How do you feel about the waiting period for HRT?

[Asfsd4214]

You're still examining yourself through tinted glasses.  Would someone with GID come to a different conclusion in regard to their ailment than a fetishist?  I went to a transgroup and met a girl who didn't want to live as a woman full time; what she thought would be ideal is if there were some pill that would make her 100% female sometimes, (particularly for clubbing and sex,) and then another to make her 100% male.  HRT and GCS would not be a good option for her, and a properly trained therapist would recognise this, and treat accordingly.

Everywhere I have ever been. My experience is that 80% of professionals in any given field actually don't know very much. Probably because the education system sucks and they learn most of what they end up knowing after they get hired.

[lilacwoman]

I know everyone is an individual and as such any medication or treatment should be adapted to that individual but why is there such a wide discrepancy?

that long wait seems nonsensical but you can use it as a legal cudgel by honestly doing RLE and after 2 years requesting a GRC and new Birth Cert and then legally you are in a serious Human Rights issue about one department of the Gov't - GRC  making you legally male but the other dept - NHS or perhaps really just your PCT - refusing you the natural rights of a man.
Lots of UK TS are going this route.

[cynthialee]

Such blind faith in the profesional world borders on pathology.

[rejennyrated]

Personally what I don't like is a one size fits all approach. Medicine is a very individual art which MUST take account of individual differences.

I think doctors and patients need to be free to exercise their judgement.

Some people clearly do benefit from a period of contemplation, others don't. The doctor and patient should be allowed to make their own informed decisions and, yes, in some instances informed consent is definitely the way to go. In my case it would have prevented me taking matters into my own hands over HRT and thereby putting my health at risk

Ironically informed consent was the basis on which I was allowed to cut my RLE from the normal length down to just over 6 months, and over 25 years later, and after a successful postop life, it would be VERY a brave, or even positively suicidally foolish, person indeed who tried to tell me that this decision was a mistake!

We are all different. Don't be mislead, the SOC are actually guidelines and NOT rules! So the day any doctor starts treating them as rules, they have ceased to practice medicine and instead mistakenly begun practicing law!

[glendagladwitch]

I used to be a strong advocate for mandatory psychiatric gatekeeping for HRT and surgery.  I know when I finally caved and started transitioning, I felt like I was going crazy, but I now think that was because I had the same prejudices about transitioners as the rest of society at large.

Meanwhile, I've observed a lot of needless gatekeeping over the years, where others have been held back for years before finally finding a therapist willing to help instead of hinder them.  And I've also seen people turn back during the process.  Not one of them had any kind of surgery, irreversible or otherwise.  I know there have been some very rare cases where people had GRS and regretted it, and some of those even had long term HRT and even other surgery first, like implants and FFS.  But that happened in spite of the SOC, not because the SOC were bypassed.  Do we really know that the incidences of regretted GRS would be greatly more frequent without the psychiatric gatekeeping?

I think it would be interesting to have control groups, where one group does traditional SOC under psychiatric supervision, and the other is not psychiatrically supervised and just has to have HRT and some kind of reversible surgery before having GRS.  I think that there would not be much benefit to the psychiatric supervision requirement, and any such benefit would certainly be outweighed by the harm done to those who were held back and had an antagonistic relationship with their psychiatric supervisor. 

So I think it would be better to let people have HRT with just endo supervision, and the GRS surgeon can treat them if thay have obvious HRT development and some other kind of elective, transition-related  surgery they didn't regret.  The requirment for psychiatric supervision seems like a result of stigma that transitioners are suspect as crazy, and that's the only reason we still have that requirement.  I mean, sure there are a few people who are schizophrenic and will seek to transition because that condition is not treated, but those people are really easy to spot.  We don't need the type of gatekeeping that is currently in place, and I think it does more harm than good.

[GinaDouglas]

Such blind faith in the profesional world borders on pathology.

It's no different than any priesthood, going back to the beginning of time.  The nearsighted lead the blind.