Since the internet at large needs reminding of this again: the purpose of "you can be trans without taking hormones" is to give people permission to call themselves trans, and to think of themselves as trans. It's not a grand conspiracy to take your hormones away from you.
and the flip side:
- you can be a boy and take estrogen
- you can be a girl and take testosterone
it's fine
the only problem with these is that if you want to get your hormones thru the usual medical system in current year you'll need to fucking lie about what gender you want to be (unless you get lucky)
Informed consent is a dream: I just told them I wanted to try estrogen to see if it makes me feel better, they asked me to read a piece of paper listing its medical effects, I signed the form, and three days later I had a bottle of pills
genuinely don't think folks in the US and canada realize how lucky they have it that informed consent is a thing there. because... it basically isn't anywhere else in the world. not even in europe. its fucked. took me a year to get approval to start HRT after finally starting to see a "gender therapist" and that was after seven years of continuiously reporting dysphoria and stating my intent to get it (oh and after he said he'd write me the approval letter it took TEN WEEKS for him to actually send me the letter. if any of y'all knew me in august to november last year thats why i was going insane the entire time)
IC is the only ethical standard and it needs to be a thing in more places. i dont want anyone else to go through what i had to deal with
it's also worth remembering that the only reason the medical community ever agreed to treat trans people in the first place is that we had a tradition of doing it without their help
more dangerous? absolutely. necessary as a driver of change? most definitely
there's a concept in negotiation of "best alternative to negotiated offer". in other words: if you don't make this deal, if you walk away, what will you do? how good or bad your options are drastically affect the outcome you can expect
the queer community is in a large-scale negotiation with medical gatekeepers. while we hope that things continue to improve within the system, it's important to not forget that we do in fact have the power to walk away.
