How can therapy be the first part of call when therapists aren’t permitted to do anything but affirm that dysphoria — a term, by the way, that’s grown ever so expansive in its meaning — means that one is indeed born in the wrong body?
In any event, in the US, no therapy required for anything trans. Hormones and surgery available on demand. In some states, parents permission not required if 15 or older.
After all, the girls are going to do it anyway, right?
I suppose one could argue that it’s better the hormones are prescribed by someone licensed rather than bought from the kid at school, who also sells Adderall and molly.
And I suppose one could argue that it’s better the girl get a double mastectomy in an actual hospital instead of in a hotel room from the kind of plastic surgeon who does face lifts in hotel rooms, or worse at one of those shopping center dental clinics that also does liposuction and tattoo removal.
This is the state of medicine in the US, where Buzzfeed and Rain Dove are located.
There are no ethics at play here. There certainly isn’t anything one would call evidenced-based medicine.
There is a marketplace, and, as ever, in a patriarchal society, the unhappiness of girls at learning they will have to negotiate their second class status with newly and obviously sexualised bodies delineating their very worth ad human beings creates a need for the marketplace to fill, at profit.
The profit aspect is key: exploitation of the female body is a tale as old as time, and takes many forms.