Dr. Violet Hargrave MD said:
Lot of people today are passing around this Old Man Yells at Cloud editorial from some the sort of bigot I was talking about in this here blog post.
None of the quotes I'm seeing in it seem to be grounded in reality, but the big one that maybe merits really addressing is him claiming "trans women are women" is "a mantra." No, you out of touch weirdo, it's a basic, easily understood fact. Trans women are women, black women are women, tattooed women are women, etc.
The reason you keep seeing it on signs is because so many totally unhinged bigots, like this guy, have been absolutely flooding every single media outlet they can with bonkers propaganda trying to convince people that "trans woman" is actually just this really weird term used to describe some combination of shapeshifting demons, people who are badly-written-movie-"crazy", and Mrs. Doubtfires, to the point where they need to be pulled aside and talked to like small children about how none of these things they're scared of are actually real, and when people who still live in reality talk about trans women, they are in fact talking about regular normal human women, who are only notable in that we have to deal with weird bigots constantly intentionally confusing us with the completely fictitious monsters they make up to scare people into voting for far right monsters who campaign on promises to install boogieman proof closets in everyone's homes.
While I would hope the average person has enough of an ability to separate fantasy from reality to understand that trans women don't like... stalk other women into alleys to steal their pineal glands and harvest their feminine essence, but the average person DOES seem to have been taken in by all the bonkers Mrs. Doubtfire lies that we have to explain really basic should-be-obvious things like how trans women's breasts are totally natural and grow in the same way as any other woman's and yeah, there's totally trans women who breastfeed their babies and no there's no weird health risk to the baby from that.
Or more importantly, we end up dealing with doctors who have been trained that there are cases where men and women need to be given very different dosages of medications if not different medications entirely, but aren't trained on WHY that's the case, and so on hearing a patient is trans do stuff that might get us killed.
Specifically, for the sake of anyone who happens to read this and it comes up for them- The deal with such medications generally, to my understanding, is that their effects are hugely dependent on the levels of various hormones in the patient's bloodstream, and while it is extremely common for trans people to have various things going on skewing those levels away form what's typical, it is also extremely common for trans people not only to have those skews corrected for, but seriously over-corrected for. So if you don't have time to check someone's medical records and do a quick blood test, and you can't just ask the patient (we do tend to be very aware of these things), assume that guy with the beard mentioning he's trans is very much a man medication wise, and that girl with the boobs saying she's trans probably has like pregnant with twins estrogen levels going on.
