https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/05/conversion-therapy-lgbtq-anti-trans-gay-gender-affirming-care/
Inside the movement to resurrect conversion therapy.
My grandmother insisted I use my right hand to write. Turns out it doesn't matter that much now, I barely write anything at all. When I do, though, it's a horrible scrawl, although I don't know if it'd be the same had I been left to my own devices.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm left handed and have always written with my left hand and my penmanship is atrocious.
I can imagine it being more difficult to push than pull, especially in cursive.
But don't feel bad, I'm right-handed and write right-handed and my handwriting is also atrocious.
It would be a horrible scrawl smeared across the page, but your hand wouldnt cramp as bad
My mother's art teacher would hlsmack her with a ruler whenever she tried to use her left hand. Destroyed her passion for art at a young age.
That's because the left hand is raised against the establishment. Want proof? I can't even raise a left fist emoji.. No option. Only right.
Puts on tinfoil
Healing trans people by giving them what they need to feel normal in their own body, right?
Here's a personal story. It's a long one and it's purely anecdotal. But I think it's fitting.
I'm in the process of diagnosing my autism, and I mean it's pretty much done. I'm autistic, there is no doubt about it at this point, but now I just need what we could call a stamp of approval for it to be officially recognized by my government. So I had to see a psychiatrist to do this. Currently, in my country it's kind of hard to do so because they are all completely booked so I basically jumped on the first one that was available.
I sent him an email explaining to him my situation, telling him that I'm a trans woman, about my pronouns, he was aware of absolutely everything, and he told me that it was all good with him. Previous experiences in my life had taught me to be wary of psychiatrists, but I tried to go in with an open mind. I brought all of the tests that I had done with therapists who were specialized in the domain of autism and everything with me so that we could go over all of this. According to those people that I was seeing, it should have been just a formality, or at the very least he could've wanted me to do some tests quickly just to double check but that was it.
So I finally went to see him. And the first thing he did was misgender me. He called me sir, called me he and then he noticed that I flinched at this. Made a point of addressing it. And I told him that yeah it was a bit weird because you know I told him in advance and people didn't misgender me nowadays so it was weird. He half-apologized for his "mistake", before telling me that it was my fault. Because according to him, my passing wasn't good enough. He told me that I didn't look feminine enough and that reality was harsh and that sometimes we just had to accept that things are not the way we want them to be. That he wasn't going to pretend just to please me.
And mind you, my passing is good. Not to brag or anything but I am never misgendered. I always had a very feminine face, a very feminine body. I always had long hair, so I was already passing before I was out. And now it's even better. I have guys walking up to me and flirting with me for 10 minutes straight and never questioning if I'm a man or a woman. The point is my passing isn't an issue, and even if it was, fuck him. That's not something he should judge. You are a psychiatrist, not a stylist. Shut the fuck up and stay in your lane.
I tried to divert from all of this. I wanted to cry but I still tried and remained focused about what I was here for. So I handed him all of the papers that I had from my therapist who was specialized in autism, all the tests we did and told him here are everything I have, all of my pre-diagnostics, how should we proceed? He barely took a look at them before telling me that he categorically refused to help me with the diagnosis, saying that it was just a trend.
I tried to explain to him that I needed this because I was trying to build a file that would recognize me legally as a disabled worker because, well, I am, and it would help me greatly in my day-to-day life especially at work, because I would be granted accommodations for my hypersensitivities and the like. He told me he refused to help me with this and told me that we had to work on other things like for example that I had a habit of self-diagnosis. I had self-diagnosed my autism for example and I was kind of stunned at this because... I didn't.
I had a long track record of doctors suspecting that I was maybe autistic but never really going all the way for a diagnosis. I finally decided to take action and see some people who immediately confirmed that yes, I very likely was. I was getting frustrated but I was thinking that he was the professional and maybe he was right, maybe something was wrong with me, but then he continued and said that I also self-diagnosed my trans identity.
I was fucking stunned at this. To the point where I just couldn't say anything, so I let him continue and he continued talking about it, about my trans identity, how it was clear I had some identity issues and so on. And the way he talked about it, I started to feel dread. He was talking about me being trans like it was some psychosis.
This was the first time I saw this motherfucker, we had never met before, and he somehow deduced all of this in like 30 minutes. Like, the dude talked with such confidence, like he had it all figured out already. And this was the first time anybody told me something like that. It's not like there was a pattern with my therapist or even the doctors that I saw who gave me hormones or anything. No, he was the first one to do this.
The second I walked in, he immediately got set on trying to cure the fact that I was trans. He became fixated on it and ignored everything else I was telling him. He always brought it back to this.
And mind you, this is not the protocol at all for my country when it comes to trans people. That's not how you do things. But at the same time, from what I understand, once you got your medical license here, well, there is no need to take a refresher course. And this dude got it like 20, 30 years ago. And he never had to brush up on his knowledge. The dude was basically trying to diagnose me with "transsexual syndrome" or something like that.
Figuring out that I was trans is one of the best things that ever happened to me. My life has never been this hard and yet I've never been this happy. And he wanted to take it all away from me. He saw it as some problem to be fixed.
The last interaction I had with him was when I gave him my medical card. He proceeded to bill me much more than I anticipated, so that was fun but that was only after he commented on the card, which had a very old photo of me where I looked much more masculine (really short hair) but also my deadname which he proceeded to read aloud and comment on how he liked it, asking me how I came up with "Plume", and how different it was than [DEADNAME].
Needless to say, I never saw him again.
I did talk about it a lot with my therapist, she was shocked at what I was telling her. My doctor who put me on hormones told me something along the lines of, "what an asshole". I was shaken by the experience. Still kind of am. If I had been a minor and didn't really have a say in any of this, I am convinced, without a doubt, that the dude would have put me through some sort of like conversion therapy.
Talking about this to some other trans people, I learned that, at least in my country, this is a shockingly common occurrence...
I just want to be me...
I needed a moment to calm myself after reading all that. The amount of vitriol I felt in my stomach when I got towards the mid-way point... Idk if I would have even stayed there to listen to his crap. Turns me bitter. Send me the bill for my time you wasted and piss off.
The bullshit we have to endure... Just know that I'm sending all my hugs your way. You deserve it and so much more, gurl! Stay Strong. ✊ These assholes won't ruin our resolve.
I'm so sorry you had to deal with that. My heart breaks for anyone who happened to see him first.
I hope to see more and more outreach programs for trans youth so they know they're not alone and don't have to listen to such assholes.
I am sorry you went through this, just report this doctors behavior to the relevant authorities if you think that makes sense to do. If you don’t want the hassle of any bureaucratic issues of reporting him, that’s understandable.
i would've walked out the moment i walked in.
I'm not trans, but fuck you if that's how you treat me in a professional environment. You're not getting my time of day or money.
sorry you went through that.
doctors, lawyers etc all think they are very smart. Some of them are, but also, you don't have to be smart to memorize a text book. People can get through exams and still be dumb motherfuckers.
But it always goes back to the idea that you can beat something inherent out of someone. If they thought that it was possible with blackness, they would have blackness conversion camps too.
Technically it is, my cousin's mom used to bite his left hand till it bled everytime he used it, now he's ambidextrous but mostly uses his right hand to write, she tried to get my mother to do the same with me but I was lucky she isn't religious and shot that down immediately
If they thought that it was possible [to beat out] blackness,
Don't give em any ideas. That's actually far more plausible than trying to beat someone out of being gay or trans: the part of the dermis that actually has the concentration of melanin to make skin appear dark is like less than paper-thin. I've worked on black burn patients, and when that portion of their skin gets burned away, the skin (still skin, not subcutaneous or muscle or anything) that's left is as white as mine, and I'm a pasty mofo.
Edit-
Warning - not gory necessarily, but if you're squeamish you might want to skip this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2KtvtY7MU0
This video shows a dermatome taking a skin graft from a dark skinned patient. A dermatome is basically a razor blade that vibrates and takes a specific thickness of skin... it's basically the bastard child of a cheese slicer and those vibro-blades that some people obliterate their turkey with around November.
Anyway, this appears to be a partial-thickness graft, which means most of what they're taking is the epidermis, and leaving the dermis mostly intact. Notice the contrast when the epidermis comes up.
...so many stupid problems through the entirety of our history over the biological equivalent to tissue paper. -_-
Oh I was not ready for the tweezers 🤢
That is actually really cool though, are they able to make skin gratfs that way without actually having to remove flesh? Or is it for a different purpose?
Most of the ones I've done, we take it with the dermatome, then run it through a "mesher" which cuts little slits in an alternating pattern all over it, which allows the graft to expand and cover twice the area. Then you cut a piece large enough to cover the burn or wound or w/e needs the graft, stitch if into it, then stretch the remainder out and stitch it back to the site we cut it off from.
The ones I've done have all been split thickness grafts where we only take the epidermis; full thickness takes the dermis and epidermis, and I assume can work the same way with a mesher.
I don't think subcutaneous tissue is ever grafted in that context - that's more liposuction territory, which I've seen that grafted in facial plastics stuff like lip restoration.
I don't recall ever grafting muscle.
I just watched a video of that process, it's really incredible. I don't know much about how the skin works, does the dermis just regrow under the epidermis? I imagine it sort of repairs inwards from the edges of the wound using the epidermis as support, is that correct?
I'm really glad people like you are doing out there. I imagine you get used to it, but I feel squeamish just looking at the graft, not to mention the injury that required it!
The how's of skin healing are largely over my head - I'm a surgical tech, so my focus is mostly on surgery setup, knowing the surgery well enough to keep the surgeon equipped with the instrument they need throughout the surgery, tear down and clean up, rinse and repeat. Our education on physiology is pretty limited relative to everyone else in the OR, especially in my case since I was trained to be a surg tech when I joined the Air Force, and the military version is WAY abbreviated and requires no academic background (vs most civilian programs which require college level anatomy & physiology courses, and then actual surg tech school is like 5x as in depth compared to mil). I've only just recently caught up to my civ peers academically bc I took the prereqs for nursing school, for which there's significant overlap with normal surg tech program prereqs. (just finished 1st semester of nursing school, woot woot!!)
...and tbh, grain of salt on civ surg tech program info I just mentioned - that's all 2nd hand info from other techs that I just took at face value. I have no reason to doubt it, but still.
Aaaanywho, my understanding (which is like tip of the iceberg basic) is that the epidermis is mostly just the dead skin cells that flake up to the top to form the outer layer of your skin. The dermis underneath is vascularized, and healing pretty much starts with blood (delivering nutrients and platelets etc). So yeah, wounds heal from the edges inward and from the deeper parts outward. Wide area wounds can be painful af, have a high infection risk, and you lose a lot of fluid through them, so that's where grafts come in to replace that protective outer layer, which acts as a barrier to pathogens and keeps the underlying tissue moist. Even with the mesher, the graft is effectively covered in holes to cover a wider area, but that still acts as a scaffolding for new tissue to form.
I imagine you get used to it, but I feel squeamish just looking at the graft, not to mention the injury that required it!
Yeah you get used to it. Funny thing with the AF: many active duty surgical techs are placed via "open general" which is a recruiting tool to place warm bodies in open job slots as fast as possible. Basically people go to a recruiter, aren't picky about what they want to do once they enlist, so they just let the AF decide for them. Some of them get surg tech, and there's an "Oh shit" moment when they realize medical jobs were on the menu and they're the type that passes out at the sight of blood.... TOO LATE, THEY ALREADY SIGNED! So they finish Basic, go to surg tech school, then go to work at the OR at an on base hospital where they STRUGGLE (in part because they're a source of great fun for the other staff, lol) for about... 4 months. Much after that, them being elbow deep into a stranger's abdomen to hold a bunch of intestines back out of the surgeons way is just another Tuesday, doesn't phase em at all.
Squeamishness is just a matter of exposure; as that increases, so does tolerance.
...also on the off chance anyone reading this is considering enlisting into the AF, do not - DO NOT - go open general unless you're sincerely cool with spending the next 4+ years doing ANY of the jobs listed in general, which is a massive category that could land you as a medic, cop, line cook, roach exterminator, weather, etc. And if you want medical and your recruiter recommends you go "open medical", that doesn't exist - there's a number or email on the back of his business card to file complaints, write that motherfucker up for lying to you. Apparently that's a common trick to get people to sign open general.
Only because it isn’t forced on them. Push these racist idiots hard enough and they may get the idea for ‘color conversion therapy’. Or more people of color will go for it again to try and avoid racism.
I keep thinking back to the Mark Twain quote, ‘As happy as a black mother whose baby has come out white’, and how incredibly sad of a statement that is. And how little things have changed since Mark Twain’s time.
You’d think by now it wouldn’t matter if a child was born light or dark, but it still does, because of a small group of horrible people, and a wider group who don’t care as long as they get privileges, and so just keep telling everyone ‘not to rock the boat’.
that's it boys! We've cured homosexuality! Our work here's done.
Wait, what the fuck do we do now?
Honestly curious and hoping for serious replies:
What do trans people think about the possibility of a child or preteen “getting it wrong”? Ie, maturing into an adult that realizes/decides that they actually want to live out their life as initially assigned at birth?
Note: I know so little that I’m actually not sure if this question itself is massively offensive or not…if so, sincere apologies. Just want to learn more about this and stop imagining things!
Good faith questions should always be welcome, even encouraged. It would be a sad world where I was still in the dark unable to ask questions about things I didn't know for fear of offending. Thank you my rainbow friends since college. No topic was ever taboo once I started with, "Okay I have one of those questions..."
Reply was always, let's hear it!
Unfortunately, the whole scenario is a little contrived, and it feels quite a bit like the same tactic as describing things like fingernails or the "heartbeat" of a fetus...it's designed to get you to act on emotion without learning more.
Now, if a surgeon were to be found doing gender reassignment surgery on minors without the years of therapy and other interventions that are all part of the real process...then I'd be fully on board with yanking their license to practice and probably charging them and the kids guardians with any applicable criminal charges. As far as the real process goes, the whole thing is designed to give the person every opportunity to change their mind or only partially transition before anything irreversible happens. It usually starts with letting the kid pick their own clothes/hair/whatever and therapy. If they change their mind, they just change their clothes and hair. Then, more therapy and maybr change their name ( it doesn't even have to be a legal change yet, as they're a minor), maybe puberty blockers as appropriate. If they change their mind, they just stop the blockers or go back to their old name... whatever they feel comfortable with. Then maybe top surgery as a late teen or early 20s... again, it's harder to reverse but still doable.
Because of the way the process is gradual and guided by medical professionals, actual cases of someone fully transitioning then changing their mind is less than 1%. Gender affirming surgery to make you look more like your ideal version of your assigned sex (breast augmentation/lip implants/whatever) have mich higher regret rates.
Because of the way the process is gradual and guided by medical professionals, actual cases of someone fully transitioning then changing their mind is less than 1%.
just for clarity here, since i'm curious and this is worded rather, weirdly. I've always assumed this stat was measured among transitioned people, but it's possible to interpret this as people who transitioned, and then detransitioned, which would include the entirety of the population by proxy.
A very small percentage of people who transition ever choose to detransition. Further, a very small percentage of people who detransition report that their reasons for doing so included that they weren't actually transgender. The vast majority of people who detransition do so because of outside pressure from their community and not because they think they were wrong to transition.
yeah, that's what i've always understood it as.
The fact that people detransition, because the pressure of it is less than being trans is fascinating to me. I'm sure psychs and sociologists are having a field day with that considering it's a rare opportunity to get a pretty specific view into an incredibly complex topic such as social cohesion, and self expression.
Unlike what some people may have told you children aren't allowed surgery, and are rarely allowed hrt. Sometimes they get puberty blockers, which is somewhat controversial, but is also used in cis children with precocious puberty. It's been demonstrated that even small children have formed a gender identity (can't remember the exact age but it's around 5 or 6 years old), and that this doesn't really change. It is possible for someone to not know their gender identity, though I think this is more common with non-binary people and those who aren't taught about gender identity.
What do trans people think about the possibility of a child or preteen “getting it wrong”? Ie, maturing into an adult that realizes/decides that they actually want to live out their life as initially assigned at birth?
i'm not trans, but i think there is always the possibility of being wrong, and the only real thing we have to back this up going forward is long term heuristics.
Notably if you've been cross dressing for a couple of years, chance are, it's gonna be pretty fucking low that you would regret it. By that point at least.
Maybe one day we will develop some kind of technology that gives us a better way of classifying this, in a more reliable manner, because theoretically there should be some form of expected brain adaptation from the average person, or related physical issue in the case of physically intersex people.
Ultimately, having a more positive opinion on less binary genders in general is going to be like 80% of what solves this problem. The second that non binary and genderfluid is more universally accepted, the trans existence is probably going to shift more towards the center. Simply due to social acceptance. Though i'm sure a lot of people will still ultimately be trans, i'm just curious to see how this plays out.
That's my two cents on it at least.