Strazdas said:
ThatOtherGirl said:
Loethlin said:
Well GLAAD is mad, just not in the way you refered to. they, after all, refer to gender reassignment procedure as "life-saving". because apparently people now die if they dont get their genders reassigned.
Many do. Death by suicide due to severe depression brought on by gender dysphoria. It happens alarmingly often.
And besides, there are non literal ways for something to be life saving. It is not unusual to apply the term "life saving" to some procedure or event that, strictly speaking, did not directly prevent death. I would argue that physical therapy is life saving. I would argue that surgery that saves the eyes of an individual is life saving. I would argue that modern prosthetic are life saving. Training to overcome the disadvantages of a disability is life saving. Depression medication is life saving. None of these afflictions are life threatening, but they do cause terrible damage to the individuals life. These treatments save people from a life of hopelessness, misery and pain. They save a persons life in a very real way, if not in a strictly literal sense. I would certainly classify gender dysphoria treatments in this group of figurative life saving treatments.
No. they do not. According to you they kill themselves from the depression, not die from not having an operation. Maybe they should contact mental health professionals to help with their depression so they would not have to end their lives? Either way, this is NOT a result of them not having the operation (if anything, you seem to think its a result of having gender dysphoria instead).
Before I begin this, I'd like to say that I personally have nothing against gender reassignment surgery as long as it helps the individuals. I'm a facts man and those are really all I care about so the discussion below is about the facts and not about how we feel about things. If anyone has legitimate sources answering some of the missing data point I mentioned, that would be greatly appreciated.
It should be noted that the issue of suicide still remains after the procedure. Here's an interesting article from the Guardian regarding a medical review of 100 different international studies on post-op conditions for transsexuals.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth
As far as I know the Guardian is admittedly left leaning so this should be taken seriously by any group. The review notes that many previous studies that show more positive results have a major issue with participants dropping out of the studies and therefore not being included in the results. One study it looked at that had 727 participants who were post-op had 495 people drop out of it. So any data it acquired was actually from just the remaining participants without any respect to the nearly 500 people who may have committed suicide or done anything else. It also noted that other studies also had clear bias against transsexuals within their study parameters. So this seems to be a really balanced review of these studies that seriously reviews legitimate bias and study construction issues.
Anyways, the study finds that 20% of post-ops regret having made the change and recommends significantly more research be done in the area.
This is a 2010 study from The National Center from Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (ergo the merits or bias of this study need not be questioned unless I'm unaware of nefarious goals of this particular organization but their site seems very pro-LGBT).
http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_report_on_health.pdf
At the top of page 16 you'll see the following: "Those who have medically transitioned (45%) and surgically transitioned (43%) have higher rates of attempted suicide than those who have not (34% and 39% respectively)." The percentages here are the rates at which the groups have attempted suicide.
As an aside, I'll also point out that the most commonly cited study regarding transitioned individuals having much higher rates is comparing them to the general population and not to pre-op individuals. That study just establishes that reassignment surgery is not sufficient by itself rather than explicitly stating that it is worse than not having it. This study at least compares apples to apples.
To really know the benefit or harm we need to know the rate of "successful" suicides in the general transgender population (not the overall population). We would also benefit from knowing the rate of suicides in pre-op transgender individuals. Apparently that information is difficult to acquire since death certificates do not state the orientation or gender identity of the individual. All we really know is that post-op transgendered individuals report a higher rate of attempted suicide but we also know that if you are willing to kill yourself then you might be more willing to explore alternatives. So we don't really even know if the attempted suicides happened before or after the procedure and that's an extremely important point to make since they could have attempted suicide, gotten treatment and then never have tried again for all we know. That would be extremely beneficial to ascertain. We do see that transitioned individuals are still 19 times more likely to die from suicide than the general population and that at least is a solid data point to consider. We just need something to know the non-transitioned suicide rate (not attempted suicide rate) and we'll have a legitimate comparison.
What I'm seeing is that we're in desperate need to gather more information. If the long term effect is negligible or worse then we HAVE to learn that sooner rather than later. Also, if the long term effect is positive it would be nice to know that the medical community hasn't been actively harming most of their transitioning patients for decades now without questioning the ramifications of it. The only thing we know for certain now is that it does not sufficiently reduce the issues of dysphoria, not if 19% still succeed at killing themselves. I'm also not sure how much overlap there is between the 19% that kill themselves and the 20% that regret the procedure. A future solution may combine reassignment surgery with some additional procedure. Or there may end up being a different treatment altogether. Just don't know.
P.S. Sex change operation is not treatment of gender dysphoria, its support of it. treatment implies that there is something wrong with that and its being removed. thats not what sex change operation does.
Also i disagree that incorrect use of the term is "not unusual".
Gender dysphoria is having a state of unease with your life due to your gender. The idea of a sex change operation is to make the person more aligned with their desired gender as a means to alleviate the condition of dysphoria with respect to their gender. So it is intended as a treatment.
Keep in mind, when someone calls it a condition or mental health issue from a clinical perspective, they aren't saying that the person wanting to be male or female is the problem. They're saying the dysphoria caused by not already being the physical sex they identify as is the problem. Understand that in order to qualify for a medical procedure there must be a condition.
However, I think the term "gender dysphoria" has gone out of use because of the connotations that there is a problem with the person's gender identity rather than their dysphoria. That doesn't mean that the dysphoria isn't a problem. It certainly is if it requires medical attention or else a lot of doctors are committing some serious malpractice in prescribing a treatment for something that isn't a problem.
