bucket.

Brilliant comment

Yes it sounds like she is having a terrible time with this and it is impacting severely on her wellbeing and self esteem.

Simple solution, identify as a man. Go down that route as it will probably be quicker then identify back again.

With respect OP I think you are trivialising this girl's situation and the lives of trans men.

For this girl to go down that route she would need to be on testosterone which would have many undesirable and permanent effects on her body. She wouldn't just be able to say she was a man and then progress to surgery. She needs appropriate medical care not a hyperbolic recommendation to fake gender dysphoria.

Also to imply that the treatment for gender dysphoria is a 'simple solution' trivialises the realities of trans men. I can't help think your post might just be an attempt to shoehorn in a derogatory reference to trans people.

I’d read the poster saying “simple solution” as tongue in cheek - clearly none of this is simple. Whilst at the same time highlighting the contrast between the apparent ease with which ‘we’ (I mean society as a whole) authorise hysterectomies for transmen - rendering them infertile, inevitably leading to all the same medical issues that an early menopause causes for any woman, in order to alleviate psychological distress at a perfectly healthy body - with the extreme reluctance we have to perform the same procedure on women suffering extreme physical symptoms - bleeding, pain, distress - because essentially we don’t trust women to make this decision for themselves.

And perhaps the implied concern is, that the former props up an misogynistic ideology that legitimises certain men’s sexual fetishes. Whilst the latter is inconvenient for men who may wish to impregnate these women. Who ‘wins’ in each case (as a class?) People with XY chromosomes, the be-penised, impregnating kind of human. Who loses? XX people, the cunty, potentially-child-bearing variety. Patriarchy in action.

I and many other people share these concerns.

Phew. I think that is all allowed in our stunning brave newspeak world!

And then let’s not forget - a 15 year old transboy and a 15 year old girl have the same potential to suffer severe dysmennorhoea, premenstrual dysphoria, menstrual psychosis etc. One will be able to access hormone blocking treatment and look forward to a prompt hysterectomy within a few years. The other can see her future mapped out in the lives of her mother and grandmother before her, repeated pain, distress, missing career and educational opportunities due to their health, impacting their personal relationships, preventing them from living as full a life as they would want. And she has little hope of being permitted the exact same surgery that the transboy will be celebrated for having. That sounds very much like discrimination to me.

If a 15 year old is old enough to have a child she is old enough to decide to live a life free from pain. Being a woman is about a lot more than having babies.

To be fair YAS, seeing as the age of consent in our country is 16, by legal definitions a 15 year old is not old enough to have a child. Clearly no one told biology that, though.

And fails to skip over the bit that it is people who are being sent with all the ? around what would happen to them in space, can they cope with the acceleration, what about being trapped together etc etc which surely falls into the "hard biosciences" bucket.

The training the pilots did mitigated for most of that. They trained in huge centrifuges and did team exercises and individual personality assessments to decide team composition. I did mention null-gravity effects as a risk. Those guys were already taking risks of huge acceleration when test flying jet aircraft.

By contrast, developing new drugs involves affecting the body at the cellular level in ways that are hard to predict, and something that has a desired effect on endometrial cells may have extremely inconvenient effects on other body systems. Depo-Provera is a well-known example of this, causing weight gain and bone mineral density loss in many patients.[1] And you can only find these things out by giving the drug to a large group of hundreds if not thousands of people. Who wants to go first? Not me...

[1] But hey, who cares if women become obese and risk osteoporosis, as long as men can get their dicks wet