Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 26 September 2022 – gender:hacked
There’s a lot to say about it and I’m still processing. But one of the things that fascinated me about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference was how persuasive the feeling that you’re making progress is. The language is always changing and so you’re Always Learning. The frontiers of identity are always expanding. Everything can always be made more ‘inclusive.’ Techniques can always be refined.
It’s easy to lose sight of what you’re progressing toward: sterilizing more kids, earlier, on thinner and thinner pretexts, regardless of comorbidities, despite mounting evidence of both social contagion as a driver and medical harm as the outcome.
Just a few short years ago, surgeons didn’t know how to deal with underdeveloped penile tissue in “affirmed AMAB individuals with early puberty blockade” but now we know how to ‘quilt’ a fake vagina out of colon and scrotal tissue and other donor sites.
A few years ago, the scales we used to justify experimental medical interventions on teens were so binary but now we have special genderqueer scales that let teens rank how many body parts (out of a possible 33) they want to surgically alter!
Some clinicians once felt very uncomfortable performing ‘gender nullification’ surgeries (cutting everything off) but then they Did The Work and now they’re treating more patients than ever!
Isn’t progress for progress’s sake a beautiful thing?
Because trans is always in motion, even the most dedicated adherents must rush or risk falling perilously behind. They never get a chance to catch their breath and take a long look at what they’re supporting, much less question it.
