'Arm the Dolls'

[WrongKindOfFeminist]

Pictured is Natacha Kennedy of Goldsmiths.

T shirt says 'Arm the Dolls'

@Seethlaw I know, some thoughts are very common, like being unhappy with your body, feeling like it’s unfair you don’t look like XYZ person. Although most people don’t talk about it, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t wave a magic wand and alter themselves in some way that has bothered them all their lives. Luckily for most people its just cosmetic and not a huntingdons diagnosis or a BRCA gene.

That's the bit that frustrates me, yes. I'm glad I got treatment that made my symptoms better, but I also want studies to figure out what's going on, and whether that's the right treatment for everybody, or even the best treatment for anybody!

Like, take another one of my conditions, hypothyroidism. Doctors didn't stop at, "When people get really tired and have this and that symptoms, giving them thyroid hormones helps:" They actually explored the problem, figured out what happens to the thyroid, how much hormones to give, and so on. Sure, in the end, we're still at the point where we can't yet cure the thyroid, so all we can do for now is relieve the symptoms, but at least we know what is happening, and how to make sure this is the right treatment by looking directly at the thyroid and the levels of thyroid hormones in the blood.

The fact that TRAs are not pushing for the same thing to happen to the trans condition only highlights the faults in their reasoning.

Oh come on, think about it.

We are the ones who don't think gender identity overrides sex.

So when we talk about "women" or "female", of course we include "trans men", and non binary female people, and every other woman who for whatever reason does not see herself as a woman. Because we don't make any distinction between the two groups.

Read other threads. There are pages of discussion and concerns about the different pressures on women and men that both lead to and result from transition, both medical and social.

What you don't understand is that Feminists don't attach Feminism to the word "woman" regardless of the person claiming it, we care about female peope and the personal and structural abuses, exploitations, risks, injustices and challenges we face because we are female regardless of the names we may be identifying under.

Seethlaw, it took them over a year to diagnose my having a thyroid condition at all, because I'd recently had a heart attack. So they assumed my condition was caused by heart failure and treated me for heart failure, which of course did no good at all. It took a cardio nurse rather than a doctor to ask whether I had had a thyroid test, and then when I said I had asked for one when I was taken into hospital as an emergency and they'd said they would do one, to discover no result was in my notes and send me for another.

Then it took them a further eighteen months to accept my constant statements that T4 wasn't really much use to me, and a private (and expensive!) practitioner to point them at Hashimoto's and T3....

If you know hypothyroidism you'll know what hard work this was for me, when my brain was really not functioning at all well because of my thyroid having packed up.

The cause is gender dysphoria and that is treated with hormones and surgery

Yes, you said that. It's a lousy treatment because it DOES NOT CURE THE CONDITION, it treats the symptoms and hopes the individual will go away and stop taking up the doctor's time.

And that is assuming that the cause is in fact gender dysphoria and not herd mentality or fear of adolescence or trendiness or whatever other thing. These possibilities seem not to be particularly researched at all.

You'd think 'So what is presenting in a feminine way?' was a really difficult question, given how it has been studiously ignored for three days.

I'm done. You're not behaving like an honest actor, you're not arguing in good faith, you've accused me of being stupid, you have not done one damned thing to convince me that I should help you in any way.

You've just managed to harden my opposition to men, however they identify, coming into women's spaces.

Congrats. 🎊 🎊

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria-and-incongruence/

'Gender dysphoria is when you feel distressed or uncomfortable for a long time because the gender you feel you are (your gender identity) is different to your sex registered at birth.
The feeling of your gender identity being different to your sex registered at birth is known as gender incongruence.'

Bloody hell, NHS.

This all just makes less and less sense as we go on.

'Gender' is arbitrary, how can it be 'different' to sex when it's not correlated exactly with sex?

'I don't feel like the kind of person who has long hair, therefore I must make medicalised bodily changes' is effectively the reasoning they are describing here.

'You may want to live and be treated as a different gender, or feel your body or parts of your body do not match who you feel you are.'

'be treated as' is doing a lot of hard work in there.

You may want to be treated as all sorts of things that you are not. How does a body match 'who you feel you are'? What does it even mean to 'feel who you are'? You are who you are, however that feels!

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

I'm horrified 😱- but unfortunately not surprised. I don't know what's with the thyroid that suddenly makes doctors stupid, but it's terrifying the number of people who've shared horror stories on that topic... starting with myself. Would you believe that when I finally reached a level of thyroxine that worked, my endocrinologist (at the time) said, "Good, then you don't need it any more" ? That's the level of sheer medical idiocy I had to deal with. I don't get it.

Kudos to you for fighting it all while hypothyroid! I know indeed how hard it is...

It cured mine

Gendery feelings of wonanhood in men prove some women are man shape

Juat like albino crows prove some swans are crow shape

🙄

When my present OH was studying medicine at Barts, he tells me that they spent almost three weeks on The Heart, and one lecture on a Thursday morning on The Thyroid. This (and the NICE guidance not having changed between 196-something and this century) may have contributed to a general level of ignorance. (I don't think it is stupidity: that's incurable. But simply not knowing is entirely possible.)

My brother, NHS admin for many years, has said that it was universally acknowledged in the medical profession when he knew it last century that the thyroid was a poor relation and people who wanted to get ahead in medicine didn't specialise in it because they would never get any grants to research into it. (Which might explain about the NICE guidance, mightn't it; vicious circle.)

So you are now happy with the fact that you are male. I am so glad for you! But what on earth are you doing here throwing all the straw men in the air?

How does a body match 'who you feel you are'? What does it even mean to 'feel who you are'?

That's the kind of things I want studies about. I know what I mean when I say stuff like that, but is it the same thing another trans person means? If yes, is there a common neurological and psychological cause? If not, does that mean there are different kinds of trans? And so on.

And that song that Jordan Gray performed on telly where he played the piano with his penis was expressing this same mockery that he was better than any women, especially since his artificial breasts would never sag!

No, it cured the distress I felt about my body which is what gender dysphoria is.

What the fuck are you talking about by straw men?

Oh yes.

Good to have a reminder.

But it didn't make you a woman.

So what? It made me comfortable and not distressed with my body. I don’t care that I didn’t change sex

Which would be fine, if that's all that it meant for women and our sex based rights, our livelihoods, our safety, our access to single sex spaces, our right to ask for a female for intimate care and so on.

But it's not. Far from it. Do you see that?

Yeah, I am trying to dig a little into the actual criteria etc, and for one thing I can't find a service specification for the NHS beyond 2019 (albeit updated in 2022) and furthermore, it's all so infuriatingly vague.

I can't help but feel that the 'diagnosis' basically comes down to 'the patient says they want this treatment, which proves they have this condition'.

Of course not; what a man wants is the only thing that is of any importance whatsoever, so why would he see anything that contradicts it?

Well, I'm not in the UK, but I guess the situation is pretty much the same everywhere, since there's no physical symptom or criterion to determine that someone has gender dysphoria. So basically it's a matter of the person declaring in one way or another that they have it. "I feel like I should be the other sex/I should have been born the other sex." "I want (insert physical attribute of the opposite sex)" or "I hate my (insert body's sex attribute)." And so on. So yes, sometimes, it can be wanting the treatment that determines you have the condition.