Let people understand something about trans people

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Yes. Mistakes happen for every medical procedure. It doesn't mean coverage should be denied.

I don't believe I've made any assertions either for or against denial of coverage.

OK, then. Thanks for the clarification.

i have to say I'm confused, benificci.

This thread rails against the conventional spirit of your posting style.

I totally agree with this.

I'm lucky I only have social dysphoria to a mild degree. It's painful to be in a society where I'm expected to 'act' 100% female all the time and where people can't see me as I really am - but it's nothing like being at odds with my own body.

I think she's been thrashing things out in her head and has finally realised the basic truth of her situation. Some people need SRS just to be able to function and society's beliefs about gender are less important than people being able to live.

Here is a small selection of illnesses/diseases:

- Anorexia
- Cutaneous Anthrax
- Deafness
- Kidney stones
- Malaria
- Pneumonia
- Spinal disc herniation

The untreated case fatality rates for individuals suffering from any of the above illnesses/diseases are lower (and for several of them, much, much lower, almost 0%) than the suicide rate among individuals with gender dysphoria (various estimates put this at around 30 percent or even higher).

So, the treatment of individuals suffering from any of those illnesses (and hundreds - if not thousands - of other illnesses with similarly lower death rates) would be "less" important than treating gender dysphoria, and thus a waste of government resources, right?

to me the greatest tragedy is that any access to medical treatment ought to be curtailed in the name of scarcity of resources.

Here are a few more that can be managed with expensive healthcare, but who are usually a death sentences without:

- HIV (rarely progresses into AIDS in Europe, but usually does for people who can't afford healthcare in the US)
- Leukemia
- Legionella
- Skin cancer
- Various heart conditions



Actually, many transsexuals who commit suicide, do so after the reassignment surgery. Furthermore, the waiting lines for psychiatric treatmen are as high as two years in many European states. While you never hear about detransitions (which isn't uncommon for people who can afford it) in the media or see transgendered people who regret their decissions in documentaries, up to 18% regret their reassignment surgery.



Gender dysphoria can be treated by creating awareness of the fact that not everyone conform to gender stereotypes. There would be a lot fewer men who "felt like women" (or vice versa) if it became more socially accepted for men to be feminine and women to be masculine.

Last edited by Kurgan on 28 Oct 2013, 1:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Looks like you dropped a decimal point there, Kurgan. The figures I've seen have been 1.8% regret rate.

It depends a lot on the source. The 1.8% figure typically stems from various activist sites.

Highest I've seen from the 90s on is 8%.

Regarding suicide, it is true that for many trans people, treatment does not restore them to the level of non-trans people, likely due to accumulated psychological damage. Still, there is good evidence that sex reassignment improves psychological functioning, as in this study from the Netherlands:

http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/handle ... 189321.pdf

It looks like providers need to be aware of predictors of success, and provide more treatment in cases where the risk is higher.

I have no doubt about that. It doesn't mean that the government should pay for it, though. If someone has crooked teeth or a face with no definition, corrective surgery improves their psychological functioning as well; does that mean that the government should pay for it?

Thus the high suicide rate among transgendered people who have received their "corrective" surgery.



Also ...



Source: LiveScience Article

By the way; The Trevor project operates the nation's only 24-hour toll-free suicide prevention helpline for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth (1-866-4-U-TREVOR).

You have received one demerit for selective quotation. I was explicitly making a point by comparing gender dysphoria to less fatal illnesses that are uncontroversially accepted in government funded health care systems.

In other words:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

So I will consider your reply as evidence of your failure to address my point (that you arbitrarily single out sexual reassignment surgery when deciding what procedures should be covered by the government).


Of course they do. It is called a "confounding variable".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

The group of individuals qualifying for gender dysphoria is (by just about any eligibility criteria I have encountered) a more severely affected subset of the entire group of individuals suffering from gender dysphoria. In other words, their risk of suicide was probably already higher than my previously mentioned 30 percent figure.

Even the most *negative* finding that I have come across regarding the effects of sexual reassignment surgery explicitly acknowledges this:

"For the purpose of evaluating the safety of sex reassignment in terms of morbidity and mortality, however, it is reasonable to compare sex reassigned persons with matched population controls. The caveat with this design is that transsexual persons before sex reassignment might differ from healthy controls (although this bias can be statistically corrected for by adjusting for baseline differences). It is therefore important to note that the current study is only informative with respect to transsexuals persons health after sex reassignment; no inferences can be drawn as to the effectiveness of sex reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism. In other words, the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality. Things might have been even worse without sex reassignment.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi ... ne.0016885

And obviously, this is not exclusive to gender dysphoria. People who undergo surgery for Cardiac dysrhythmia are probably much, much, much more likely to die subsequently compared to those who do not, as a lot of individuals with Cardiac dysrhythmia do not require any treatment at all.


So what? A fundamental concept in medical ethics is that you assign the highest priority to the most serious illness. This is most obviously relevant in emergency situations (triage), but I 'm pretty sure that cancer is considered a higher priority than ingrown nails. And when it comes to psychiatric illnesses, is there any condition other than schizophrenia that can compete with gender dysphoria in severity?



Please provide sources for both these claims. And peer reviewed science only, please... Your record of scientific integrity on WP is *extremely* poor.

EDIT: Grammar.

Last edited by GGPViper on 28 Oct 2013, 5:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Do people with crooked teeth/a face with no definition have a 30 percent suicide rate?