The Blessed curse of informed consEnt

I just read a very interesting article called [What I Needed: An Open Letter to Therapists from a Detransitioner](https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/2016/05/21/what-i-needed-an-open-letter-to-therapists-from-a-detransitioner/), and I think it’s a really important concept.

Honestly, even as someone who has vastly benefitted from the ease in which medical transition care is now provided, I feel that it was a little easy. Not that I’d retro-advocate for that when it was me doing the seeking.

It was through more than a year and half of researching nerve functions, opiate receptors, and sensory gating in days the brain fog was clear enough for me to comprehend what I was reading that a vision of what was going on with me suddenly began to congeal. We’ll talk more about these things in later posts, but for now the point of all this is that I did not begin HRT with the set intention to transition. At the time I was still trying to get out of it. I almost flushed the pills that first day instead of taking them.

I’m not saying I had no conscious feelings of being a transsexual before I took the pills. Moreover, the fact that I’d been sitting on my idea for a cure for nearly eight months before I had the courage to actually try it ought to say something.

Anyway, the point here is that if it hadn’t been for how easily accessible HRT was for me to begin, I’d probably still be waiting, and that means I’d still be totally disabled and dependent on others for survival. At that point in my life navigating various counselors was literally impossible. I couldn’t drive and I lived nearly an hour from anything my insurance would take. If it hadn’t been for informed consent, I’d probably still be staring at the wall, losing my will to live in a world I was thoroughly cut out of.

So while I do think things shouldn’t be that easy overall, I also think that they absolutely need to be accessible for people who may have a medical need beyond GD. For that, we need to be able to recognize and test for those things. And we can’t, so sometimes we have to go with intuition and crazy ideas. Sometimes we have to risk everything on a notion. And that’s genuinely dangerous. So we need a way to know.

Until we have that, we have a problem no matter what we do. If we close things off and go back to ultra-gatekeeping, it just causes suffering, more trans suicides, and it causes society to lose many true narratives of trans lives because a lot of us will have to edit those stories to fit the narratives we’re expected to tell in order to recieve treatment.

Conversely, by opening them up completely, we leave room for a lot of damage, and not just to the very confused people who walk this path and later find out it was wrong for them. Every time that happens it muddies the truth of what it is to be trans. As the condition becomes less cleary defined, doesn’t that leave room for it to become something that is largely viewed as a body modification trend?

So we need some kind of classification or testing. There is a lot of controversial material on these classifications, particularly the binary groupings observed by Ray Blanchard. While I feel his observations are both shrewd and correct, I personally feel they are also too narrow and largely ignore several other seemingly obvious classifications and forms of trans people. However, that subject is outside of our scope, and I’ll go into more depth in a dedicated post on Blanchard’s views.

In the meantime, as trans people, I think we need to step out of ourselves for a while and look at the broader picture. I really think we need to be advocating and supporting finding a biological cause for what we experience.