[prottog]

If a teenage girl standing 5'7" and weighing 80 pounds came to the doctor and said she feels too fat and needs to lose weight, the doctor would rightly tell her that she is anorexic, that her being too fat is only in her head, and that she should instead gain a bit of weight to be healthy. A doctor who instead prescribes her weight loss pills would be treated with skepticism; a doctor who performed gastric bypass on her would rightly be excoriated and maybe even have their medical license taken away. If there was an epidemic of such doctors, voters would rightly take alarm and may even petition the state legislature to ban such a practice. None of this would be stupid.

[howinteresting]

Correct, but anorexia is very different from gender dysphoria and involves diametrically opposite treatment protocols.

edit: responding to prottog:

> gender dysphoria was classified a mental illness [...] It's only very recently that with the former we started to take the (mentally unwell) patient's word over evidence.

You're the one begging the question now.

If gender dysphoria really is a mental illness, why are regret rates for gender-affirming care so low? One of the defining characteristics of a mental illness is that if you "feed into it", it gets worse. For example, with schizophrenia, you should not validate the voices someone might be hearing because doing so makes it worse. The situation with gender dysphoria is exactly the opposite.

[prottog]

Treatment protocols aren't divine edicts. They can be wrong. The medical community is as susceptible as any to groupthink and being taken in by the current culture milieu, as well as being influenced by moneyed interests.

As recently as ten years ago, with DSM-5, gender dysphoria was classified a mental illness, much like how anorexia is still classified as one. It's only very recently that with the former we started to take the (mentally unwell) patient's word over evidence.

Doctors used to say that cigarettes were good for you. I suspect that we'll look back at gender-affirming care the same way in a few decades.

[Eisenstein]

> Treatment protocols aren't divine edicts. They can be wrong. The medical community is as susceptible as any to groupthink and being taken in by the current culture milieu, as well as being influenced by moneyed interests.

Do your suspicions in this instance merit an intervention in care for other people? At what point do your 'feelings' matter so much that you get to tell other people what to do medically with their own children? Apply this in an inverse fashion -- at what point do other people who suspect doctors are not right get to tell you how to make medical decision regarding your children?

Let's compare how many times Doctors as a group have been wrong about something vs Politicians. Are you still for Politicians making medical decisions for people?