| > No surgeon should be removing healthy body parts, in my opinion. There are a metric ton of medical procedures surgeons do outside of medical transitioning where people alter/adjust/remove healthy body parts. This seems like a pretty blanket statement to say; and I say that as someone who would be extremely cautious about telling someone that they "should" medically transition if they feel that social transition would be sufficient for them. I'm all aboard the train of telling transgender people that they're valid whether or not they choose to transition, and I definitely would advocate that transgender identity and body dysphoria are not necessarily the same thing, and that many trans people are blessed to be able to both embrace their transgender identity and celebrate aspects of their bodies that don't "align" with their gender in strictly hetero-normative ways. Even with that perspective, this framing of "we're perverting the role of doctors/surgeons by cutting healthy flesh" -- it just doesn't really match the reality of how many procedures there are in the US that already fit that definition. Everything from the stereotypical examples of cosmetic surgery, to non-essential dental procedures, to limb lengthening, to circumcision, to sex-assignment surgery for intersex infants, the list goes on and on. Many of these procedures aren't strictly speaking medically necessary. Precocious puberty for example is primarily harmful because of its psychological and social effects. The physical consequences of early puberty are comparatively minor (not non-existant, but then-again neither are the effects of puberty blockers. We're mostly talking about stuff like "you might be shorter when you grow up"). And yet, I've never once seen someone advocate that it's morally wrong or that it should be illegal for a doctor to prescribe puberty blockers to a cisgender child with precocious puberty. There's no shortage of conditions that really don't have physical health-effects or side-effects other than that society has decided that we don't really like them or that they're inconvenient to live with (either because of social stigma or because of the increased need for accommodations that society is unwilling/unable to provide) -- and we generally don't tell people with those conditions that they need to just learn to live with them. Instead, we give them choices (including medical interventions) to address both the social effects of their conditions and the internal psychological effects of their conditions. What we don't do is we don't take a purely physical view of things. Heck, one of the justifications for why doctors prescribe puberty blockers to cisgender girls with precocious puberty is because there's limited research suggesting that delaying puberty lowers their risks of being raped. That's about as far into the "its a social problem, not a medical one" category as it's possible for a medical intervention to be. And look, all of this is even taking the most charitable view of the statement statement above and assuming that it is specifically talking about medical interventions among minors. But if I take that statement at its face value as saying that no surgeon should ever operate on healthy tissue, then it just kind of becomes absurd, honestly. There are so, so many medical procedures that fall under that umbrella. I think everyone would love to have less invasive ways of helping people who suffer from gender-disphoria and I think everyone is hoping that as social stigma continues to decrease that some of the psychological downsides of not transitioning might also decrease. That's not to say that medical transitioning is bad; it's not. But it does carry some risks, and obviously it's good to have multiple available paths for the transgender people who don't want to take those risks. But arguments that boil down to "it's in the mind, so treat it that way" sound good at face-value but are ultimately way too simplistic to work even in a purely cisgender world. Our medical profession hasn't really worked that way for a long time, if it ever worked that way at all. So any debate about whether or not a surgery procedure is moral needs to be engaging with the issue on a deeper level than just whether or not there's a physical risk involved. |