Questions of bodily autonomy
But is it health care, or is it dangerous invasive tampering?
After a midterm election and record flow of anti-transgender legislation last year, Republican state lawmakers this year are zeroing in on questions of bodily autonomy with new proposals to limit gender-affirming health care and abortion access.
Calling it “gender-affirming health care” is tendentious at best. “Attempted sex-changing surgery and hormones” would be more accurate, though of course believers in the ideology would see it as an outrage.
You can’t change sex. You can change gender only if gender is being understood as entirely external and social, which is not how most people understand it. Either way it has nothing to do with health or health care. Assisting it is not medical.
More than two dozen bills seeking to restrict transgender health care access have been introduced across 11 states — Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — for the legislative sessions beginning in early 2023.
See that’s even more misleading. It sounds as if the bills say trans people can’t have health care, which would indeed be outrageous. The bills are about restricting measures to make people trans, which is not the same as restricting health care. Measures to make people trans can be the opposite of health care.
Gender-affirming health care providers and parents of trans youths are the primary targets of these bills, many of which seek to criminalize helping a trans child obtain what doctors and psychologists widely consider “medically necessary care.”
Really? How widely? In what way medically necessary? What is the evidence that “gender-affirming health care” is medically (as opposed to socially or psychologically or emotionally) necessary care? What is the evidence that the purported medical need for such treatment is permanent? What is the evidence that no harm is done, that no one regrets such health care?
Oh, here it is.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said last year that teens experiencing gender dysphoria can start taking hormones at age 14 and can have certain surgeries at ages 15 or 17. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it was unethical to withhold early treatments, which can improve psychological well-being and reduce suicide risk.
Ah yes WPATH, which notoriously has no vested interest at all whatsoever. Yes it’s risky but it’s unethical not to do it because maybe it will make the victims happy. Maybe. Ignore all the people already saying they wish they hadn’t done it.
It’s interesting how they mention the anti-abortion laws, but those immediately fall away. It looks like abortion rights are like anti-racism; they have become a tool for trans to use for their own interests, to tie trans to unrelated activism in order to tie their issues to other issues that really are issues of rights.
Meanwhile, pro-trans politicians make questioning a child or teenager’s assertion of being trans into “conversion therapy” and they make that illegal and threaten parents with the loss of their children.
Indeed. We saw TiM speakers at rallies, which were ostensibly protests against the overturning of Roe v Wade, turn the fight for abortion rights into a subsection of trans demands for “bodily autonomy.” Women’s rights pushed aside for boutique demands. To complete the hijacking of women’s platforms, captured orgs like the ACLU, NOW and Planned Parenthood tweeted about abortion rights without using the word “woman.” Once women have served their purpose of getting the T centred, women and their needs are cast aside. Mission accomplished.
Similarly NBs, and even TiFs are afterthoughts within trans activism itself for the core of TiMs who seem to be driving the agenda. If there was some means of dismantling the forced teaming and dismantling the “umbrella,” TiMs would find it harder to advance and defend their demands. A good wedge issue might do the trick. Pushing on things like getting men men out of women’s prisons might help do this. It’s harder to hide the impact of the trans agenda on the prison issue than it is to conceal in “health care for trans kids.” There are far more candy-coated euphemisms to unpack and translate in the medical arena than in the prison one, making the incarceration of men with women a harder position to hold, and an easier one to attack. It looks bad to start with, and I don’t think TiFs or NBs have much of a draw to this issue. I don’t see TiFs clambering to get into men’s prisons in the name of TMAM, and as for NBs, who really gives a fuck what they think or want?
For TiMs, it’s TWAW in all situations and circumstances; or, as Stonewall used to put it, “Acceptance without exception.” No ground can be given: TWAW is a total(itarian) position. In the UK, TiMs in women’s prisons was promoted as the perfect test case for getting men into any and all female single-sex spaces. They can’t afford to let this one go. All the better for our side. Bring it on. Let this be their Stalingrad.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions of bodily […]
Medicalisation of children, and the surgical removal of healthy body parts which are necessary for a full and healthy adult life, aren’t an issue of ‘bodily autonomy’; they’re an issue of bodily integrity. Adults should be protecting children from harmful physical interventions which are wholly unnecessary, and equally should be protecting them from an ideology which is telling them that they need those interventions in order to ever be happy again.
We allow children a say in medical and surgical interventions according to age and competence; my son had no say in the procedure to give him some hearing at the age of four months, so I had to weigh up the probability of being deaf having a massive negative effect on his acquisition of language and his safety, versus the slight risk of the procedure itself, and make the decision for him. Using medicines and surgery on a child when to do nothing is harmful, but the outcome of the interventions is beneficial, is quite different to removing their ability to mature alongside their peer group, or to grow into adulthood with necessary body parts intact; it is quite different to turning them into lifelong medical patients because of iatrogenic health issues.
When it comes to girls and abortion, it has been proved time and again that a timely termination of pregnancy is far, far safer than allowing it to go to term. That truly is an issue of bodily autonomy, and girls are capable of having a say in the decision, provided thaty they have had proper, fact-based, counselling. Proper, fact-based, counselling is exactly what children are not being given when pushed onto the ‘trans’ track.
And if the “treatment” doesn’t resolve the underlying psychological issues, then it’s the patient who’s at fault, because they’ve been told these treatments work. As more attention is paid to the ongoing “progress” of the “gender journey,” less is paid to the problems that “affirming care” is incapable of addressing, and, unless they detransition, the more they become invested in going the distance. If the measure of success is shifted to the approximation of the appearance of the target sex, and passing as such, then the goalposts have been shifted; the drugs and surgeries are producing the likeness requested. The interior crises my continue unabated, but that’s not their department.
[…] a comment by tigger_the_wing on Questions of bodily […]
So this is happening:
https://www.northernnews.ca/news/canada/michelle-zacchigna-ontario-detransitioner-sues-doctors
The title and byline:
Given how little faith I have in the courts offering a clear but nuanced opinion, and even less in the general public’s ability to correctly parse a nuanced opinion, I can’t see this ending well regardless of the outcome :-/