25 Comments
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Marcus Williamson's avatar

Good article but as far as I know this is just a drop in the ocean. There is a laundry list of major diseases where incidence, presentation and severity are strongly influenced by sex including heart diseases and many kinda of cancer. Good health care requires knowing the sex of the patient.

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Mary Edwards's avatar

Trans people deserve holistic safe care just like everyone else. It is sad and irresponsible that activists in this space try to undermine medical and health professionals from providing optimum care. They are openly driving barriers, distrust and division that may stop trans people attending health care when they need it.

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Laurel Kovacs's avatar

Not to mention that taking cross-sex hormones undermines the health of an objectively healthy body in so many ways. It makes you into a permanent medical patient, no matter how healthy you were to start. And that’s criminal.

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Carson's avatar

Um… everyone everywhere all the time are permanent medical patients. You’re a permanent medical patient. It comes with the whole-having-a-physical-body thing. It has to be taken care of.

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Always Curious's avatar

That’s not true. I met a woman today who’s 82 and takes no medication at all. Avoids doctors like the plague. Sensible.

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Lola Coco Petrovski's avatar

Carson Carson Carson...you poor misguided thing ... you really aren't entitled to your own facts despite the enormous feelings of entitlement you experience 24/7

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Carson's avatar

Entitlement to what exactly?

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Lola Coco Petrovski's avatar

The TQ+ perceived entitlement to the rights that Women and LGB actually fought for and entitlement to their spaces, their history and their glory. Entitlement to free, ongoing medical care for imagined illness. Entitlement to enforce their new meanings to words and language. Entitlement to rage over non-existent problems. Entitlement to special treatment by society for doing nothing but being narcissistic. Entitlement to expecting laws to change and court cases won that benefits them but harms everyone else. The Entitlement T, Q , and any other letter to shame and abuse all that disagree. Entitlement to jobs they're not qualified for and have no talent for purely because they're "queer". Gross Entitlement to feel superior and more virtuous by doing nothing more than changing dress, name and hair colour. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Please make no mistake.... I feel the utmost compassion for young people caught up in this most destructive movement, and believe anyone should live how they choose - as long as their actions don't harm others or endanger others rights. But when people go about spouting garbage, I will respond with passion. You are talking garbage.

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Scherer's avatar

True, but some individuals actively sabotage their bodies by the choices they make and thus require intensive, long term care which they would not have needed

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Carson's avatar

It’s 1 appointment a year for a significant improvement in quality of daily life. It’s no more intensive than any other aspect of health.

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BiologyinMedicine's avatar

We are surprised to hear that your yearly review is no more intensive than any other area of health that you have experienced and that you only have your FBC taken. Depending on what hormone you are taking other bloods tests are recommended in shared care agreements we have read. BMI and BP should be checked. and if a smoker you should be advised to stop. You should also be screened for any adverse effects of the medication because it is unlicensed and lacks robust evidence.

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Carson's avatar

That is all covered with your PCP. Honestly, so is most of the lab works.

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Always Curious's avatar

It worries me that someone on cross sex hormones only gets checked once a year! There are so many consequences or these hormones I’d expect a LOT more check ups.

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Carson's avatar

Do 14-year-olds going through puberty go more than once a year for a checkup? No. It is functionally the same mechanism of action. If you’re on testosterone, it’s really only hematocrit that matters and that doesn’t need to be checked often.

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Carson's avatar

There’s really not that many consequences”

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Jim Ryser's avatar

“Hurt feelings” have undermined so many things I cannot fathom. I remember a doc getting scolded for using the term “obese” for a, frankly, obese person. Tables need to turn. I have never been so embarrassed to have been a therapist.

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Fading Light's avatar

An artificial problem, a created problem, an inauthentic problem.

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Kristy Hopkins's avatar

They are all menopausal women now. The irony.

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Heather's avatar

You still have not explained how your management of the broken arm is any different. That's what you are being asked to do. Not manage their overall bone health. A trans individual can go back to their health professional of choice and say, I broke my arm, any repercussions we should check out? Absolutely not the business of some random in an ED dept who has not been chosen to be their dr, absolutely irrelevant to management of broken arm, and infantilising of trans individuals as incapable of going and getting background care if they want it. Trans individuals on hormones are in medical care, so they'll be seeing a dr in the foreseeable future, and you'll be sending the primary care physician a discharge summary from your management of the broken arm (you should), so if they want to follow up with comprehensive care, plenty of opportunity for that to happen. You're not the only Dr in that patients life! And the sky isn't going to fall in between now and when they see their primary. Your paternalism is insulting. And I'm a terf!

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Always Curious's avatar

I think management IS different. Even if simply promoting to return to gender identity clinic for consideration of how to treat osteoporosis in this group. Tbh I haven’t a clue what would be right, bcz usual treatment might not be right.

It might suggest a different referral pathway, and this is important.

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Peter Brown's avatar

Mmm…let’s see now. The vast majority of medical trials, assumptions, predilections etc are based upon the human male… this is not the past….this is still now. Wake up to your selves…we still know so little about humans in general that belittling other humans about how they feel about about themselves is just cruel. Why not just start a conversation with someone who is in this space and try to understand… not oppress and assume you know best.

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Always Curious's avatar

Do you know better? Your argument simply proves the article’s point that knowledge of sex and medication are important. Trans status not so much, but medical history is necessary.

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Lola Coco Petrovski's avatar

....what?

Are you responding to the right article?

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Peter Brown's avatar

If we were all logical reasonable persons that would be true. However, whatever our training and experience we come with a lot of emotional bias. Some people may be reluctant to reveal all of themselves out of fear from previous experiences. As a general example many female patients felt ignored and demeaned by the attitudes of male doctors to female health issues over many decades. I am sure those individuals in some of the smallest and most marginal groups in our society, most of them young, would feel less than confident confronting the machine of modern medicine and its representatives.

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