Those both sound like pretty terrible ideas TBH. I know of people who had surgery along those lines and had serious complications, including a lady (an adult in this case) who died after getting breast implants.
If you were to give a rough guess of the percentage of women that have had the surgery then died from it, what do you think it would be?
I’m sure the percentage of people who die or otherwise suffer serious complications after cosmetic surgery is very low; nevertheless I think the fact that our society incentivizes people to take such drastic steps to alter their appearance is a bad thing, as is the fact that this pressure is much stronger on women.
That doesn’t have much to do with gender affirming care, though; I was just responding to Kimstu’s comment about whether we should discourage these sorts of surgeries in cis minors, to which I would answer “yes, definitely”.
And I am sure you added something (“otherwise suffer serious complications”) I never asked about just to get that answer up the the very vague “very low”.
7.2 million women have undergone the procedure, and there have been 43 known deaths reported directly related to the procedure. 0.000597222222%
Huh?
Ok, and? Why do you imagine this would change my response?
Who is “we”? Because I’m not part of the “we”. I’m not a doctor and I’m certainly not the personal doctor to patients who eventually undergo these procedures.
Note that when minors get surgery, these are not prepubescent children. That doesn’t happen. These are usually children aged 15-17. Old enough to drive. Legally minors but not little kids. And even then, it’s something like 2 in every 10,000 minors who are transgender. It’s extremely rare because it’s extremely rare for it to happen.
And of that 2 in 10,000 minors, they are trans men getting breast removal. A major surgery with lifelong impact, for certain, but not the kind of surgery that right wing activists are screaming about.
You are talking about a medical situation that’s more rare than being a conjoined twin.
Being male or female is a physical thing as in what a person physically is. I see gender as something else. The designations boy/girl….man/woman are cultural constructs. Constructs that are taught and ingrained as kids grow and develope. I think gender is an inate part of who a person is as opposed to what they are. I think that by the time a kid begins to sense and form their personal identity, they have a feel for whether they are more boyish or girlish as part of who they are. Why that bugs some people so terribly is beyond me.
That might be your personal definition, but it’s neither the officially accepted definition in modern US English, nor is it everyone else’s personal definition.
For example, at Merriam-Webster:
having a gender identity that is the opposite of female
A huge reason why trans people are marginalized and discriminated against is simply because people want things to be simpler than they actually are in reality.
The rest of what you said about gender being a social construct is completely accurate.
Note that cosmetic changes to the appearance of breasts, buttocks, hair follicles, hair length, muscles, etc are all gender-affirming care when a woman or man does it to conform to their own vision of their sexuality.
Huh.
If we define male and female as also about gender identity, what language do we use to distinguish the male sex from the female sex? I’ll note in your definition the biological characteristics come first.
It seems to me that words like cisgender and trans don’t have any meaning if we can’t establish the difference between being born with male parts and being born with female parts (or chromosomes and what have you.) There has to be some way to define the immutable characteristics that come with sex.
What’s the medically accepted way of doing this?
I agree, the language can get very awkward. But I’m not going to call my real life trans friend a “male” because she was assigned male at birth if it makes her uncomfortable or hurts her feelings. It sucks that those terms are mixed up with gender identity too, but they are.
Society.
I don’t see what that has to do with anything? We are talking about societal norms, not medical recommendations for any random individual.
You seem to be implying t
You seem to be implying that I’m talking about gender affirming care for trans minors there. I am not. I was talking about cosmetic surgery in general for (cis) adults. I don’t think it is a good thing that our society encourages that to the extent it does.
I assume that’s meant to be “note”?
Sorry, I did not catch that in context. In general I agree with you, I think that cosmetic surgery does a lot of harm to people and it’s driven solely by societal pressure that pushes people to undergo an unnecessary and potentially dangerous medical procedure.
I think I told this story before, but I had a friend (I’ve lost contact with her over the years) who identified as a man when I met her, but later let people know that she identified as a woman (and changed her name slightly to reflect that). She then was compelled to undergo a procedure to allow her to conform closer to society’s idea of what a woman should look like, and had to do a GoFundMe to pay for it. I supported her (both emotionally and financially by donating), but the sad thing was that she didn’t want to do it, but was sick of being misgendered constantly for not looking how people expected her to. (The procedure was mostly facial hair removal, not anything more extensive than that, but it was still painful and expensive.)
I wish we just didn’t have this social pressure on people to make them go through this just to be accepted. It sucks. Whether we are talking about trans people or cis people.
If anything, I would consider gender affirming care for trans people to be one of the most justifiable forms of “cosmetic” surgery and borderline not cosmetic at all. I find it more similar to reconstructive surgery for a burn victim than to purely cosmetic surgeries.
It sounds like for your friend it was mostly social pressure that made her undertake that surgery, and I would agree, it’s probably a bad thing that our society is set up in a way that encourages those results.
When the surgery is about reducing the patient’s own internal feelings of gender dysphoria, however, it feels less like a societal issue and more like a medical problem that’s being addressed.
Agreed. There’s a difference when it’s about getting others to accept you, and being able to accept yourself.
I do wonder how often those issues get entangled. And maybe you don’t always know yourself which issue is at play. In my husband’s family, plastic surgery is expected, at least among his Aunts. What is the social cost of declining? It’s already a cutthroat environment, an endless beauty competition.
A lot of that stuff is ingrained and internalized from a young age. Seems like a lot to deal with.
I just think when people think of cosmetic surgery they assume shallow and vain, and in many cases it’s more like an attempt at social conformity and belonging.
I would imagine you are very sensitive to this issue. But if you had to refer to it (a very rare occurrence I would suspect), wouldn’t you say “assigned male at birth”, or “biologically male” or something like that? If not, what?
You would have them call her an “assigned male at birth” to her face?
Let’s say she had a medical incident, I had to take her to the hospital, and as they were admitting her they asked me information about her. If it was medically relevant, I’d say she was assigned male at birth. It would have to be a weird situation, but that’s the term I’d use.
But in reality, since she first openly identified as a woman (she is yet another friend who I first met when she previously identified as a man, but in her case she has a gender-neutral name anyway so didn’t have to change it) I have only ever referred to her as a woman either to her face or other people. It’s actually pretty simple, and all of this complicated talk about sex identifiers versus gender identifiers, and social terms versus biological terms, it just never comes up. There isn’t any reason for it to come up. I don’t imagine a situation where it would unless I was her doctor (and I’m not of course).
It’s not really an issue, nor should it be, for just about anyone in most any interaction.
thanks, yes I suppose that would be the best choice
agreed, which is why I noted it would very rarely occur