Because there's no standard of care, it's all experimental surgery on mentally ill people. Troons are afraid to speak out because the community is invested in propping up the lie that these are life-saving procedures, anyone saying otherwise is othered and shunned.
Lawsuits and backlash will happen eventually. For now, suggesting these people should be denied surgery—even if the reason is because the surgery is horrific butchery on par with Civil War battlefield practices—is gEnOciDe to them.
Doctors themselves are the ones telling parents "would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?" It's all rather evil and will, eventually, be thought of as we now think of lobotomies. We're not there yet.
This is going to be very autistic on my part, but bear with me.
If anyone has read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, I think the concepts in it have explanatory power here. In the book, Kuhn describes the process of scientific theory crafting not as a linear process of slow learning and iterative steps, as it is often though of, even by scientists, but as an essentially dialectical process where a dominant paradigm directs discourse, research and actions, emphasizing things that support whatever the dominant theory/model is and dismissing or excusing contradictions as faulty or exceptions to the rule. This process repeats itself over and over, because most of the community responsible for further developing research aligns itself dogmatically to the dominant paradigm. The takeaway is that once a paradigm establishes dominance, the practitioners defend their position at the top until the contradictions being presented become too overwhelming to ignore or excuse, there's a general disillusionment, a shake up of institutional power, and a new group takes centre stage with a new synthesis that attempts account for the failure of the older system. This conflict is not purely ideological, as it concerns the real access to material resources that practising the dominant model brings. This is especially true in things like medicine, where these models control recommended treatments and therapy and hence the money and resources that go with them.
This is really, when you think about it, a pattern that occurs a lot all over human society, but seeing it articulated for me really helped clarify things for me. We are currently watching the dominant paradigm of trans medicine, collapsing, itself part of a broader collapse of human behavioural science that has been convulsing the past decade under the revelation that a lot of the studies that helped create it (and displaced the older, lingering psychoanalytic approach) were faulty or straight up fraudulent. It always takes time, and I'm not trying to say be optimistic, but it does seem that the contradictions are building up. Even journalists, who for the most part exist purely as amplifiers for the dominant paradigm, are showing signs that the consensus is breaking down.
I will take my Puzzle Pieces, Moais and Rainbows now.
