The main reason, I have been calling bullshit on the regreters, who think they should have the right to sue the doctors over medical treatment they sought out and either jumped through Health Insurance Program’s hoops to fund or personally paid for, is simple.
I believe TS/TG people are ordinary people first and foremost, average and normal in every way except for being TS/TG and therefore members of a minority, that generally speaking meets Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall of being despised and dispossessed.
One of the main problems with being a member of such a class is that authorities spend a lot of time and effort denying us personal agency.
I post a great deal of material about how the right wing religious fanatics try to deny women access to birth control and abortion. The principle is the same the one at work when TS/TG people are denied the agency to make their own informed decisions regarding their own bodies.
Either way the denial of agency is dehumanizing and infantilizing.
If I had come out in the 1980s or later rather than in 1969 and the early 1970s I would have been driven to revolutionary levels of rage by the imposition of of all the new gate keeping rules that seem meant to enrich the Psychiatric Industrial Complex.
The instituting of the GID diagnosis effectively disenfranchised TS/TG people, denied us the agency to decide on our own what we considered right for us to do with our bodies.
I came out at a point and time when women and gay and lesbian people were clamoring for their rights and freedom, at a time when African American people had destroyed major parts of cities in acts of rebellion against America’s racist oppression of black people.
All I had to do was walk into the office of a public health clinic in San Francisco and state I was a transsexual, that I wanted to take female hormones and get a sex change operation. I went to more psychiatrists as part of an effort by social workers in the Berkeley Welfare Department to obtain public funding for SRS.
Think about that for a moment. In 1969 social workers in Berkeley were waging a campaign to obtain public funding for SRS. Further they weren’t alone social workers in other parts of the country were doing the same thing.
We were being treated as ordinary sane people with an issue that required medical care.
We had agency and weren’t treated as though we were mentally ill children in need of professionals to make our medical decisions for us.
Yes we did have to be on hormones and living full time for at least a year prior to SRS. I tend to consider that an important part of the process of transition, perhaps along with the hormones the most important part, because it tests one’s ability to cope as a member of the sex/gender one is transitioning to live the rest of one’s life as.
Beyond that some psychiatric testing and a psychiatric interview by the surgery provider should be sufficient to insure that a patient is intelligent enough and sane enough to both understand the extensive medical releases one is obliged to sign and realize the full implications of the step one is embarking upon.
While one should still retain the right to sue due to medical malpractice and surgery complications one should not have the right to sue based on the idea that some how the doctor failed to protect the patient from making a mistake regarding his/her desire for this course of treatment.
The one who sought out this course of treatment has the existential responsibility for that decision. Doctors are human beings, not mind readers and there is no fool proof biological marker, no little purple gene waving a sign saying, “I’m the gene that makes people transsexual/transgender.
When I came out being transsexual was self-diagnosed and in most cases to day being TS/TG is still based on self-diagnosis. Much of what the Psychiatric Industrial Complex does is extract a toll ranging between hundreds and thousands of dollars from each person making the transition journey. In the process they dehumanize, pathologize and infantilize.
Demanding the agency to make our own decisions regarding medical treatment requires accepting responsibility for our decisions, including our mistakes. But shouldering that responsibility is the price we pay to be fully human adults with the agency to make our own decisions on these matters that are of vital interest to us.
Women Born Transsexual 