- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
I think the interesting thing with medical transitioning is that its basically a hybrid monster of 2 different types of harmful interventions. Throughout history you have plenty of cases of treatments or procedures that people did for aesthetic reasons, even if they knew it was bad (People knew lead based face makeup causes sickness and hair damage, but the pale look was too popular, for example, and even today a lot of more shady skin lightening products contain mercury). And there's plenty of medical interventions that were thought helpful but turned out to be harmful (Lobotomies. Obviously the why of them being helpful was ideologically loaded, but the point is at the time people thought it was a good solution to a problem).
With SRS, the harm is known, but the justification is that it helps anyway. This produces the schizophrenic arguments you see in this thread, where everything is fine and great until everything is horrible because the doctors fucked up again. Everybody who actually does the procedure knows it is an extremely invasive intervention that is cosmetic in nature, but justify it with the nebulous goods of "authentic self" and "mental health". It's why the argument always ends with the idea that they'll kill themselves without it. No other outcome could possibly justify what is being done in the name of health, the only reason to do it is with the rationale of a battlefield amputation, ie. death as an alternative.
It makes the whole construct harder to argue against. You can't just prove the harm, they know and don't care. You can't argue about how we shouldn't let people do damage to themselves, that's denying them their mental health.
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