Transgender Surgery: Giving Away Hormones Like It's Going Out of Style

my name is
elle i am a uh female to male to female d transitioner i recently detransitioned um probably like a little like a month and a half ago um and i've been actively living transitioned back de-transitioned into a woman for like two days now my name is jack and i am a female to male to female d transitioner when you go into planned parenthood um at least for me i went in and i signed like a little consent form they didn't really ask me any questions and they took a blood draw and then i scheduled to come back for two weeks later after the lab results had come in and get my prescription that was it um so my opinion first on all of that um i mean it must be nice to just be able to walk in and finally you know just say hey i want to start hormones now and then just kind of kick that off um although i will say that i mean with the whole just giving hormones to whoever walks in the door i mean i don't think is necessarily a good thing imagine how many girls have felt uncomfortable in their female bodies before growing into them and becoming strong confident women who are happy with themselves this is how it used to be before dysphoria was medicalized before women were told they could become men medical professionals attributed my dysphoria to an innate identity the internet encouraged this my parents didn't know how to respond assuming that therapists and doctors would know better than to let a sixteen-year-old make the wrong life-altering decisions i regret my double mastectomy more than i regret going on testosterone like if i had gone on testosterone and never had a double mastectomy i feel like i could almost reverse all the effects because you know my voice will always be deeper and i'll always have the body hair but at least i would have still had my whole body but parts of my body were cut off and when i look at myself in the mirror i feel mutilated and i don't mean that to be um dramatic that's just genuinely how i feel like when i see myself naked it's like when i look at myself from the you know the rib cage down like the belly button down i feel like i look like a woman at least mostly but when i look at the rest of my body you know without my wig on and without my makeup and when i see my chest i i do feel like i look mutilated or like i feel like some kind of bad science experiment you know people ask me like do you regret it yes yes i regret it i think it's the stupidest thing i've ever done in my life i got very active in the trans communities on reddit um on twitter and spent most of my time online that didn't do anything in real life at all really i i didn't have any friends i didn't go to school at that point so the only people i really talked to on a daily basis were the people that i talked to online and that definitely didn't help um that didn't i i just i i was basically consumed by trans media online trans content online so uh about a year later i started testosterone and um i was 16. i had been going to a therapist who tried to tell me that she didn't want me to transition then i went to a therapist from the lgbt center who told me that she was ready to get me on hormones from day one i was able to have a double mastectomy because i had one appointment with a therapist who diagnosed me with gender dysphoria i saw him one time i believe i was 16 years old i could have been 15 but i'm pretty sure i was 16. i don't know we must have talked for only like 45 minutes or something like that and he diagnosed me with severe depression i still have like the diagnosed paper severe depression severe anxiety and gender dysphoria and um that was a piece of paper that allowed me to go on testosterone and that was a piece of paper that allowed me to have a double mastectomy at 19 years old 18 years old i mean like when you go to the doctor and you want to get like a medication for something they don't just give it to you you know like they want to make sure that you're taking the right thing to help your specific needs um so with planned parenthood just kind of willy-nilly you know just almost handing out hormones like candy to anybody who walks in the door you know regardless if you're actually transgender or not or just confused or whatnot um i mean i feel is almost almost disrespectful to people who are actually transgender um i mean like when you look like they're trained medical professionals i mean shouldn't they be asking you more questions and like taking more care to give you what you actually need um i mean that can't be good for tran the transgender community in general anyways i mean because just i mean when you're just handing out hormones to anybody who wants them i mean you're bound to be giving it to somebody who shouldn't be taking hormones like myself or somebody else who detransitioned i mean the more people you just hand it out to i mean that's just going to be more detransitioners down the line somebody quoted my tweet and said to any women out there how did you feel about your body when you were 14 were you comfortable in it why are we encouraging teen girls to believe their bodies are wrong somebody says very uncomfortable in my own skin hated my periods wanted to be a boy because they didn't have to go through that every month very happy to be a woman now hating your period is such a universal female experience that is not talked about women have been feeling like this since the beginning of time i feel like i feel like teenage girls especially like in this generation are being told that they can opt out of this of all of this womanhood of expectations of society looking a certain way you can just opt out by changing the way that you identify there are so many young teen girls right now who are identifying as men because of this so many young women who don't want attention from men who don't want to deal with growing into an adult woman because of everything that you're told that means you can just say no i'm not a woman i'm a guy i had the surgery well actually let me back up i had a consultation um and my mom drove me to the consultation and i probably saw the surgeon for maybe 10 or 15 minutes basically what happened was he walked in my shirt was off it was extremely uncomfortable he touched my breast he looked at my breasts we took photos like one facing to the side one facing to the front and then he was like okay we're good and i didn't see him again i just saw the nurses and anesthesiologists and they rolled me back and put me under and when i woke up my breast was gone um and i remember waking up and being in extreme pain the feelings of dysphoria were never there until i started having sex with a woman and i think that should have been a big red flag for me but i just didn't know i wasn't aware of what the criteria that should be meant for someone to be considered transgender and so when i came out to my mom she was like well are you sure and i was like yeah even though i don't think i was sure i'm remembering in bed being like well am i sure i wasn't um but i was so stubborn such a stubborn person that once i had decided on something like once i decided i am trans i was like well there's no going back and this is what we're doing now but the thing was like i couldn't reach for a plate in the cabinet to feed myself without the pain or like it was really hard for me to take a shower by myself like i really needed someone to help me and for a little while like they were willing to help me but then after some time you know maybe like the first week it kind of seemed like they were really irritated so i had a really really difficult time and i was out of work for six weeks and i could only sleep on my back and i remember not feeling anything i did not feel happy about having a double mastectomy like i don't want to say i felt sad about it but it was more like i didn't feel anything eventually i went back to work but i was still experiencing like a lot of pain and i was having i basically went immediately back to doing all this physical work because my job was basically like to throw stuff around and it would hurt me so much like i would pick up these 50 pound boxes and like throw these bags of potatoes and stuff and i would just be in so much pain like there was a few times where there was like a center island in the middle of the grocery store where i'd be with some of my co-workers it'd be like trimming vegetables or something and i would just be like keeled over on the floor in pain like i'm not a crier but i was like on the verge of tears because i was like hurting so much and my coworker was like are you okay like what can i do like they like didn't know what to do and i was like i'm really sorry like i just had reconstructive surgery like i just need a minute and i would just be literally huddled in a ball on a concrete floor at my job and i mean i think that as a doctor or some like people who are like trained medical professionals i mean you should be asking more questions instead of just having you walk in be like hey i'm transgender i want to take these and then then just like here take your prescription and get out and he's like we got our money and it it makes me angry for myself and it also makes me angry for other people because the people who have reached out to me especially privately and told me about their regrets regarding surgery whether that be a mastectomy or any type of top surgery or hysterectomy or basically like any uh sex reassignment surgery or cross sex hormones like it made me a lot more upset than i thought it would and not in like a sadness type of way but like a very angry type of way like it made me really mad that this has happened to other people and doctors were just like yeah i'll take your money and i'll take out your organs but i mean i mean of course hindsight because i mean back when i wanted to take hormones i mean i thought planned parenthood oh my god this is like a godsend i mean i don't have to go because i didn't want to talk to a therapist um i mean so i don't have to jump through any hubs i don't have to do anything um i just walked in and got it and yes that's on me for not knowing what i wanted to do but i also feel like if it wasn't just as easy as just walking in and signing a form for something that permanently changes your body for essentially the rest of your life and in some aspects um i think like if it wouldn't have been so easy for me to just walk in i don't think i probably would have transitioned because i think the longer i would have thought about it and given it more time to think and con given it more consideration i think i think it may have played a pact or a part and may have influenced me transitioning at all um if it just wasn't so easy just a willy nilly on impulse just go and decide to take hormones there is a currently popular catchphrase in politics and i'm concerned that it's going to become a thought-terminating cliche especially but not only on the left-wing end of the political spectrum the catchphrase i hear again and again is in reference to police reform police misconduct police violence that we should only listen to the voices of african americans in reference to transgender people that we should only listen to and believe the voices of trans men and trans women themselves this is fundamentally incompatible not just with the concept of deliberative democracy it's also fundamentally incompatible with the concept of research itself in cambodia many decades ago there were violent calamitous disastrous events that today some people call the cambodian genocide some people might call it the cambodian holocaust or the cambodian civil war the cambodian famine you could say a little bit more neutrally the cambodian revolution do you think we should only trust and we should only listen to the voices of cambodians about what happened and why and that's an easy question because we're talking about something happened decades ago when i was a small child basically before many of you were born what about the current political situation in cambodia do you think we should only ask cambodians do you think there's some unique value in the perspective of a detached outsider in evaluating what went wrong in cambodia before decades ago and what's going wrong now i would be the first person to admit there are some aspects of cambodian culture in cambodian politics even cambodian economics that only an insider can understand that would be incomprehensible or even invisible to an outsider to a detached observer an analyst from a foreign culture like myself but there are other aspects that are invisible to people within that culture and immediately seem very important to an outsider give give a really quick example you know in the years leading up to the cambodian revolution the level of violence that was normal in that culture was shocking and abhorrent not just to europeans who visited cambodia but like to chinese people and japanese people also like people came from other parts of asia to cambodia they still had the equivalent of gladiatorial games of men fighting to the death for the entertainment of the crowd not exactly the same as in ancient rome but nevertheless with their own weapons with their own tradition there are levels of violence and uh executing and killing people for incredibly minor infractions what was considered normal um acts of cannibalism on the battlefield cutting open your enemy and eating an organ from their body yes on the one hand cambodia was a buddhist culture committed to taravata buddhism a religion of total non-violence a religion in which it's actually it's contrary to the religion even to kill a fly or to kill a mosquito on the other hand this was a shockingly unbelievably violent culture and someone who lived in that culture during those generations they would regard those things as normal oh yeah they go and watch the gladiatorial games right these things when you grow up within a culture that won't really stand out to you in quite that way and in this same way an outsider can look at how the ideas of marxism and communism went from germany to russia from russia to china from china to cambodia there's an analytical perspective of an outsider that really matters and you know what the truth is it doesn't invalidate the perspective of cultural insiders it doesn't invalidate the perspective of cambodians themselves it enriches it right both are necessary but we've just talked about the easy part we've just talked about research the other side of this question is deliberative democracy if you want to bring about police reform reform to the way the police operate in the united states canada australia france england that is not a decision for black people to make a loan that is not a decision only for the victims of police brutality to make alone which are obviously a tiny minority of the black community and also there's a tiny minority of the white chinese first nations american indian there are if you could just gather together if you just gathered together every person who had proven in court that they were the victim of police brutality or police harassment i don't know how many thousands or tens of thousands you get but then you'd have a very small minority and guess what they shouldn't make the decision they shouldn't write the legislation either if you actually believe in research i know it sounds ridiculous to say but this is a real question do you think that research could reveal facts yes or no do you think that a researcher could discover something that a native born cambodian themselves might not know might not appreciate do you think a researcher can discover something that a transgender person might not know or might not see the significance of if you don't if you think research just doesn't exist if you think it's like the tooth fairy that would be a very different view on some level to some extent everyone in this audience believes in research you just might not have thought through the implications because a researcher is not qualified to do that research by being cambodian a researcher is not qualified to do that research because they're black they're not qualified to do the research because they themselves are a victim of police brutality or police misconduct right you're qualified to be a researcher precisely by having the detached outsiders perspective having the integrity the commitment to the truth and so on that being a researcher entails and again i can sympathize but obviously if you are yourself personally the victim of police brutality the police kicked in the door of your house and killed one of your children or killed your husband or wife nobody expects you to have the detached perspective of a researcher right and nobody expects you to write the legislation to come up with a new plan for what is the best decision not just for the police and not just for the victims and not just for black people but for all of us as a society right so there's a certain set of beliefs that include beliefs about research in terms of what deliberative democracy means not just in its process but in its outcomes that we all of us in theory if you really believe in democracy it would be all of us if you believe in aristocracy it would just be some of us who get to have an opinion but all of us get to put our salt our seasoning in the pot and stir it up and try to come up with the best policy for all of us to live together in one of the same society under one in the same set of laws if you really think it's inappropriate for a detached outsider to have a perspective on and to be advocating new laws and new policies on the hormone replacing therapy the drugs given to transgender people riddle me this do you think that only professional athletes should be allowed to vote on whether or not they get to use exogenous testosterone steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs do you think there's a decision to be made there that's not just what would be convenient for the athletes themselves athletes who want to win in their sport they may want to look beautiful not all the maybe athletes some people may be using steroids because they want to be in pornography they want to be models they want to be actors they want to be in the movies right those people they may make one decision what's good for them right but you and i right now if you believe in deliberative democracy if you believe in research there's the possibility that we might know something we might learn something through investigation where we have to make a decision as for what's best for all of us as a society moving forward i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you