Trans and health: reality bites

[QAOPspaceman]

Maybe affirming people's fantasies doesn't help them or anyone else

www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/19/trans-people-england-missing-vital-cancer-screening

Oh dear how terribly troubling.

Unfortunately, it's an example of Darwinism. Although those allowing/ condoning it are complicit.

Well who could have predicted this. Goodness me.

Well duh! People have been predicting that on here for at least 5 years and probably longer!

So... people who decide to change their medical records to a fictional sex rather than their real sex in order to hide it are then.... having medical consequences arising from having hidden their real sex.

Whodathunk.

I wonder what it is that medics are supposed to do in order to absolutely definitely not know but still know when it matters and get it right anyway? Crystal balls? Layla Moran on speed dial?

Don't the cancerous cells respect their gender identity? Bloody transphobic reality.

But...but if everyone doesn't play along and pretend they are what they aren't then something, something!

You dont say. Amazing. Who knew that biology was relevant to health

No way! Are they really saying that ... Sex Matters??

Nailed it @Datun

Well colour me shocked!

Ooh I know this one...is it literal violence? 😀

oh look-another thing not to give a flying fuck about. There really is no end to this fucking bollocks, is there?

I imagine it will be painted as “transphobic NHS systems” rather than accepting reality needs to be reflected in the records.

It’s not just cancer screening either. It concerns me from an acute perspective too. What if a woman who is registered as male presents to the emergency department with abdo pain? Do people recognise she needs a pregnancy test to rule out an ectopic?

What if a 60 man registered as female presents with back pain? Does a junior doctor who’s all in on gender ideology check his prostate for signs of cancer?

Pretending sex doesn't matter and prioritising gender instead has serious consequences when it comes to health? No way! Who could have seen this coming?

Stonewall (or maybe just Nancy Kelley, I can't remember) was complaining about transmen not being invited for smear tests a year or so ago. Well duh. If trans people don't want their biological sex on their records and the NHS are happy to play along with this dangerous nonsense, what the hell did you expect was going to happen?

Next up - constructing fake genitals out of unrelated body parts and taking opposite sex hormones causes complications and deaths shocker. I expect a study to "reveal" this in about 5 years...

There was a recent interesting discussion about screening tests on FWR and, iirc, an information leaflet that was targeted at Travellers.

Somebody who works with Travellers explained that although the leaflet seemed short on specifics and might not even have used the word cancer, it had been workshopped to be appropriate and was culturally competent.

I don't know how, but I wonder if the population health part of the healthcare system will need to adopt a, "Are you having your regular screening tests? Talk to your health provider."

That doesn't solve acute or emergency issues. Nor does it address dissonance that is so strong, the person at the heart of it can't contemplate even discussing appropriate screening (e.g., breast, cervical, prostate, reporting birth sex to help interpret kidney clearance results etc.) but there has to be a better method.

The article still manages to have a hand-wringy vibe of "won't someone think of the poor oppressed trans people being failed by health services!!!" while literally making obvious that this is a result of demanding to have sex markers changed. Either your sex is important for healthcare providers to know and that info needs to be there and you accept that... or not in which case you do need to take responsibility for it yourself, because how can HCPs if they don't have the info?

Obviously the whole idea of going along with this demand was ludicrous in the first place but FFS.

You can't have your gender cake and eat it.

"Experts say the problem is the way GP electronic records in England are updated when patients change their gender."
No, 'the problem' is that it is permitted to change the records at all, from the truth to a lie.

I would expect that core NHS computer systems are old. And they're undoubtedly difficult to redesign (there were a lot of articles on NHS systems in Computer Weekly in the 1980s/90s). There is no way that record layouts set out in the ?1970s? would accommodate changing such a defining field as sex. It would have been unimaginable.

So, when did some arsehole start imagining it? And, faced with a legacy system that couldn't be made to do their bidding, fudged it with 'let's create a new person, then load the history of another into it'. But the new person is a fiction and the sex field carrying the wrong value fucks up everything sex-related.

I really hope that whichever arsehole who did this was proud enough of themselves to claim the credit and leave documentary evidence of what decisions they steamrollered through. And I hope they are made to pay for the damage they have done to the health of so many people.

In the fullness of time when some poor sod is eventually diagnosed with a terminal cancer that should have been picked up on regular screening except they weren't invited because of the sex fudge, it'll be the NHS that will be sued. Another foreseeable and expensive consequence of allowing gender ideology to dictate.

I can't help remembering the Darwin Awards when I read things like that. I would have been more sympathetic in the past but at this point I'm honestly exhausted by the bottomless stupidity of this cult and its hapless members.

I've been thinking it through and I literally can't come up with an appropriate conversation.

It's absurd but I wonder if the only logical way through this is AI triage for screening both for population health and run of the mill healthcare (including acute). The AI then pops out recommendations for follow-up and interpretation of any tests.

Even this would only work with accurate sex recording. For the number of trans-led gender identity services, surely there must have been focus groups and papers about how to handle this.

I work in the NHS and it is also worrying that patients can change their NHS number along with their gender so whole episodes of previous healthcare are difficult to find. If people find it offensive to have a sex marker alongside their gender marker then maybe they could agree not to change their NHS number and screening could be arranged by the sex registered to that NHS number, almost set up at birth!