Detransitioner sues Kaiser Permanence for permanently disfiguring her for profit

RunRagged wrote:

translucent wrote:

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.

RunRagged wrote:

rrrtty wrote:

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.

RunRagged wrote:

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

Where did I miss the link to those peer reviewed studies? I thought that was the standard you demanded from everyone.

Here you go:

Link:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21364939/

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.

RunRagged wrote:

Anon6383 wrote:

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.

You might well be right. We won't know for sure until Cole's case is further along - and until all the othe cases in which additional gender medicince patients in other jurisdicitons are suing their HCPs and HCFs for negligence and malpractice have their "day in court" too.

The USA cases might all end up settled out of court under terms kept from the public. That's happened with the significant number of medical malpractice and negligence cases that female gender medicine patients have filed against USA surgeon Curtis Crane in recent years for phalloplasties that yielded distastrous, disabling and nearly fatal results.

However, the legal cases regarding gender medicine in countries which have universal, tax-payer funded health care that's provided by government under the control of national and/or regional authorities will probably get aired in more public manner. Currently, there are pending lawsuits by patients in the UK, Sweden, Australia, Canada and Spain that I know of.

Since the lawsuits in other countries are against government health authorities - and/or private practitioners and facilities who treated patients under the purview and/or at the behest of the government - and the legal systems of those countries require public disclosure, the cases outside the UK will probably get more press coverage as they unfold.

Moreover, the mainstream press in the UK, Sweden and Australia are doing a much better job of covering the problems with gender medicine today, particularly as it impacts children and adolsecents, than the media in the USA and Canada are.

As for those "highly documented medical records" you mention- you're right, there should be extensive documents outlining in detail what Chloe Cole and her parents were told by the HCPs they're now suing, and what they asked in turn. But then again, maybe there aren't. That's what the experience in other cases in other countries so far suggests.

One of the many reasons the UK government has decided to shut down its national youth gender identity clinic at the Tavistock in London is because it was found to have shockingly poor record-keeping - and to have failed in its duty to provide parents and young patients with the full, accurate information required for them to give "informed consent" to the medical interventions recommended and undertaken.

Similarly, one of the reasons Sweden has put a halt to all "gender medicine" interventions for children and adolescents is because practitioners of youth gender medicine and therapy there as well were found to have extremely poor record-keeping and not to have told patients or their parents the truth about the risks, downsides, lack of efficacy and irreversible nature of the medical interventions they recommended, prescribed and performed.

In fact, the esteemed, world-famous Karolinska Institute in Stockholm ended up having to report itself to Swedish prosecutors for violating the human rights of several of its young female gender medicine patients. This occurred after the Swedish national television broadcaster and internal investigations determined that HCPs in gender medicine at the Karolinksa had not foreawarned young female patients or their parents that taking "puberty blockers" could cause them to develop skeletal deformities and damage that would leave them permamently disabled.

The Karolinska gender vendors also failed to tell young female patients that the "puberty blockers" being touted as absolutely essential if they wanted to look like males would stunt their height and make them short even for girls/women - thus making it far more difficult for them to pass as members of the opposite sex over the long term of their lives.

malarko wrote:

RunRagged wrote:

The paper you linked to… (clipped)

If someone has had their penis and testicles surgically removed (for example), it’s sort of past the point of no return anyway, isn’t it? Nothing surgery claims to be able to do can give those parts back to you in a real way. Certainly, everything I’ve read about the way they make a “penis” out of lady parts for trans F to M sounds like a farce to me, a pretty weak and barely functional parody of real male-parts. (Same is true, I’m sure, the other way round).

Point being, I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual number of people who have regrets is much higher, but at that point it’s too late and you have to make the best of it.

Plus, given the absolute explosion in number of people being transitioned in the past 10-15 years, I’m still not going to be surprised if we look back on this like we now do the popularity of lobotomies, despite what the other fellow claims. It might take a lot longer because (1) trans people can still do most everyday things like a normal person, unlike what happened to lobotomized patients and (2) lobotomy didn’t have an entire social movement roaring emotionally in its favor. The older fight was primarily one among scientists at least as far as I can tell, the trans fight is much wider than that. Put 200 million people in your way and it’ll take a heck of a lot longer to get where you’re going.

RunRagged wrote:

Here you go:

Link:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21364939/

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.

RunRagged wrote:

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

Kim Petras was born in 1992. Nicole Maines (b. 1997), Hunter Schafer (b. 1998), Georgie Stone (b. 2000) and Ariel Nicolson (b. 2001) all seem to be leading very successful lives as trans women. And they all started medical transition at early ages.

Whether or not the youngsters you have named are "leading very successful lives as trans women" depends on how one defines living, success and women. Since you and I disagree very strongly about the meaning of the word women, and about fundamental issues such as the nature of mammalian sex, I wouldn't be surpised if we also have very different views about what makes a life successful and what "living as a woman" means.

But it's telling that the five persons you present as exemplars of early-transitioned males who are now "leading very successful lives as trans women" all happen to be leading lives that don't exactly exemplify the diversity, authenticity and "being true to your inner self" that trans activists are always banging on about.

On the contrary, these five persons all appear to be living in cookie-cutter similar ways epitimozed by shiny surface glitz and gloss that's all about shallow superficiality, artificiality and performativity

All five are either entertainers or models whose lives seem to revolve around their looks. And all of them have looks and are cultivating "brand images" of a very narrow kind meant to appeal to the so-called "male gaze."

Kim Petras in particular is a pop singer who has gone to great lengths to project the pornified public image of a dolled-up, bootylicious, blonde bombshell glamorpuss sex symbol who is always hot to trot and who is so ineluctably alluring that men the world over are falling at KP's feet coz they find KP and KP's so-called "coconuts" utterly irresitstable.

Video:youtu.be/ite2vY5qihc

Like many women, I'm not enthalled by the way KP's song "Coconuts" and the video for it depict women's breasts as objects for men to ogle and play with, and as props for porn shoots.

In fact, I find KP's take on breasts to be vulgar, crass and insulting to those of us who are female. I think the way KP and many other male trans-identified persons look upon and depict breasts is especially cruel to all the female people whose breasts have made us targets for male sexual harassment and assault, and who've been snickered at, discriminated against, perved on and called cows (and worse) for using our breasts to feed our children.

I also see a direct connection between the pornified way that people like Kim Petras portray breasts and the fact that a great many teenage girls like Chloe Cole are so unhappy about having breasts today that they are rushing to get theirs cut off.