In fact, the lawsuit alleges that the HCPs and HCFs the Cole family turned to for help with 12-year-old Chloe's psychological distress and confusion all said that if Chloe were not subjected to the extreme treatment regimen they recommended to masculinize her body ASAP, then Chloe would inevitably kill herself long before reaching adulthood. The lawsuit claims that the HCPs guilt-tripped Chloe Cole's parents into giving consent on her behalf by telling them that the only choice before them was whether to have "a live (transgender) son or a dead daughter."
This should violate the Hippocratic oath. We don’t tell schizophrenics that the voices they’re hearing are real
My fear lately is that the best analog to trans affirming medical interventional is the lobotomy, circa 1940. For about 15 years it was considered the cure for all kinds of mental disorders, and then it was finally admitted that it was a massively over-drastic procedure that was almost never helpful or necessary.
One early critic of lobotomy said, according to Wikipedia: “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance.” I don’t know about you but that sounds familiar to me.
This is an increasingly common argument, and it could not be more wrong.
The earliest publicized (by the US media, anyway) transgender genital surgeries took place around the time that the inventor of the lobotomy won a Nobel Prize. (That was 1949. Christine Jorgensen came to the attention of the media in 1953.) They would have happened earlier if not for the Nazis making sure to burn the works of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in their first round of book burnings, but that's another story. Since then, the lobotomy has been rejected completely and seen for the vile act it is, while transgender hormone and surgical treatment has become much more accessible (still with a long way to go in most places) to those who need it, despite the furious opposition of various religious fundamentalists, political extremists, and others ignorant of the transgender experience and the science relevant to it.
The lobotomy was conducted against the will of patients, or by deceiving them about what was being done. It was done to make inconvenient people more convenient to caretakers or to society. Gender transition has been desperately sought out by transgender people, often against the crushing opposition of society, since the most rudimentary forms of it came into being.
No one that I am aware of has ever accomplished anything of note in any field after undergoing a lobotomy. Janet Frame was remarkably lucky -- she had been set up to undergo a lobotomy, but, to everyone's surprise, received a national literary award in the days before it was scheduled to happen, leading to the cancellation of the procedure.
Janet Paterson Frame (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author. She was internationally renowned for her work, which included novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and receiv...
In contrast, transgender people have made great contributions in microchip design (Lynn Conway, Sophie Wilson), satellite radio (Martine Rothblatt), evolutionary biology (Joan Roughgarden), neurobiology (Ben Barres), and even won Grammies (Wendy Carlos, Kim Petras), before and after transition. These are mostly right off the top of my head -- there are many others, along with countless people who merely achieved happiness and contentment they had never before known.
Lynn Ann Conway (born January 2, 1938) is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist.She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used i...
Sophie Mary Wilson DistFBCS (born Roger Wilson; June 1957) is an English computer scientist, who helped design the BBC Micro and ARM architecture. Wilson first designed a microcomputer during a break from studies at Selwyn Co...
Martine Aliana Rothblatt (born October 10, 1954) is an American lawyer, author, entrepreneur, and transgender rights advocate. Rothblatt graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with J.D. and M.B.A. degrees in 198...
Joan Roughgarden (born Jonathan David Roughgarden, 13 March 1946) is an American ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She has engaged in theory and observation of coevolution and competition in Anolis lizards of the Caribbea...
Ben A. Barres (September 13, 1954 – December 27, 2017) was an American neurobiologist at Stanford University. His research focused on the interaction between neurons and glial cells in the nervous system. Beginning in 2008, h...
Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Carlos is the first transgender recipient of a Grammy Award.Born and raised in Rho...
Kim Petras (, German: [ˈpeːtʁas]; born 27 August 1992) is a German singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, California. Between 2016 and 2020, she released music as an independent artist under her own imprint, BunHead Reco...
By the way -- this makes it clear that anyone who cares about transgender people getting the treatment they need should want very much to *avoid* giving it to people who do not need it! Rather than treating gender dysphoria, that would mean creating gender dysphoria -- a miserable condition to experience. Historical rates of regret for transgender treatment are very low, as others have mentioned -- but as airplane crashes have been made an exceptionally rare event by deeply studying what has gone wrong and determining how to prevent it in the future, medicine should learn from cases like this one. It can only be a deplorable failure of medical treatment for a cisgender* woman to go through years of testosterone treatment and a mastectomy without ever raising the alarm that something was not right -- or, in all likelihood, having her alarms ignored.
*Some of you don't like that word. Too bad. It's the correct word here, used in the appropriate context.
Yeah, the science of transitioning sucks now. But think of what will happen in 100,000 to a million years. We'll also be able to attach octopus tentacles to our bodies. Descendants of conservatives have a lot to look forward to ;)
The rate of regret for Lasik and breast augmentation is 10x higher.
The paper you linked to measures the rate of "lasting regret" about "gender affirming surgery (GAS)" amongst patients who've had various kinds of GAS based on information shared by "a multidisciplinary workgroup including cisgender, transgender and gender diverse professionals" employed by a "gender medicine" program at a single health care facility in the USA - Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR - during a short period of time, namely the five years from 2016 to 2021.
The authtors of this paper say that GAS regret rates are so low as to be negligible because of the 1989 individuals who got some kind of GAS in the Oregon program during the five-year period looked at, only six (6) "either requested reversal surgery or transitioned back to their sex-assigned at birth" when they were seen at, or had contact with, professionals in this particular gender medicine program after having GAS.
The lengths of time that these Oregon patients were followed up on by their gender medicine providers varied, but it was relatively short in duration. After all, the paper only covers a span of five years - and one of those years was during the Covid 19 pandemic lockdowns.
Other research from countries other than the USA such as Sweden shows that for a variety of reasons - including denial, post-surgery opiate use, the intitial high of "honeymoon phase" euphoria soon after surgery, sunk cost fallacy, embarassment, shame, guilt, self-blame, anger and rage at themelves and their health care providers, clinical depression, hopelessness, pyschologcial paralysis or feeling "stuck" and in limbo - it often takes patients who've had GAS many years to process and come to terms with what's happened to them and to feel comfortable honestly expressing any misgivings they might feel.
Longterm research from Sweden about people who had GAS as full-grown adults after plenty of longterm psychotherapy shows that patient regret rates climb year after year following GAS, reaching their peak roughly a decade to 12 years afterwards.
Moreover, because the paper you linked to about one health care program and facility in Oregon only includes patients whose gender medicine providers said had "expressed regret" to them or other program staff subsequent to undergoing GAS, it obviously leaves out and fails to count patients who might be significant in number. Such as:
1) GAS patients who experienced so much regret, dissatisfaction, pain, trauma, conflicting emotions, second thoughts and/or shame and embrassment about their GAS and its impact on them in the years afterwards that they didn't want to have anything more to do with the gender medicine program or the professionals working there;
2) GAS patients who followed-up with the gender medicine program but for various reasons didn't express any of the regrets they might have felt aloud;
3) GAS patients who subsequently expressed regret about their GAS to their gender medicine providers, but whose expressions of regret were dismissed and not recorded;
4) patients whose expressions of regret about their GAS were not taken seriously by their gender medicine providers because it did not fit the very narrow parameters used to define regret here. The paper assumes that any patients who experienced genuine and lasting regret will have either made a formal request for "reversal surgery" or will have decided to re-identify with and present as their biological sex.
5) patients who felt regret and would love to have the chance at a "do over" but would never request "reversal surgery" for GAS because they know that the GAS they had cannot be reversed. After all, once the breasts of female patients have been removed; the trachea and facial bones of a male patients have been shaved down to feminize his appearance; and the gonads, genitals, reproductive organs and urinary anatomy of either sex have been removed and/or rearranged, there's no going back. With very rare exceptions - such as removing silicone implants surgicaly implanted into the chests, butts and hips of males who identify as trans - there's no way to undo the irreversible effects of most GAS operations. Or there's no way to undo these effects without the patients ending up with even worse results and without their health and functioning being further compromised.
For these and other reasons not worth going into here, I don't think this paper can be taken as convincing evidence that the rates of "lasting regret after gender affirming surgery (GAS)" are so low as to be close to zero the way the authors and you want everyone to believe.
This post was edited 15 minutes after it was posted.
If this is true then it is malpractice, but it’s likely not. I highly doubt that there isn’t highly documented medical records that outline conversations they had with the patient and her parents given how much scrutiny is on these procedures by politicians and the public.
By the way -- this makes it clear that anyone who cares about transgender people getting the treatment they need should want very much to *avoid* giving it to people who do not need it! Rather than treating gender dysphoria, that would mean creating gender dysphoria -- a miserable condition to experience. Historical rates of regret for transgender treatment are very low, as others have mentioned -- but as airplane crashes have been made an exceptionally rare event by deeply studying what has gone wrong and determining how to prevent it in the future, medicine should learn from cases like this one. It can only be a deplorable failure of medical treatment for a cisgender* woman to go through years of testosterone treatment and a mastectomy without ever raising the alarm that something was not right -- or, in all likelihood, having her alarms ignored.
*Some of you don't like that word. Too bad. It's the correct word here, used in the appropriate context.
Why are we not banning commercial air flight? One plane crash is just one too many. No crash would happen if there were no flights. Ater all, people had been travelling on ships for centuries. Why do they need to fly?
Let's also ban automobiles. Going back to horse carriage would drastically cut traffic fatalities. People's safety should come before convenience.
And let's ban Lasik and breast implant. If one person regrets it, that's one too many. People had been living without Lasik or breast implant before those evil procedures were invented to profit medical practitioners.
Other research from countries other than the USA such as Sweden shows that for a variety of reasons - including denial, post-surgery opiate use, the intitial high of "honeymoon phase" euphoria soon after surgery, sunk cost fallacy, embarassment, shame, guilt, self-blame, anger and rage at themelves and their health care providers, clinical depression, hopelessness, pyschologcial paralysis or feeling "stuck" and in limbo - it often takes patients who've had GAS many years to process and come to terms with what's happened to them and to feel comfortable honestly expressing any misgivings they might feel.
Longterm research from Sweden about people who had GAS as full-grown adults after plenty of longterm psychotherapy shows that patient regret rates climb year after year following GAS, reaching their peak roughly a decade to 12 years afterwards.
Where did I miss the link to those peer reviewed studies? I thought that was the standard you demanded from everyone.
By the way -- this makes it clear that anyone who cares about transgender people getting the treatment they need should want very much to *avoid* giving it to people who do not need it! Rather than treating gender dysphoria, that would mean creating gender dysphoria -- a miserable condition to experience. Historical rates of regret for transgender treatment are very low, as others have mentioned -- but as airplane crashes have been made an exceptionally rare event by deeply studying what has gone wrong and determining how to prevent it in the future, medicine should learn from cases like this one. It can only be a deplorable failure of medical treatment for a cisgender* woman to go through years of testosterone treatment and a mastectomy without ever raising the alarm that something was not right -- or, in all likelihood, having her alarms ignored.
*Some of you don't like that word. Too bad. It's the correct word here, used in the appropriate context.
No one really knows for certain whether the historical rates of regret for the medical interventions done to effect "gender transition" are "very low" like you say - or whether they are quite high. Because very few providers of "gender medicine" in the past followed up with their patients several years down the line to see how they were doing over the long haul - and even fewer did any longterm tracking of the patients they prescribed exogenous sex hormones and sex hormone blockers to and/or operated on.
The surgeons who did most of the world's "gender affirming" genital surgeries on males in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s like the big-name "sex change doctors" Georges Burou in Casablanca, Stanely Biber, Marci Bowers and Sherman Leis in the USA are well known to have been particularly lax in this regard. Their customary practice was not to see or check in with the any of people they operated on longterm. Usually they never saw or had contact with their surgical patients once they okayed their release from the hospital or clinic shortly after surgery.
The surgeons who do the bulk of the "gender affirming" surgeries in the world today similarly fail to do any follow up. One reason is that many people who get "GAS" today travel far and wide for their operations, often going to clinics and hospitals in foreign countries thousands of miles from their own homes. If you read online forums, many people who've gotten surgeries in places like Bangkok and Belgrade complain that clinic and hospital staff don't speak the same language as their patients from abroad.
Moreover, a number of patients who have had GAS and other "gender affirming medical care" in recent years and ended up unhappy with the results say that their gender therapists and gender medicine doctors have refused to book further appointments with them, won't take or return their phone calls, and won't read or respond to emails or other attempts to communicate with them.
BTW, I agree with your statement that "It can only be a deplorable failure of medical treatment for a cisgender* woman to go through years of testosterone treatment and a mastectomy without ever raising the alarm that something was not right." But I think it's important to keep in mind that when Chloe Cole went through years of testosterone treatment and a double mastectomy, she was not a woman - cisgender or any other kind. She was a teenage girl.
Chloe Cole was first put on testsoterone by the gender medicine doctors she saw when she was 13. She had her healthy breasts surgically removed when she was 15.
So even if there were good records going back decades showing that "historical rates of regret for transgender treatment are very low" like you say, those rates would be irrelevant to what's going on today. Because historically, the vast majority of persons to undergo medical interventions to effect a so-called "sex change" or "gender transition" were not teenage girls like Chloe Cole, they were full-grown males who were already well into adulthood with a lot of life experience behind them like the well-known "MtF" figures of yesteryear Christine Jorgensen, Julia Grant, April Ashley and Lily Elbe.
Indeed, the majority of persons to have undergone "medical transtion" historically were male who decided to switch teams, so to speak, when they were middle aged. Most of them only decided to start "living as women" after completing their educations (often at male-only schools), serving in the military, building very successful careers in male-dominated fields, getting married (to women) and fathering children like the two most famous "MtF transitioners" of the 1970s, Jan Morris and Renee Richards, did.
It should go without saying that the experiences and regret rates of middle-aged adult males who "transitioned" after living a good portion of their lives as highly successful men and fathers like Morris and Richards - and their many current-day counterparts such as Caitlyn Jenner, Biden admin official Rachel Levine, billionaire Jennifer Prtizker, NYTimes and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Finney-Boylan, and business and tech titan Martine Rothblatt - cannot be assumed to apply to all the troubled pre-teen and teenage girls getting sucked into the maw of "youth gender medicine" today like Chloe Cole.
This post was edited 7 minutes after it was posted.
Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, althoug...
Long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex-ressignment surgery: cohort study in Sweden
Context: The treatment for transsexualism is sex reassignment, including hormonal treatment and surgery aimed at making the person's body as congruent with the opposite sex as possible. There is a dearth of long term, follow-up studies after sex reassignment.
Objective: To estimate mortality, morbidity, and criminal rate after surgical sex reassignment of transsexual persons.
Design: A population-based matched cohort study.
Setting: Sweden, 1973-2003.
Participants: All 324 sex-reassigned persons (191 male-to-females, 133 female-to-males) in Sweden, 1973-2003. Random population controls (10:1) were matched by birth year and birth sex or reassigned (final) sex, respectively.
Results: The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8-4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8-62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9-8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0-3.9).
Comparisons with controls matched on reassigned sex yielded similar results.
Female-to-males, but not male-to-females, had a higher risk for criminal convictions than their respective birth sex controls.
Conclusions: Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.
By the way -- this makes it clear that anyone who cares about transgender people getting the treatment they need should want very much to *avoid* giving it to people who do not need it! Rather than treating gender dysphoria, that would mean creating gender dysphoria -- a miserable condition to experience. Historical rates of regret for transgender treatment are very low, as others have mentioned -- but as airplane crashes have been made an exceptionally rare event by deeply studying what has gone wrong and determining how to prevent it in the future, medicine should learn from cases like this one. It can only be a deplorable failure of medical treatment for a cisgender* woman to go through years of testosterone treatment and a mastectomy without ever raising the alarm that something was not right -- or, in all likelihood, having her alarms ignored.
*Some of you don't like that word. Too bad. It's the correct word here, used in the appropriate context.
No one really knows for certain whether the historical rates of regret for the medical interventions done to effect "gender transition" are "very low" like you say - or whether they are quite high. Because very few providers of "gender medicine" in the past followed up with their patients several years down the line to see how they were doing over the long haul - and even fewer did any longterm tracking of the patients they prescribed exogenous sex hormones and sex hormone blockers to and/or operated on.
The surgeons who did most of the world's "gender affirming" genital surgeries on males in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s like the big-name "sex change doctors" Georges Burou in Casablanca, Stanely Biber, Marci Bowers and Sherman Leis in the USA are well known to have been particularly lax in this regard. Their customary practice was not to see or check in with the any of people they operated on longterm. Usually they never saw or had contact with their surgical patients once they okayed their release from the hospital or clinic shortly after surgery.
The surgeons who do the bulk of the "gender affirming" surgeries in the world today similarly fail to do any follow up. One reason is that many people who get "GAS" today travel far and wide for their operations, often going to clinics and hospitals in foreign countries thousands of miles from their own homes. If you read online forums, many people who've gotten surgeries in places like Bangkok and Belgrade complain that clinic and hospital staff don't speak the same language as their patients from abroad.
Moreover, a number of patients who have had GAS and other "gender affirming medical care" in recent years and ended up unhappy with the results say that their gender therapists and gender medicine doctors have refused to book further appointments with them, won't take or return their phone calls, and won't read or respond to emails or other attempts to communicate with them.
BTW, I agree with your statement that "It can only be a deplorable failure of medical treatment for a cisgender* woman to go through years of testosterone treatment and a mastectomy without ever raising the alarm that something was not right." But I think it's important to keep in mind that when Chloe Cole went through years of testosterone treatment and a double mastectomy, she was not a woman - cisgender or any other kind. She was a teenage girl.
Chloe Cole was first put on testsoterone by the gender medicine doctors she saw when she was 13. She had her healthy breasts surgically removed when she was 15.
So even if there were good records going back decades showing that "historical rates of regret for transgender treatment are very low" like you say, those rates would be irrelevant to what's going on today. Because historically, the vast majority of persons to undergo medical interventions to effect a so-called "sex change" or "gender transition" were not teenage girls like Chloe Cole, they were full-grown males who were already well into adulthood with a lot of life experience behind them like the well-known "MtF" figures of yesteryear Christine Jorgensen, Julia Grant, April Ashley and Lily Elbe.
Indeed, the majority of persons to have undergone "medical transtion" historically were male who decided to switch teams, so to speak, when they were middle aged. Most of them only decided to start "living as women" after completing their educations (often at male-only schools), serving in the military, building very successful careers in male-dominated fields, getting married (to women) and fathering children like the two most famous "MtF transitioners" of the 1970s, Jan Morris and Renee Richards, did.
It should go without saying that the experiences and regret rates of middle-aged adult males who "transitioned" after living a good portion of their lives as highly successful men and fathers like Morris and Richards - and their many current-day counterparts such as Caitlyn Jenner, Biden admin official Rachel Levine, billionaire Jennifer Prtizker, NYTimes and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Finney-Boylan, and business and tech titan Martine Rothblatt - cannot be assumed to apply to all the troubled pre-teen and teenage girls getting sucked into the maw of "youth gender medicine" today like Chloe Cole.
To add on to RunRagged's point, the latest wave of people claiming to be transgender and receiving GRC is still extremely recent, and likely due to cultural influences from social and news media. According to Pew research, a whopping 5% of young adults now identify as transgender/non-binary. A UCLA study has found that the rate of young adults identifying as transgender has doubled from 2017-2020. We're not going to know the full ramifications of the spread of Gender Theory ideology being spread, or the rate of detransition, for some time.
