There is a popular video on Youtube that provides a very slanted (anti-trans) summary of the research on gender identity and transition. On different forums, I have seen people have express concern about this specific video when coming out.
As someone who was thinking about having SRS when I was a kid (this was back in the 1950s) I recall reading that anyone accepted for SRS in Sweden in that era had to have made two previous (serious) suicide attempts. I began to wonder how I could fake two suicide attempts to get SRS--what we won't do to get what we need! If they had said only Mercury astronauts could get SRS, I would have headed for Cape Canaveral to get the needed credentials!
Gender programs from the 1950s up into the 1970s preferentially chose to treat individuals with suicide histories--the
credentials, so to speak. I can't cite exactly where, but I believe my source was a pop article in
Science Digest sometime fall 1959-spring 1960. In fact nearly all the programs wanted people who had attempted suicide, including Hopkins. I never considered Hopkins because I saw I would not qualify in as much as I had never thought of harming myself.
So all of us non-suicidal college and grad school folks who had saved up went off to
Trinidad, or New York City where you did not need to be a suicidal patient to get "studied" to get SRS, and right afterwards we all disappeared into the woodwork.
I attach a response to an article in the news, where I,too, rebutt the dim prognoses. This is my comment from Zack Ford's, main article in
Think Progress which I posted elsewhere last week.
Insofar as the oft cited trans data of McHugh, from the Johns Hopkins transgender program, a total of 22 patients had reassignment surgery. This sampling is very small, yet is cited as some revelation and sweeping insights are drawn from this. During this same period several thousand individuals outside Hopkins program surgically transitioned. However, McHugh has hung his academic hat on this very small sample of individuals.
During an interview in the Netflix documentary, Trinidad, Stanely Biber, a former MASH surgeon who developed modern sex change surgery in the United States, said the Hopkins surgeries were crude, to put it kindly. The supposed poor post-operative social adjustment that McHugh’s claims likely reflects primitive surgical techniques, if that.
If this is McHugh’s modus agendi, his insights should across the board be taken with a heavy grain of salt.
Medical science is not a weapon to be twisted into an attack on a group that someone despises for personal reasons
