Hi! Sorry for replying late! Yeah I think it strange how some gendercritical people use Blair as an example of 'a good transwoman'. How can you work to abolish gender while saying it's ok for 'true transexuals' to uphold it the way Blair does? And it's not as easy to separate tucutes/truscum as who has dysphoria and who has not.

I listened to Meghan Murphy's interview with Keira Bell, who on all account fit the brief for a 'true transexual' but she still detransitioned. In any of the truscum subreddits, she would have been told the risk for that happening was zero. Was she just a trender then?

Blair and others like him can do what they feel they need to have a good life, I don't hate him or wish for transsexuals not to exist, but I do feel that the' truscum' idea that dysphoria = trans = wrong brain/body = only treatment - surgery, is simplified and damaging. In the short term for those getting caught up in the trend now, and in the long term for people who do benefit from the standard treatment.

About the other surgeries I don't really have a reading recommendation, I did some looking into it like 6 months ago, maybe I should write a post on it after the holidays, but you can look up Eugen Steinach and his rejuvination surgery which was very popular in the 1920's. "This procedure, along with testicular implantation popularized by Serge Voronoff, was an attempt to rejuvenate older and fatigued men around the world. (...) Ultimately the lack of verifiable outcome data and the chemical isolation of the "internal secretion" (testosterone) ended this era in surgery."

Steinach was a friend of Harry Benjamin if you're familiar, and his collegues were the ones performining the grs on Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, 'the Danish girl' in the 1930's. This was also the early days of transplant surgery, which is perhaps why they tried and failed to transplant a uterus into the 49 year old male, two decades before the first successful kidney transplant.

There is also Henry Cotton, who was in charge of the Trenton hospital in New Jersey, who believed mental disorders were caused by bacterial infections and could be cured by removing spleens, ovaries and colons for example, and he operated on many of the commited mental patients. This was in the 1920's, and the concern for the treatment was not the science or ethics, but that so many patients died, perhaps more than 30%.

It is not hard to draw parallells between the 1930's ideas of racial hygiene and treatments of mentally unwell/homosexual people, when the idea of transsexuality as a medical condition emerged and todays attitudes towards puberty blockers, 'what's the harm in potentially mentally stunting/sterilising a would be gay/anxious child? They won't procreate or be useful to society in their natural state anyways.'

But I understand that some people would find it extreme, and don't see the parallells at all. And I'm not saying, look at the history, this means all transgender surgery is bad! Just that there are reasons that this came to be seen as a condition with one specific solution, and there's a reason why this persisted, while treatment for other mental health issues moved away from surgery.