Crucial
The Independent breathlessly reports:
Transgender men and women are increasingly having crucial hormone treatment withdrawn by NHS doctors, an investigation has found.
Trans patients and staff at NHS gender services have said that cases of people being refused hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or having the medication withdrawn are on the rise.
That’s one way of putting it. Another would be “Some men and women who think they’re the opposite sex are no longer able to get opposite-sex hormones on the NHS.”
In other words the Indy is very much stacking the deck by calling cross-sex hormones “treatment” and “medication”. Delusions about what sex one is are not a good reason to harm patients by fiddling with their hormones.
HRT is a crucial part of the transition process for many trans people and involves the administration of hormones to align a person’s physical characteristics with their gender identity.
There is no “transition process.” That’s not a thing. We can’t become the opposite sex any more than we can become pigeons or bison or orcas.
While HRT is best known for its use in treating symptoms of the menopause, it is a crucial part of the transition process for many trans people.
Yuh huh, and while mastectomy is best known for its use in treating breast cancer, it is a crucial part of the maiming process for many trans people.
Yes, it’s possible to hijack some drastic medical measures to serve non-medical purposes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Of those who had their HRT refused or withdrawn, some were told their GP didn’t feel qualified to provide the care. Other GPs didn’t provide the treatment on the grounds they don’t have the resources to provide it.
Others, in their responses to a survey by Transactual, a trans-led research group, said their GPs had cited lack of policy or personal beliefs as reasons why they had withdrawn or refused their HRT prescriptions.
Ah, their personal beliefs is it. Well what about the personal beliefs that prompt the demand for cross-sex hormones in the first place? That demand is entirely based on a personal and mistaken belief.
Kamilla Kamaruddin, who has been a GP for two decades and is currently a lead clinician at the East of England Gender Service, said that the issue of care being refused or withdrawn from transgender people has become more frequent.
“GPs who refuse to prescribe are still in the minority but we’re seeing more and more GPs who are refusing to prescribe on the basis that they don’t have the expertise … even though they have already done the prescribing for a very long time,” she said. “If a GP didn’t know how to treat a heart condition they’d ask a cardiologist – they’d get advice and guidance … for some GPs this doesn’t seem to apply to treating trans people.”
But the two are not comparable. Heart conditions are physical; wanting to change sex is an idea.
The General Medical Council, the regulator of doctors in the UK, has previously stated to GPs that the provision of HRT prescriptions to transgender adults is not a highly specialist area and does not require specific expertise.
That’s rather damning. Maybe the GMC should have thought a little harder about that.
Not to mention the inability of wrong-sex hormones to change someone to the sex they are not. Don’t blame your travel agent for refusing to sell you tickets to Atlantis, Lemuria, or Lilliput. You can’t get there from anywhere.
It almost goes without saying, but what is this “hormone replacement” of which they speak? If a woman decided she wanted to grow a beard, a course of testosterone would do the trick, but it wouldn’t be replacing anything her body had produced naturally before. It’s another example of the news media slipping in a loaded, biased, propagandistic word.
Second Peter N, though disagree with his penultimate sentence. Women’s bodies do produce testosterone, just as men’s produce estrogen. It’s just in much smaller amounts, so giving them the ‘treatment’ is increasing their levels.
When my doctor retired, I was near menopause. One of the things I insisted on in looking for a new doctor was one who didn’t automatically prescribe estrogen just because you were in menopause. We got away from that, thankfully, and only prescribe it for really symptomatic women now. But if a man wants an excess of estrogen so he can grow the breasts he dreams of? Oh, of course! It’s HRT! No, it isn’t. The best you could say is that it is HIT – hormone increasing therapy (and the therapy is dubious).
Ok but how about Pemberley? I would like to go to Pemberley. I want to go all around the grounds in the pony cart.
Under the Equality Act 2010 it is illegal to discriminate against anyone because of their ‘religion or belief’. When Maya Forstater was refused employment because she believes and has stated publicly that there are only two sexes and that changing sex is impossible she took the employer to a tribunal, won her case on appeal, and established a legal landmark.
It is likely that those GPs who have cited their personal beliefs as grounds for refusing to prescribe cross-sex hormones are relying on the Forstater case.
I wonder if specifically personal belief means in contrast to plain fact. We do believe a lot of plain facts, but the plainer they are the less likely they are to be purely personal. “Men are not women” is not in fact a personal belief but a fact. “Men can be women” is a belief, and a damn silly one.
Absolutely. And a ruling by the UK Supreme Court in April this year has finally established that possession of a gender recognition certificate does not make a man into a woman in law. But for years now we have been told that it does. And since it was not permitted to ask to see a gender recognition certificate, any man could claim to be legally a woman (or vice versa, of course) and there was no way to know that person’s actual status.
On the matter of GPs saying they’re not qualified, I think this piece illustrates the issue well.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/testimony-of-a-gp-who-will-not-affirm
I wouldn’t want to speculate on what the GMC’s rationale its decision about HRT prescriptions might have been; but let’s allow for the sake of the argument that it was buffoonery. Still: there might be an upside to that – or, at least, there might have been a bullet dodged.
Had the GMC said that it was a specialist area, requiring special training, then who would have undertaken such training? Since doctors are not assigned to specialisms by lottery, the answer to that would have to be that the training would only or overwhelmingly be sought by True Believers in the gender cause. And, in turn, that would have given heft to the idea that there is a whole specialism devoted to this thing, therefore this thing must be 100% legit. (Recall a few years ago a minor kerfuffle over chiropractors setting up a professional organisation and publishing professional standards; the concern was then that this gave a fig-leaf to chiropraxis because it made it look like something real.*)
On the other hand, by not saying that it’s a speciality area – by saying that it’s just a normal part of medicine – the door is left open for normal medics to make normal evidece-based decisions about whether HRT is warranted. And while that means that there’d me more doctors with the liberty to prescribe HRT, there’d also be more who’d be inclined not to.
(*Yes, I’m calling it chiropraxis, because “chiropractic” is an adjective. Lord: if there’s one single thing that makes me, as a layman, suspicious of those charlatans, it’s that they do such obvious violence to the rules of grammar. And if they’re mangling grammar, what’re they going to do with my vertibrae?)
@2 I’m sure they can arrange the pony cart….
https://www.chatsworth.org/visit-chatsworth/
You can even stay there (in the lodge, though, not in the house).
Yes but that’s just boring old Chatsworth. Pemberley or the highway, that’s my position.
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