Benefits of Transsexual Surgery Disputed As Leading Hospital Halts the Procedure (Published 1979)

submitted by divingrightintowork from nytimes.com

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[–]Femaleisnthateful 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I bookmarked that; really interesting. I had to keep reminding myself that it was from 1979. I can only imagine what those psychologists and surgeons would say about the current state of things.

It's interesting to see how far the narrative has changed, from tempering expectations and acknowledging that surgery won't change anything about a patient's internal state, to claiming that surgical interventions are 'life-saving'.

It's also worth noting how the screening criteria for surgeries has been undermined. It seems that there was once a stringent screening process, with an expectation that a person life successfully in the opposite sex role for 1-2 years before surgery. That's now gone.

[–]divingrightintowork[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

yeah shockingly a lot of GCs/RFs are ok with there being medical options available so long as they're done under an ethical research / cost / benefit informed framework, with no collateral... which is what a lot of this seemed to be.

[–]JulienMayfair 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Just from my own experience, I was friends with someone transitioning FTM in graduate school. She later told me that it didn't fix her problems, and a few years later, she committed suicide. I also knew an older MTF who confessed to me that she regretted transitioning, especially the surgery, but felt she was stuck with the outcome. And the latter actually passed pretty well and was not remotely a modern angry TRA.

I fully believe that the current enthusiasm for transition is going to end badly for a lot of young people, but it's hard to tell people that they are going to regret their decisions in 25 years.

[–]divingrightintowork[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A study on detransitioners came out not too long ago, one of the prominent reasons for detransitioning is transitioning only exacerbated their dysphoria...

[–]divingrightintowork[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

So, this is an interesting article....from the 1970s, on research on the efficacy of cross-sex-medicalization. TLDR - it seems like this all was being explored in very good faith, with quality research & records being kept, in the mid-20th century & the conclusion was that there generally wasn't a clear consistent provable benefit to any cross sex medicalization in terms of improving quality of life so the programs generally shuttered or faded out.... Any potential evidence of quality of life improvements for cross sex medicalization only showed benefits if the recipients were heavily gatekept by the medical practitioners / industry, which is more or less orthogonal to what a lot of people here seem to believe (but if I'm wrong, please feel free to let me know). It's just so fascinating that all of this was happening, research was being done, outcomes were being tracked, and no one seems to use any of this for contemporary arguments about the efficacy / lack thereof for CSM (cross sex medicalization). To explain, people who were rejected for SRS then got it anyway generally had poor outcomes. I believe there was some life improvement on some folks who got CSM who did pass through screening. Like, why aren't we doing any tracking or studies like this today? Why aren't people looking through the research from the mid-20th century on this? FWIW a lot of GCs/RFs were actually ok with the classic gatekeeping model for... a lot of reasons, including low levels of collateral.

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's just so fascinating that all of this was happening, research was being done, outcomes were being tracked, and no one seems to use any of this for contemporary arguments about the efficacy / lack thereof for CSM (cross sex medicalization).

Paul McHugh, the physician who as head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins from 1975-2001 took the lead in putting an end to doing "sex reassignment surgeries" there, has been very active and vocal about what he & other clinicians found back then as well as about the trans mania that has arisen in the current century. Many talks he's given are on YT. But the media and the TRAs have smeared him as a transphobe and discredit him coz he's a practicing Roman Catholic and coz he is adamant that surgeries are not the cure for what ails "trans" people.

Look at what the TRAs have done to discredit and ruin the lives of Ken Zucker, J Michael Bailey, Ray Blanchard, James Cantor, Anne Lawrence...

As an aside: The Silence of The Lambs and the other works by Thomas Harris about Hannibal Lecter drew heavily from the work on "transsexualism" done at Hopkins. Lecter is supposed to be a psychiatrist who got his MD at Hopkins during the years Hopkins was a pioneer in doing "sex reassignment surgeries" and did his internship there. Lecter set up his private practice in Baltimore in the early 1970s. The issue of who is a "true transsexual" and "qualifies" for medical "reassignment surgery" plays a pivotal role in the story of the Silence killer Jamie Gumb, the man who is trying to make a "woman suit" out of the flesh of the women he captures, starves, kills and skins.

[–]NeedMoreCoffee 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Amazing and mindboggling