I have the strangest feeling that my body has been stolen from me. When I started my transition, I was not aware of any options besides medical treatment to modify my body. Years later, I still ask myself why no one told me that I could have left my body the way it was; why no one ever explained that sexuality in that body was possible. There was no violence involved, no threats were made.
But I feel that I was robbed of the possibility to experience my body any other way. I don’t believe this is a universal truth for all trans people. It’s simply something that I feel, something that pains me.
I am not oblivious to what many of you must be thinking: how could it be a robbery when trans people themselves choose to undergo operations? To compare the medical treatment of transgenderism to theft is certainly risky because it makes it seem as if trans people have been forced to accept these treatments when in reality we see the exact opposite: people fighting for the right to receive hormones and have surgery. It certainly doesn’t appear like anyone is forcing us to do anything.
This is true, but from my point of view it is also true that the conditions under which we make these decisions have been and continue to be very complex. Without refuting trans people’s agency and autonomy, I think it’s worth mentioning the role these medical professionals have played in this story. Starting in the late Eighties, the health professionals who worked with trans people touted the famous threefold treatment method (psychological or psychiatric evaluation, hormonal treatment, and surgery). They doled out diagnoses explaining to people that they had “an incurable illness, with chronic treatment options”, which consisted of hormonal therapy and surgery. And these treatments were not publicly funded until almost 25 years later. The results: trans people became a succulent market niche. (They tell us that we have the wrong body and then we pay them: it has to be admitted that this is a brilliant business model.)
Among the surgeons in Spain leading the field in so-called “gender reassignment surgery”, a few figures stand out in terms of how they’ve built their practice on the myth of the wrong body. These are professionals with dubious reputations: surgeons who have been working for decades and have treated thousands of trans people, and whose businesses are booming, despite their appalling reputations among the trans community. In my experience as an activist, I’ve heard terrible stories of extremely questionable results sold as infallible cures, claims from patients who wanted to report malpractice but had signed multiple documents that impeded them from later filing complaints, and tales of trans people being called by their original gender pronouns on the operating table.
And, as the icing on the cake, some of these doctors have become the public face of trans advocacy: there’s not a panel discussion, debate, TV news report, or documentary on being transgender that they’re not a part of. There they are in their offices, sitting in front of their computers with screensavers showing pictures of our bodies before and after we lie down on their table, saying that the problem with people who have gender identity disorder is that they were born in the wrong body.
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