IF YOU CARE ABOUT TRANS ISSUES, READ THIS. IT’S IMPORTANT
Unfortunately, the medical establishment owns the transitions and the lives of most transsexuals up to at least the point where they are able to set themselves free after their operations have been done. Even more unfortunately, the medical establishment is highly conservative and very unwilling to actually understand transsexuals (which one would have thought would be a prerequesite of treating us).
This is something which happens in a great deal of countries and there’s a lot of pressure from the transsexual community to change this, to bring the treatment more into line with what we actually need, but challenging the medical establishment is hard. It is so even for doctors with new ideas, it’s doubly so for a group of rather unrespected and generally misunderstood patients.
Now, one of the most influential bodies trying to control the treatment of transsexuals is the American Psychological Association (the APA) which carries a lot of weight with psychologists elsewhere in the Western world. Recently, they did a study which indicated that the prevalence of gender dysphoria was much lower than expected (by a factor of up to 20) and there is very strong evidence that they did so on purpose.
In this study, they used two well known anti-trans ‘experts’, Anne Lawrence* (who holds onto a very insulting and old-fashioned view of transsexualism which is very focussed on a pecking order of ‘real’ transsexuals and the rest) and Ken Zucker* (a psychologist who believes in quite horrific ‘reparative’ treatment, especially of transsexual children) even though there has been opposition to their inclusion due to their extreme views on the transsexual issue.
Lynn Conway is transsexual activist who has put a lot of effort into first of all showing transsexual people as normal people who have a condition from which they can recover with the right, physical treatment and secondly into standing up to the old guard and anti-trans parts of the medical establishment. She has written an open letter to the APA which is worth reading, even if you’re not in the US.
You can read the open letter here.
The results of this exchange is going to make major impacts on the lives of transsexuals everywhere. This is important.
* I have used the TS Roadmap reviews of these people’s views on transsexuality because I believe they are fair an accurate descriptions. I encourage you to read these pages and others to get more information on these people’s views. In my opinion, they are improperly in positions of power over transsexual people’s lives and we need to know their views.
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