Gender Affirming Healthcare - Tumblr Posts
YES fucking exactly. thank you op. because this is pretty much the exact idea ive had to try to articulate to people irl a few times now
like it’s just so ridiculous?? and clearly prejudiced when people make these arguments. and a surprising amount of people (including seemingly well-meaning people who are just trying to understand the issue, not just TERFS and outright transphobes) do not seem to understand why
when it feels like it should not take that much thinking to realise that this argument MASSIVELY values ‘poorly mistaken’ cis people’s lives and regret over their own decisions. over trans people’s lives and our autonomy!
New reaction pic for y'all to be used when you get into an argument about trans healthcare and your opponent starts talking about the 0.8% or whatever or trans people who regret transitioning
A well informed autism self diagnosis is just as valid as a psychiatric diagnosis. Additionally, under the given circumstances it is safer, most probably less expensive and you don't need to wait for any appointment.
10 screenshots from a twitter thread by @devprice with white text on black background.
The thread reads as follows:
I hear from many trans & nonbinary people who are actively seeking an Autism diagnosis. My advice is RETHINK THIS. Restricting Autistic people's access to gender affirming care is a major TERF talking point. As legal attacks on trans healthcare mounts, a psychiatric dx is a risk
The high overlap between Autism & transness was one of the main "concerns" JK Rowling rose in her "TERF Wars" blog post. Numerous fearmongering anti-trans articles influenced by TERFs have raised the issue since. if youre trans now is not a good time to seek a formal Autism dx.
An Autism dx does not unlock access to any beneficial therapeutic treatment, bc there is no "treating" Autism. Formal diagnosis makes us vulnerable to legal & psychiatric control and gets our competence challenged -- you dont need to subject yourself to this. diagnose yourself
I am close with dozens and dozens of Autistic people, and I have no idea who has a diagnosis and who does not. It does not matter. There is no reason to ask, no reason for others to care how someone identifies and how they arrived there -- all that matters is community support.
also if you cannot afford to pursue a lengthy & expensive lawsuit, it's unlikely a formal diagnosis will actually protect you from discrimination at work, in school or in housing. if you have the means great, but most don't. disclosing disability can be more risk than its worth.
if you need a dx to access resources such as disability benefits or extra test time, by all means go for it, but be cognizant of the potential costs. you could be denied for surgery, lose control of your assets, be found legally incompetent, lose custody of your kids...
Tweet replies to this thread:
By Greysquirrel @/treerat93
My autism dx was forced on me at age 2 and kept me out of the military in my 20s. It’s been nothing but destructive. I was beat up in sped and believed myself to be stupid my entire life because of it. I can’t even buy life insurance.
By Emily Johnson @/emily_rj
In some states, people with autism face being denied organ transplants, are at higher risk for forced sterilization and/or denied contraceptive and reproductive care, and have a higher risk of police brutality I considered this and decided informal diagnosis was best for me
By AK Faulkner is sweet and...
In the UK, an autism diagnosis is already a significant barrier to gender-affirming care. The GICs automatically try to discount dysphoria as autism during your initial assessments with them. If you arrive pre-diagnosed with autism they write your dysphoria off as that.
goes to a bottom surgery consultation and asks for this guy as my new peanis
With the Alberta government announcing a ban on gender-affirming care until 16 years old, let’s take a minute to correct some misinformation using peer-reviewed publications. A thread.🧵
“High quality evidence doesn’t support gender-affirming care.”
‘High quality evidence’ is a technical term that essentially just means ’no randomized controlled trials.’ RCTs are not scientifically feasible for trans youth care and would be unethical (link).
The evidence-base for gender-affirming care is quite robust and is at least as good at the evidence base for comparable interventions like abortion and birth control. For an overview of available studies, albeit already few years outdated, see page 144 onwards (link).
“Over 80% of kids grow out of being trans.”
That’s just not true. The claim is based on old, poor-quality studies that included tons of kids who never claimed to be trans (link).
But even if we took the percentage at face value, it would be irrelevant since it’s based on pre-pubertal data and virtually all the so-called ‘desistance’ occurred before puberty, when gender-affirming care becomes available (link).
More recent, better studies suggest that only around 2.5% have ‘grown out of it’ after 5 years (link).
“Kids falsely believe that they are trans because of social contagion.”
There is no evidence for that claim. It’s based on the reports of transphobic parents who were surprised that their kid came out ‘out of the blue’ and happened to have trans friends, as trans kids tend to do. For a careful explanation of why the claim is completely unsupported by evidence, see this (link).
Studies of trans youth that used clinical data to look into the claim have also failed to find any evidence of epidemic or large-scale social contagion (link).
“We need a years-long diagnostic process to make sure kids are ‘truly’ trans before they transition.”
There is no evidence that gender assessments fare any better than self-report at predicting future outcomes, as we explain in our recent review (link).
“Gender-exploratory therapy can help identify the trauma that made these kids gender dysphoric.”
Gender-exploratory therapy is extremely difficult to distinguish from classic conversion therapy, which also starts from the premise that ‘trauma’ makes people LGBTQ2S+ (link).
Since conversion therapy is known to be harmful, we have reasons to believe that gender-exploratory therapy would be as well.
Self-directed exploration is good. Forced exploration rooted in suspicion towards trans identities isn’t. If you’re starting from the belief that trans identities are inherently suspicious, you’re not doing therapy, you’re doing transphobia.
Any more myths about gender-affirming care you’d like me to bust, Tumblr?
A survey of more than 90,000 transgender people in the U.S. — the largest nationwide survey of the community ever — found that trans people continue to experience workplace and medical discrimination. However, the overwhelming majority of them still report more life satisfaction after having transitioned. The National Center for Transgender Equality, or NCTE, one of the country’s largest trans rights organizations, released its 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey Early Insights report Wednesday after a yearslong delay due, in part, to the pandemic. The survey, the most comprehensive look to date at life for transgender people in the U.S., comes as hundreds of bills in the last three years have attempted to roll back trans rights, most often by restricting trans people’s access to transition-related health care and trans students’ abilities to play school sports.
[...]
More than one-third of adult respondents, or 34%, were experiencing poverty at the time of the survey, and 18% were unemployed. More than 1 in 10, or 11%, of respondents who had ever held jobs said they had been fired or forced to resign or had lost jobs or been laid off because of their gender identities or expressions. And, in line with previous survey findings, 30% of respondents had experienced homelessness in their lifetimes. Of adult respondents who saw health care providers in the previous 12 months, 48% reported having had at least one negative experience because they were transgender, including being refused health care, having staff members use the incorrect pronouns for them or having providers use abusive language or be physically rough or abusive while treating them. Fear of mistreatment prevented 24% of respondents from seeing doctors when they needed it in the 12 months before the survey. Many respondents also reported past mistreatment in school. Of adult respondents, 80% who were out or perceived as trans in K-12 experienced one or more forms of mistreatment, including verbal harassment, physical attacks, online bullying or being denied use of the restrooms or locker rooms that matched their gender identities. Of the 8,159 respondents who were 16 and 17, 60% reported such mistreatment. Despite those negative experiences, the vast majority of adult respondents, 79%, who lived at least some of the time in different genders from the ones they were assigned at birth reported that they were “a lot more satisfied” with their lives. An additional 15% reported they were “a little more satisfied.”
my HRT (testosterone) screening appointment has been delayed by a month after being on a wait list for a year and a half
but prior to that, i was told by doctors over and over for around four years that i wasn't not allowed to apply for gender-affirming care because of my age. my doctor at the time was incredibly transphobic (she refused to use correct pronouns and name even after I legally changed it)… they refused everything, including puberty blockers, which would have significantly decreased the possibility of my disability developing.
safe to say i'm angry
all up, it's been about six years of begging.
tw suicide
.. i don't want to know what will happen if they push it back again. considering holding onto getting HRT is one of two threads stopping another suicide attempt.
HRT is SO IMPORTANT.
surgery that turns me into the ao oni oni
Remember, it's your life. So...
[Pt: Remember, it's your life. So... end pt]
Go on HRT if you can and want to, regardless of if you're trans or not. Get top surgery. Start packing or tucking. Do whatever you can to make your body comfortable to live in.