A mother in the midwest asks why medical professionals won’t tell the truth about transition.
Transcript
I am a mom from the Midwest.
For the past five years, my 21-year-old daughter has believed that she is a gay man. Throughout her childhood, my daughter largely conformed to gender roles, although that is not something I promoted, and she expressed no distress with her sex. Things suddenly changed at age 16.
My daughter acknowledges that she did not have dysphoria until she found out online that she can become a man. Once she believed it was possible to be a man, she started to become dissatisfied with being a woman. In so many words, she said, Men get more respect. I cannot argue with her about that. They do. But wanting to escape womanhood is not the same as having a deep-seated feeling that you are a man.
Since she has always been attracted to males, and she now believes she was a man, she surmised that she was a gay man. I tried to explain that she did not have the type of body that would be attractive to gay men, to no avail.
I understand how my daughter could get caught up in this belief system. With the internet, it is so easy to access the ideas of influencers you never would have met in real life. She was not one of the popular kids at school. She was quirky. There has always been something different about the way she communicates. Since learning more about autism, how autism presents in women I have come to suspect she may fall on the spectrum. Kids on the spectrum are particularly vulnerable to believing that changing sex will solve all their problems with fitting in. As a trans boy she finally stood out at her high school and was encouraged by enabling friends.
The thing I don’t understand is why there are so few doctors who will tell my daughter that she cannot actually become a man. If you study the gender affirmation treatments available, the drugs and surgeries only provide cosmetic changes that mimic the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex. The term sex refers to our reproductive role. You’re either one of the sort that produces ova, or the sort that produces sperm, and that cannot be changed. Even intersex people play one of those two roles. It’s just less obvious which role they play.
I also don’t understand why there are so few doctors who will tell my daughter that pursuing gender affirmation treatments is a bad idea because she will live with constant side effects and likely shorten her life. My daughter’s paediatrician said she wanted to support my daughter on her “journey”. Taking massive amounts of testosterone, binding your breasts, having an unnecessary mastectomy or hysterectomy, having flesh harvested from your arm to fashion an appendage that looks a bit like a penis, does not constitute a journey. It is self-destruction. It is more akin to a dumpster fire than a journey.
The one medical professional who came through for my daughter was a physical therapist who advised her not to bind her breasts. The physical therapist said it is going to cause problems if you push in things that should be pushing out. I could have kissed that therapist.
This is what we have come to – a medical professional who dispenses a bit of common sense is a rare and glorious find. I’m looking forward to the day when the medical professionals who write the prescriptions and perform the surgeries that hurt our kids, get their day in court.
Hopefully, there will be judges who also do not understand how doctors could have participated in this destruction.