A few of the more questionable quotes, although the whole article is nuttier than a squirrel's diet.
But here again, Whitley hit a snag: his doctors were in need of another vital piece of information – and without it, they couldn’t work out how often he would need this treatment. They had to guess; they got it wrong; he became yet more unwell.
Help me out here, why did the doctors have to guess? Is it because they were incompetent and modern medicine so woefully inadequate or is it because the patient deliberately withheld that vital piece of information?
But most healthcare has evolved with a straightforward dichotomy of gender in mind.
No. It has not. It actually evolved based on the default human, ie males, treating females differently only in relation to reproductive health and functions.
This has meant and continues to mean worse outcomes for females.
For a very long time women have been fighting for the medical establishment, including medical science and research, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry to accept that there is a clear distinction between males and females in how our bodies work, how illnesses manifest, how they are diagnosed, how we respond to treatment and how we recover.
Just as this is finally happening, progress is being threatened by transgender ideology.
Rather than devising new ways to cope with changing social norms, transgender people are often shoehorned into inappropriate boxes instead.
In medicine, male and female are entirely appropriate boxes. Creating little box inserts for "male transsexual" and "female transsexual" would solve the worst problem presented here. But in the UK at least that solution has been rejected. By trans rights organisations.
The article unfortunately swings between healthcare in the UK and the US, which have vastly different systems. Access is a huge issue in the US, where those who identify as trans can legally be refused treatment for no reason other than their trans status. This is simply not allowed in the UK. A more conscientious journalist would have made this clear.
Based on the female cut-off, he would have been allowed a transplant immediately. But he’s registered as a man on his medical records, and this meant his doctors used the male eGFR level. He wasn’t put on the list until he reached it – a decision that ultimately delayed the surgery by over a year, and very nearly cost him his life.
And whose fault is that? Given that gender dysphoria has been redefined and is no longer considered a mental health condition, then there should have been nothing stopping the patient from telling the doctors this vital piece of information.
“It was really cute and awesome that I was treated as male, but in being this way, they didn’t necessarily take into account the body,” says Whitley, who points out that, though he has been taking testosterone for around 15 years, it’s a relatively small dose. “I was born female and I identify as male – they should have probably have set my limit as somewhere in the middle.”
I'm sorry - "cute"? "awesome"? - this strongly suggests a patient who was not able to prioritise the most important issue. Which was not affirmation of identity but treatment of a serious medical condition.
Even Whitley’s dialysis was complicated by the current lack of knowledge about transgender medicine – the calculation that’s used to work out how regularly it needs to be done is based on another sex-specific assumption.
Because male bodies and female bodies work differently, even when the organ in question is not part of the reproductive system. Again, a simple solution here was to give the doctors all of the information they needed to decide on the appropriate treatment regime.
When you factor in the large data gaps in everything from the average life expectancy of transgender people to the right dosages of medications for their bodies, along with the widespread lack of knowledge among doctors about how to address them – let alone treat them – and the high chance of them being refused treatment outright, it soon becomes clear that transgender medicine is in crisis. Few groups experience such significant barriers to healthcare, and yet their struggles are going largely unnoticed.
And whose fault is the lack of data? Who resists collecting data in a way that allows it to be disaggregated by sex and trans status?
In some cases, the issues are baked right into the heart of our medical systems.
Consider this: if you were to look through every single medical record in the UK – all 55 million – you won’t find a single record labelled as belonging to a transgender person. This is also true for those assembled by many providers in the US.
That is because trans rights organisations insisted it be done this way. It was a demand made repeatedly at the time the Gender Recognition Act was designed. By trans rights organisations who rejected all warnings of negative outcomes for people who identify as trans.
“You can register as male or female, but you can still only choose between these two options – you can’t say if you are transgender or non-binary,” explains Kamilla Kamaruddin, a doctor who works for the National Health Service (NHS) and transgender woman. “So that’s quite difficult.”
See above. The option to register as trans was expressly rejected by trans rights campaigners. The suggestion that a patient should be able to register as non-binary on medical records is abject nonsense. There are no non-binary bodies.
Instead doctors must rely on their patient to tell them.
“Sometimes this can be okay,” says Dina Greene, a clinical chemist and expert in transgender health at the University of Washington, Seattle. In many cases, if someone is going to see a medical expert where gender seems irrelevant, patients might not want their doctor to know they are transgender, she says. "It’s stigmatised.”
Gender is mostly irrelevant when it comes to healthcare. Sex always matters. It may seem irrelevant, but it never ever is.
Gender, in the sense of behavioural patterns more commonly associated with one or the other sex, may indeed matter on occasion. Such as with smoking. But sex is the decisive factor here.
But this rigid male-female dichotomy also has some bizarre, and much less desirable, implications. “There are lots of simple things, like our medical record systems often cancel pregnancy tests if they're ordered on men,” says Greene.
That's because men cannot get pregnant.