The Medical University of South Carolina initially said it wouldn’t be affected by a law banning use of state funds for treatment “furthering the gender transition” of children under 16. Months later, it cut off that care to all trans minors.
One Saturday morning in September 2022, Terrence Steyer, the dean of the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, placed an urgent call to a student. Just a year prior, the medical student, Thomas Agostini, had won first place at a university-sponsored event for his graduate research on transgender pediatric patients. He also had been featured in a video on MUSC’s website highlighting resources that support the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, Agostini and his once-lauded study had set off a political firestorm. Conservative activists seized on one line in particular in the study’s summary — a parenthetical noting the youngest transgender patient to visit MUSC’s pediatric endocrinology clinic was 4 years old — and inaccurately claimed that children that young were prescribed hormones as part of a gender transition. Elon Musk amplified the false claim, tweeting, “Is it really true that four-year-olds are receiving hormone treatment?” That led federal and state lawmakers to frantically ask top MUSC leaders whether the public hospital was in fact helping young children medically transition. The hospital was not; its pediatric transgender patients did not receive hormone therapy before puberty, nor does it offer surgical options to minors.
You’re not a doctor. There have been studies and there will be more.
What about the ethical consideration of teens suffering and killing themselves because of gender dysphoria? Does that not matter?
This isn’t some “nice to have” this is important medical treatment to save lives, improve quality of life, improve outcomes.
Politicians have no fucking business denying healthcare to trans people.
The “they will die if they don’t get gender affirming care” narrative is so harmful. Women who should qualify for gender affirming care (eg, hair removal from PCOS-induced hirsutism) aren’t considered the same way. Do their feelings matter less? Are they really commiting suicide in large numbers because they do not have this treatment (perhaps it’s unaffordable because health insurance doesn’t cover it)?
Do you know a lot of girls with PCOS who are being bullied to the point of violence? Because that’s exactly what happened to the trans girl I grew up with 30 years ago. Long before she ever said she was a girl or presented as a girl in public. When she just “looked like” an effeminate little boy, another child wrapped her scarf around her neck and around a piece of playground equipment and started pulling her off the ground by her throat.
You know why? Because she was wearing a glittery purple scarf. And you know what the school administration did about it? Not one fucking thing. Her mother and my mother had to go on a crusade to even get the incident acknowledged.
Yeah, I wonder why trans kids have such high suicide rates. It’s not magic, you ignorant FART. You’re part of the problem driving these kids to experience high suicide rates.
(Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobe, for anyone who isn’t familiar with this much more appropriate acronym for a TERF.)
bro that’s fucking horrible and nobody should have to go through that but making people go through irreversible chemical, hormonal, and physical “treatments” instead of even trying to help their mental anguish is even worse. That’s literally saying that cutting body parts off and gaslighting yourself into being okay with it is a reasonable fix toward feeling uncomfortable in your body, they should have the root issue addressed rather than having the entire medical field shit on them by making them think mutilating themselves is the right and empowering choice. they’ve fooled everyone including you, and it’s all for money, because these “treatments” rake in ridiculous amounts of money and would bring in more money than just fixing their real issues so they can live a happy life phisically and chemically intact.
I knew this child from BIRTH. She’s the same age as my younger sister and they were very good friends growing up. From the instant this kid could express preferences - I’m talking 18 months-2 years old - we knew something was up because here’s this little boy who wants to wear dresses, play with dolls, and sneaks into mom’s high heels and makeup at home.
We just assumed she was a gay boy because none of us had ever even heard of a transgender person 30-35 years ago. Believe me, everyone discouraged this. The constant battle finally met a stalemate agreement to just keep it at home. Even then, this kid was irrepressible, hence the glittery purple scarf at school.
When she told us in high school that she was really a girl, it was the most face-palmingly obvious thing, like of course that’s what we’ve been seeing your entire life. That makes so much sense.
SHE initiated that conversation. No one EVER pushed her to do anything. She was a very active participant in her own medical decisions, which is medically appropriate for a teenager. (I’m a nurse. Teenagers should participate in their own medical decisions.)
She started puberty blockers, started living openly as a girl in RURAL OHIO 30 YEARS AGO and it was not a big fucking deal until you assholes suddenly decided it was a few years ago. She didn’t receive any permanent medical treatment for transition until she was 18.
Believe me, son, she’s PERFECTLY INTACT, happier than you, and you can fuck the fuck right off with that horse shit terminology.
what part of any of those things is female? you don’t have to be female to enjoy “stereotypically” female things. that’s pretty sexist and shortsighted of you, so I’m not surprised why, when surrounded with assumptions like that, they would feel the need to justify those preferences with being “female”. maybe if you and the rest of their family were more open minded and accepted them for who they are, they wouldn’t feel they had to transition in the first place.
Oh fuck off. You know damn well that 90% of society would raise an eyebrow at a 3 year old boy trudging around in high heels and getting into mom’s lipstick.
NO ONE TOLD HER SHE WAS TRANS. SHE SAID THAT.
What part of this was self-determined is hard for you to understand? Transition was 100% initiated and driven BY HER. It’s what she wanted because it’s what she understood herself to be inside her own mind.
Umm… You have fallen for some massive misinformation friend. The first stages of a transition are a trial period where one figures out what their individual needs are. Medical providers are actually pretty cagey about regret so if you are a trans youth this involves a therapist and a social worker who talks woith thw kids and their guardians.
As an adult this means basically doing dry runs of everything. Name change, social transition, binding, packing and talking to other trans people to see what worked for them. Inside the community itself there’s a lot of people don’t medically transition ever. For a solid chunk the social aspects alone give them the tools they need to get by okay…which is why if someone is pointing to someone and screaming about how their pronouns are going to destroy society it’s really not great! Adding pressure by removing all the mental tools they need to get through their day in the body they have and telling them they are fake and just wanting attention doesn’t achieve the aim of dissuading people from desiring medical transition. Quite the opposite.
Look a little bit further into non-binary identies and you will find a lot of trans people who have embraced halfway transition. Sometimes it’s just a single sex characteristic you can’t get over, sometimes your sense of identity isn’t stable over the long term so a medical transition doesn’t work for you. The point being is there’s a lot of different trans people out there who have all approached being trans very differently. What works for one doesn’t work for all so you share your experiences to find differences and similarity, experiment, really drill down into how you react to everything and I mean EVERYTHING… You lay out your values, fears, life goals, relationships, body image issues, spirituality - all of it and you itemize it. You figure out what you really want out of life, what you stand to lose and what you hope to gain by either staying as you are or pursing something else.
Trying to figure out your gender identity happens as a period of self experimentation over the course of years before you go to a doc about a physical transformation and pushing someone towards a medical transition as the only option is a subsect of “trans medicalism” which inside the community itself is generally policed as an asshole thing to levy at someone.
So when you come out the gate with “The first thing they do is chop off their bits!”… No. That is not how any of this works.
I understand your point of view, it’s good that there’s a lot of care taken to make sure the mental impact of transitioning is minimal, but the point is this is a huge amount of work to help someone try and cope with “being” something that doesn’t align with what what they were born and biologically formed as. It’s a noble sentiment, but we should be approaching the whole issue in a way that helps people realize that they don’t have to change to be themselves.
That is literally the first thing the majority of transgender people try. Usually for years if not decades, before they finally accept who they are and transition.
No they don’t.
Most HRT is less than $50 a month. And trans people make up 1% of the population. Surgery is expensive, but even fewer trans people get those, they tend to be one-offs, and are only performed by a few specialists.
In comparison, therapy costs $100 a week.
You think medical and research organisations in countries all around the world are all risking their reputations to obscure the truth on a highly scrutinised treatment, in order to… Make less money than if they suggested therapy? To take less than fifty bucks a month from one percent of the population?
just because it’s less expensive doesn’t mean it’s right either, just hacking off your body parts to feel “right” in your own body is even cheaper but that doesn’t make it tight, because you shouldn’t have to feel that way in the first place.
No no, don’t move the goalposts.
You made a claim of conspiracy, that people are being lead to transition because the treatments “rake in ridiculous amounts of money and would bring in more money than just fixing their real issues”.
That claim is complete nonsense, and you pulled it out of your arse.
Acknowledge that.
Nobody is forcing trans people to go through medical transition. But medical transition is what helps them relieve their mental anguish.
Being transgender is not a mental illness.
if destroying the physical and chemical makeup of one’s body is necessary to make them feel “right” in it, then it’s definitely not a non-issue either, the fact that someone feels that way in the first place goes against their genetic and chemical makeup, as well as their physical formations resulting from that makeup, which gives you the undeniable truth of what you “actually” are, rather than any thoughts or emotions one might have.