- cross-posted to:
- worldnewsnonus@lemy.lol
- cross-posted to:
- worldnewsnonus@lemy.lol
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A lack of funds for private gender-affirming care combined with the “significant psychological stress of having breasts at an upcoming pool party, pushed him to try the surgery himself,” according to the Journal.
The trans teen prepared for the procedure by watching a how-to video on YouTube, planning ways to control the pain and bleeding, and marking out the incisions to make around his left breast.
Several hours into the home surgery, he began to worry about nerve damage and sought medical attention.
In the hospital, the teen underwent a mental health assessment before surgeons completed the left mastectomy, as well as a “symmetrizing” mastectomy on the right breast.
Doctors noted deep cuts around his entire left breast. He was reportedly released the following day.
According to a post-op report a month later, healthcare providers noted the teen’s improved mood and self-esteem.
Wow, that poor kid. I’m glad it worked out so well for him.
That was a wild ride, good for him it worked out well in the end!
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According to the New Zealand not-for-profit Gender Minorities Aotearoa, the wait time for bottom surgery in the public health system is 10 to 12 years.
Holy shit, that’s a long wait time.
My 13-year-old daughter’s best friend is trans. His parents will not give him any sort of puberty blockers or hormones, but they do let him use a chest binder, which must be quite uncomfortable. They accept that he is trans and do not deadname him, but won’t go any further than that.
He has a lot of psychological issues.
I worry about him a lot.
Sounds a lot like they’re hoping it’s a phase and will “work itself out”.
My oldest is NB, they’re 15. I like to think we’re about as open-minded as it gets, but I still had the thought that it might be something brought about by seeing people they look up to being a certain way and not from internal, intrinsic reasons.
I hope your daughter’s friend ends up ok. If nothing else then knowing there are people out there that think of him might help with feeling isolated and misunderstood.
That’s definitely a possibility. I only met his mom once and only for a second, but they seem supportive enough to spend money on boys clothes for him.
I’m more worried about how he’s treated in school- they deadname him (and his parents have told the school not to), they make him use the girls’ bathroom and locker room, and once a girl was being bigoted, he slapped her for it, and only he got punished.
We took my daughter out of that school and put her in online school because she was bullied so badly it was giving her major psychological issues and she is cis, so I can’t imagine how bad he has it. I do know that at 13, he’s already vaping and smoking weed. And he cuts himself. If I could, I would take him out of that school and drive him to my house every day to do online school with my daughter.
and once a girl was being bigoted, he slapped her for it, and only he got punished.
Oh so they are capable of treating him like a guy.
Of course. Trans people are their true gender when it suits the bigots.
According to an earlier mental health assessment, doctors said the patient didn’t have any previous psychiatric diagnoses and wasn’t suicidal.
Sounds like a failure of the mental health system as much as the medical system. If you were seeing a mental health professional regularly and you had feelings about self harm, I would hope that this would be addressed before it happened.
It’s not exactly a suicidal urge. Growing up trans before it was very commonly discussed I very nearly did this myself but ended up going the route of extreme binding, over exercising and eating disorder to avoid putting on weight that would go to places in the wrong distribution. I was in constant physical discomfort for years.
It’s more an extreme anxiety. You don’t necessarily want to die but management of that anxiety to self soothe means physical pain is less of a problem than the anxiety. A lot of people trivialize that with trans people. They think “oh it is just looks, it is surely not that important.” but how your gender is outwardly read colors every interaction you have with strangers. Not passing means you want to go out and participate in life less. The questions they ask suicidal people won’t nessisarily catch that because you are dealing with someone who is waiting to finally break out of that place to actually live… not wanting to die. The problem with framing surgeries as self harm is not realizing that the alternative is self harm. This guy just got pushed past the breaking point waiting for someone else’s permission to live.
Wanting to cut your boobs off may not come up in discussion of suicide but should come up in conversation if you’re being honest with your therapist.
Aside from that, I’m curious how this is different than somebody who needs other forms of cosmetic surgery to feel confident with their body and the way they are perceived by society?
Let’s say somebody is avoiding sexual relations because of the penis they were born with and tried to circumcise themselves because it’s not covered by insurance as an adult.
Should everybody be provided care to undergo whatever surgery they need to feel comfortable in their body?
Is anorexia not self harm if somebody does it because they can’t afford surgery and it gives them dysmorphia?
It’s a little different with gender. Like consider if I was ugly and I hate the experience of living in my body despite It’s generally considered pretty impolite to comment on that sort of thing. A barista saying “Good day ugly person, how would you like your coffee?” would probably elicit frowns and gasps from onlookers. Like it’s generally possible to go around knowing you’re not great looking because you are no surprise to yourself but it’s possible to exist in a state where you are not always conscious of the perceptions and thoughts of how other people code you because your attention can be allowed to drift. But the constant feedback snaps you back into place.
Gender comes with a whole bunch of assumptions, way people unconsciously react, restrictions on places and events where you are considered an oddity and commentary. How often does a person refer to you in the third person where you can hear? How often are you called “sir” or “ma’am”. Every instance of that happening in society is lke that person being called ugly by the barista above. You are suddenly aware of the way your body is preceieved and all the social baggage in your life that you have to deal with. For the rest of the world being called mister, sir, miss or ma’am doesn’t strike the same cord as “ugly” does in everyone. The people who feel nothing from those gendered words don’t even notice them. But when you are trans you are reminded the same way you are if you stand naked before a mirror.
Because when I was figuring myself out there wasn’t much information about the existence of trans people I didn’t really know surgery was an option I could pursue. There were issues with my body that puberty had already made irreversible and there’s a moment you realize no fairy godmother is going to come out of the woodwork to make things right. So I sobbed long and hard in the shower just in complete dispair that this was it. No one would ever see the real me, I would be invisible trapped my life would never be better. That this was it.
I ended up not transitioning for reasons of love. My partner whom I love more than life has a phenotype preference. Normally I have a lot of tricks to get through my day. I distract myself, I try never to linger in front of mirrors and when I do I try to focus on the clothes I am wearing or my hair or the scraps of my physical appearance I like. I ask my friends to use names, pronouns and social aspects of gender to help me continue on crutches through my social interactions… But whenever I am misgendered in public or on the phone a part of me goes right back to that moment in the shower every single time. It can happen multiple times a day because I don’t pass. People freely remark on my biggest hatred of my physical experience on this earth directly to my face and there is not a damn thing I can do about it but take the hit most days because out there what’s happening is normal. I live in that world because the sacrifice I made ultimately brings me joy regularly…but my relationship isn’t typical. It’s not everyone who finds someone they feel is worth making daily sacrifices to be with and it requires a lot of things to be going right in my life to be okay. But I still have bad days… If I remained stuck in that moment in the shower over and over again with nothing to show for my trouble and no way out that feels like relief I would be tempted to do a lot worse than just slice off a couple of chunks of flesh.
Being fat holds social stigma sure… But how strong could you be in the face of that if people, not just cruel ones, everyone, made oinking noises in your wake everywhere you go?
That all makes sense. I’m curious then, since the gender dysphoria is exacerbated by the way society treats people based on gender, would people no longer require gender affirmation if we abolished gender and we only referred to people as they/them?
Is being transracial different than transgender given that race and gender are social constructs?
During segregation in the United States, would you say that black people would have benefitted from the government providing them racial affirmation surgery if they felt that they were not comfortable in their bodies, were a different skin color and had to face it constantly?
To that point, is gender affirmation surgery a band-aid to the real problem of conformity to society’s gender construct?
I think you would probably see a massive upset in the binary trans community if there was a push to a fully “gender free” world. Consider that a lot of binary trans people don’t like the custom of introducing themselves with their pronouns. They want to allow the cultural signifiers to do the talking for them and some feel like having to constantly say their pronouns is essentially people not reading and validating their physicality. Pronoun introductions are an accommodation specifically for non-binary trans people who don’t have cultural visual signifers that allow that read. Gender presentation is a form of language. Like if you like to dress and culturally act like a woman that doesn’t nessisarily mean you are trans. Femboys might strike some as being trans people but they aren’t. Being trans ultimately comes down to a combo of how you feel about your physical body
Also just because two things are social constructs doesn’t mean they operate on the same rules. Fat is a social construct that we are actively working as a society to deconstruct. It’s basically on a culture by culture basis but because all human populations have differently sized people that’s a universal fight. Race however isn’t like that. It is tied into long histories with complex power dynamics. People around the world do have medical procedures to lighten their skim because of beauty standards caused by occupation by European powers that treated being the lightest beige as a moral issue. We are in the midst of trying to deconstruct that narrative and divorce it from the legacy of supremacy. Maybe in the far future when we’ve put those supremacist narratives to bed and not treated different peoples like the things that they hold as culturally sacred is something we can play dress up in for giggles then we could talk about cross racial stuff… But ultimately respect comes from honoring boundaries.
As for the question about black people in the states. I am not black. I can’t speak for that community with authority but I understand that a lot of the people I personally know would rather widen the constructs that exist around beauty to recognize what they have is also beautiful and wonderful. Like the people you love are beautiful to you. If the faces of the people who raised and loved you are a color that society values less it doesn’t mean you value it less you want other people to see them the way you naturally do.
Your last question is difficult because it’s not the gender construct but the construct of sex… Which I know is really weird but sex is also a construct. The preservation of the idea of what is phenotypically male or female has it’s own history as being constantly proven to not be a binary. “Gender” had the original origins of existing to try and preserve the idea of a sexual binary by applying a sort of sex supremacist narrative. There is a LOT of pressure trans people face to adhere to a cultural idea of sex and a lot of gatekeeping that happen regarding treating someone’s gender as valid only if they look the part… But that’s only half the story. I know trans women who would sell their souls to have periods and get pregnant and breastfeed and experience all the messy aspects of physical femaleness that women routinely complain about. That’s not a cultural desire. Personally I don’t care so much about ever having kids. I am functionally a gay man. Do I wish I could properly be a top and have boners and ejaculate and all that stuff. Yeah sure. It’s really hard to get aroused when you are limited by hardware you don’t like interfacing with but because I care more about other functionalities of day to day of getting by in society. Even if everyone called me by the correct pronouns without fail and didn’t treat me like I was at best a preteen boy and invited me to the cookouts it wouldn’t stop me from falling into a week long depression every time I had to buy a new pair of pants. I can never look good to myself this way. People who know what I need still fuck up from time to time and I can tell their brain codes me based on my physical characteristics. As much as they try to stop it that reflex is baked in and me asking them to help me is introducing a cognitive load that they don’t have with people who have physically transitioned to the point where the switch in the veiwer’s brain actually flips. So the answer to your final question is both yes and no. Some people would be fine with using non-binary coping strategies which would cause some people to be more content without resorting to surgery but ultimately others would not because the root isn’t always strictly cultural.
In a gender free world everybody would have the same pronouns. No need to introduce yourself. If society stopped reminding a trans person that they’re in the body of a specific gender, wouldn’t they then be on the same level of necessity as somebody who wants surgery because they do not like some other aspect of their body? If gender is not a thing, you only have to worry about your own perception of yourself, like how a fat person or a woman who wants a BBL does.
Are you saying that until we abolish racism there could not exist transracial people? The history of power dynamics with race also exists with sex/gender. We would have to then abolish sexism before transgender people could exists.
I don’t think being transracial would be based on beauty. Just like being transgender, being transracial means that you feel that you were born in the wrong body. If being transgender is dependent on beauty standards could we not expand beauty standards and widen the construct of gender to allow transgender people to feel more comfortable in their bodies? Men can feel beautiful and women can feel masculine. A penis can be beautiful and a vagina can be masculine. The question remains though. Should we provide medical care to people who are transracial?
To your last point, it sounds like even if we abolished gender, transgender people would still suffer from dysphoria, which I then wonder how much of the dysphoria is around how you are perceived vs how you feel about your body? It might then in fact be a band-aid to another problem in the same way somebody might get a BBL to make them feel more comfortable during sex.
As much as you seem to want trans racial stuff to be a thing at present it’s a pretty frowned on practice. Most of the trans community look at broaching the discussions about it to be straight up transphobic because there is at present one guy out there named Oli London who currently has used his desire to look like a Korean popstar and other antics more or less as stunts for attention and has become the sort of thing transphobes point to to regularly use to discredit both trans narratives and questions around disrespectful cultural appropriatation as being crazy or to derail and discredit people of color who have been very clear that they are not a costume or an identity group that accepts new members that way. If you want to try cosmetically race swapping that’s basically up to you but at present you’d likely be pretty isolated and potentially make a lot of enemies because you’d be seen as trying to pit trans people against people of color. Beyond what is ethical or not the subject makes me personally uncomfortable not the least because it’s a narrative that often seeks to try and pin trans people into some kind of double standard. We are a group of people who feel the way we do about sex and gender. We have zero insights into people who want to change racial characteristics. If they exist at all and not just for attention seeking troublemaking then what they are doing is a conversation to have with them and whatever racial group they seek to emulate.
Something I also notice is that you keep saying being trans is dependant on beauty standards… Which is misguided. While there are trans people who seek to be beautiful a lot of that os more from a hunger for validation. Cis people desire beauty just as offen. But most of the trans people in my immediate circle are more… How do I say this… Aiming for personal comfort rather than beauty? Like don’t get me wrong I would like just once in my life to dress up for a wedding and not feel like a dysphoric wreck for trying to find clothing that doesn’t bring attention to the issues of being the opposite proportion from what I wish I was…but I don’t feel the need to be a handsome bloke. I just want to wear clothes to a special event that don’t need to be tailored all to fucking hell, clean up a little nicer than usual and not feel like a complete steaming pile of shit… But if my partner was properly bi and someone was like “Okay you will be instantly fully transformed into a man but you will look like you hit every branch on the ugly tree.” yeah. I wouldn’t mind that.
I use being ugly as a parable to cis people because generally from what I have gatherered its not like the vast majority have an intrinsic internal gender preference at all. Most of you have, as far as I can tell, never experienced anything like actual gender euphoria so I can’t use the experience of what gender incongruity feels like directly. Because of that I have to use things as analogs though they are always imperfect. Description of some of the paradoxes of gender dysphoria and euphoria are really difficult to conjure properly because it properly has to do with a sense of recognition…
You know that reaction you have when you see another human and you instantly recognize whether they are of a masculine or feminine body type and if you encounter someone who could be either it inspires that curiosity and attention while you try and figure it out because there’s a chunk of your brain that treats that information as vitally important? Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria works through that mechanism. Your internal sense of yourself is one thing but your external peices register to yourself as not matching so it causes this strict mental disconnect. The result is you feel very empty. Your name never feels like it belongs to you. It’s something you respond to as a function but it feels like it belongs to someone else. Your existence feels like you are performing a part in a play. Your friendships exist behind this barrier where you want desperately to feel connected but they never quite understand you or it feels like they are somehow keeping you at arms length. Nothing feels authentic to you, you might as well not even really be there because it’s all functionality happening to someone else. Then enevitably you play around with gender performance somehow. Doesn’t matter what, a short haircut, you wear a dress, someone says “oh sorry sir!” when they bump into you and you get a sudden flash of existing. For that little moment you suddenly feel real. It’s a thrilling feeling like you have been invisible all your life but suddenly someone saw you! Desire flares up to connect and ne present and exist in your own skin because for a second it feels like you are actually THERE for once. Dysphoria can feel like intense jealousy for the things that make you feel more alive but more often than not it’s this sort of numbness.
Cis people often don’t nessisarily understand it until they actually experience a trans person they know transition and then there’s a moment somewhere along the line where that recognition mechanism kicks in and they actually start experiencing that person as their gender… or they see the difference in how someone who used to struggle and seem sort of listless, anxious and absent suddenly is very vibrantly living in the moment and is sharp and attentive. Unless you’ve properly transgressed that boundary yourself it’s difficult to properly explain the phenomenon.
This is so sad
I mean, it has kind of a happy ending that the ER doctors then went and “finished” the surgery.
Not to mention released the next day, and reportedly in good health and high spirits since. Like, talk about best possible outcome.
The takeaway here seems to be 1. Get started on the surgery yourself, 2. Go to emergency room, 3. Have qualified doctors wrap things up.
^/s
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