Comment on NHS charter to stress biological sex when placing patients in wards
rah@feddit.uk 7 months agomake trans people more likely to receive incompetent care or no care at all
I don’t follow; why does placing transgender people in wards according to their sex mean they will receive incompetent care or no care at all?
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
If a trans woman thinks there’s even the possibility that she’s going to be stuck in a ward with men then odds are she’s not going to go unless she feels like she’s about to die. This means preventable stuff spirals, which is one part of why trans people are more likely to die of preventable illnesses.
In addition for someone who is on hormones, if you treat them as their birth sex medically then you’re going to be missing signs of illness or interpreting normal things as a sign of illness. Ex: it’s extremely common for trans men on testosterone to have “high” hematocrit levels, which can be a symptom of all kinds of problems and a risk for other problems… if you compare it to the typical range for cis women. If you compare it to the levels of cis men, for most people it’s completely normal. Focusing on non-problems like that instead of what brought someone in is going to result in a lower quality of care and make someone less likely to seek care in the future.
wewbull@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Your not going to stop taking a medical history of someone just because they are on ward A or B. Your second paragraph is nonsense. Every patient has to be treated individually and many people are on unique combinations of medications.
ondoyant@beehaw.org 7 months ago
its not nonsense, its a well documented part of trans discrimination. trans people are commonly treated as if they are cis, and many doctors just don’t have the kind of awareness of HRT’s effects that you seem to think is commonplace. like, more than half of trans people have experienced medical discrimination. trans people are routinely confronted with medical professionals that refuse to acknowledge their medical histories. trans people have quantifiably worse physical health outcomes even when they do get care. i have not met a single trans person who hasn’t experienced at least some kind of barrier to care. doctors refusing to perform mammograms, doctors who haven’t even heard of HRT, doctors turning trans people away at emergency rooms. there is tons of data out there about this problem that you’re refusing to believe even exists.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Competently treating trans patients is more than knowing what medications someone is on. I know trans people that have had doctors strongly push medical detransition for having minor temporary health problems completely unrelated to their HRT. Immediately hitting the ‘medically detransition’ button every time one value goes out of range on one blood test isn’t competent care. Google ‘trans broken arm syndrome’. This stuff all has an effect on whether or not trans people seek care and how competent the care they receive is. If you set up in the minds of medical professionals that trans people are ‘actually’ their birth sex then you’re setting trans people up for receiving bad care, period.