At her second 45-minute appointment
A patient who was referred to the controversial Tavistock transgender clinic at age 15 has spoken out saying she feels like a “mutilated experiment gone wrong” after undergoing a mastectomy.
Jasmine, who was born a girl, decided to identify as a boy but has since detransitioned – meaning she has returned to identifying as female.
Or to put it another way, she decided to pretend to be a boy but then changed her mind. What is the difference between pretending and identifying as? Is there any? Is the second just more polite? If that’s the reason maybe we should stop saying it, because too much politeness is how we got here.
“Identifying as” sounds kind of more grown-up and thoughtful, but as we all know, the reality is startlingly childish and credulous. It would probably be better for everyone over the long haul if we stopped being tactful about it. Men can pretend to be women, but that’s all it is – pretending. It’s no more real or serious or adult than children pretending to be horses.
Jasmine was referred to the GIDS clinic for children and young people at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust by a trans charity when she was 15. She was seen by professionals there three times.
From the age of 17, GIDS patients were transferred to adult services where they could then undergo gender reassignment surgery.
At her second 45-minute appointment at the adult clinic, she said she was referred to be prescribed cross-sex hormones and put on the waiting list for “top surgery”, or a mastectomy, which she said did not “help” or “fix” her but “made things a lot worse”.
Her second appointment. Cool that they didn’t rush her into it on her first appointment.
She’s just one person, of course. Some people are happy with their “transition,” as the Telegraph makes clear. But…on her second appointment???
I seriously still don’t know what people mean when they say “identify as” with respect to various identininnies.
If it represents the truth-functional “I am X”, then it’s fallible, and people can be mistaken about their “gender”. But trans identification is supposed to be infallible, so the phrase can’t mean “I am X”. If it’s taken to mean something like, “I feel an affinity for X,” then it’s irrelevant in the contexts that it’s used. If it’s taken to mean, “I believe myself to be X,” then it can be first-order true while being second-order false, which means that it’s fallible again. If it means, “I place myself in the category X,” then it’s fallible, and no, making X a socially constructed category doesn’t change this. The American Presidency is a socially constructed category, and we don’t just let people place themselves in that category. (Yet.)
So what the actual hell do people mean? Under what possible interpretation does it refer to something relevant and important and necessarily true?
This bit stood out to me.
Another example of medical professionals being bypassed by Mermaids?
Also, the rush to irreversible treatment… People should loose their registration to practice medicine over this. In a just world people would go to jail for it. It’s beyond malpractice. Chopping up girls for ideology, not medicine.
It says Jasmine was referred to the children’s clinic at age 15, and then up to the adult one at age 17 (two years later), if I’m reading this correctly. It doesn’t say how many appointments she had at the juvenile level, or what or how much or how often she and the providers discussed/discussed about her case and proposed course of … treatment. She got the cross-sex hormones on only her second appointment in the adult clinic.