Psychology and mental health took a giant step back when it was decided, back in the age of castrating gay men to “cure” them, that the solution to feeling as though one was born in the wrong body was to mutilate it until it resembled the opposite sex, and pump it full of pharmaceutical hormones until it drops dead. It was back when therapy was taking a back seat to more “modern and scientific” interventions like popping pills and slicing someone’s brain open. So much could have been addressed and researched and a genuine, real cure could have been found. But no.

If you have depression, is the progressive, science-based treatment the one in which you’re allowed to take your own life at will? What about DID - should we invent some kind of artificial, plasticized skin that can change appearance drastically, perhaps with the touch of a button on a remote control, so the sufferer’s current alter can be represented accurately? Should people with BIID have healthy limbs cut off? If you’re anorexic with a considerable case of BDD, should your medical care team work together to create the most skeletal body possible for you, because that’s what you want, and that’s what you see as your ideal, rather than the body you have now?

One wonders why all of these things were anathema, whereas SRS and lifelong hormonal treatment to “turn a man into a woman” and vice-versa got the green light. Honestly, I wonder how much of it had to do with sheer fascination rather than any real interest in the long-time well-being of patients.