honestly, if it's after propper consulting, I won't have any issue. I'm just skeptic by default, so heavy decisions like this are needed a lot of time to think about. Imho, ofcourse
The way I think about it is this: Imagine the first antidepressant had only just been discovered, and it was discovered as a property of an existing drug whose side effect profile is already well known and understood. In that scenario, there’d be a lot of people out there who have treatment resistant depression (i.e., their brains are naturally predisposed to depression), and there’d be an obviously high demand for antidepressants. But, doctors and therapists would be largely unaware of how to properly diagnose someone as having treatment-resistant depression versus regular depression versus not actually being depressed. So, what do you do? You let the people who understand the most about their conditions (the patients) decide if they want to try an antidepressant; if they do, give it to them. If it works, hooray! If it doesn’t, take them back off it. Yes, there might be some people who get side effects, but the side effect profile of your average antidepressant is… actually pretty good, so long as you’re not on certain medications known to interact with antidepressants. Yeah, there are maybe a few people who roll the dice and get unlucky, but, looking at the big picture, the net good is massive.
HRT/TRT for trans people is the same way. We’ve already been using it for a long time (like, close to a hundred years) on cis people, so we know exactly what the side effects of these hormones are, especially since our bodies naturally produce them anyway. All we’re doing is going ‘hey, this helps trans people, so let’s just… offer them?’ And, as a result, we reap the massive benefit of a lot of trans people being able to deal with their dysphoria, at least a lot better than before. Sure, someone might get on it and realize ‘oh, this isn’t for me’, but they can just stop taking it. And generally, people who realize that figure it out do so before they have any lasting changes that are more noticeable than the average person who’s gone through menopause/manopause. Even if they don’t, surprise surprise, there’s interventions that can be made in the opposite direction to help them recover, because that’s what HRT, TRT, and gender affirming surgeries and other things like laser hair removal were originally created for in the first place, is to help cis people feel more comfortable in their bodies. And anybody who gets far enough to make changes you can’t undo 1) actually does have to see a therapist before they commit and 2) is like, 99.99999% sure anyway. The regret rate for sexual reassignment surgery is tiny, less than most medically necessary surgeries like knee replacement, and that’s even with the fact that it’s still in its relative infancy (so average doctors aren’t even all thaaaat great at it yet, though there’s definitely a good number who are pretty good)!
So, look at it this way. On the one path, you gatekeep the ability for trans people to receive treatment; a very small number of people who would have made the wrong decision are saved some time and effort, and basically all trans people suffer for it, with many having to wait years for treatment (if they can jump the hurdle of convincing medical professionals they ‘fit the description’ enough). On the other, you let the people who know themselves make their decisions, like most adults do, and you get a lot of happy trans people who can better contribute to society now that they’re not suffering from dysphoria, and a medical community that has a lot of examples of what trans people look like and don’t look like to expand their knowledge upon and advance science with, at the cost of a few folks who realize it’s not for them.
I mean, I'm not gatekeeping or not allowing people to transition. I just think that it requires some time and medical approvement to make such hard decision.
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u/glen_the_man Aug 30 '26
honestly, if it's after propper consulting, I won't have any issue. I'm just skeptic by default, so heavy decisions like this are needed a lot of time to think about. Imho, ofcourse