You know you're in a Swedish trans group when you get hit with “actually ‘genuine transsexual’ is a Harry Benjamin concept and completely unproblematic” and then other trans people show up to support them for saying so.
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You know you're in a Swedish trans group when you get hit with “actually ‘genuine transsexual’ is a Harry Benjamin concept and completely unproblematic” and then other trans people show up to support them for saying so.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Jasmine running last edited by
@jasmine Makes perfect sense. He's a dead old white man, so of course the Patriarchicans would fanling him.
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@jasmine What's the Harry Benjamin concept? A quick Google didn't give any clear results. But a cis man writing about such a subject in the 1960s seems like there's an enormous risk of it being very outdated at this point, even if it might have been seen as progressive and good back then (which I don't know if it was, but seemingly so from a quick glance).
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Mac Berg last edited by [email protected]
@macberg Harry Benjamin was an early practitioner of trans medicine. Started out as a progressive doctor advocating for advances in trans rights, but didn't retire while he was a hero, so as trans rights advanced past him, by the time that he exited the stage six feet under, he held fast to some pretty bizarre ideas that are outright obsolete by modern medical standards, and that, sometimes in slightly mutated or reimagined forms, have become common anti-trans talking points.
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@riley Thank you! That makes a lot of sense. I have to go read up on that, to learn to recognize that kind of stupidity when I see it.
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@macberg In this context, the relevant concept is probably Benjamin's imagination of gender being a single-dimensional 'scale', and gate-keeping patients on the basis of how well their behaviour seemed to match his ideas of gendered stereotypes.
For context, when he started, gonadal hormones were available but fickle, and a bit of a black art; antiandrogens hadn't been developed yet (I don't really know if he knew that progestogens had some antiandrogenic effect; if I had to guess, I'd lean towards 'he learnt it years and years after he had started'), so transfem people's HRT relied on extreme doses of estrogens, which could lead to nasty side effects, and the mainstream view of transgender medicine focused on genital surgeries, which were a scarce resource. So, in defence of his blatantly and obviously stupid ideas about gate-keeping, there is actually a well-established practice in experimental medicine, the branch sometimes called 'heroic' medicine, that when introducing a high-risk experimental procedure, it's a good idea to carefully select patients for whom the ratio of uncertain reward to high risk is the most favourable. And when Dr Benjamin started, bottom surgeries were, indeed, a highly experimental and rapidly developing field, with a lot of poorly understood things that could go wrong. This doesn't justify his particular method of estimating the 'likelihood of good outcome', which was a pretty sexist one, of course, only the selectiveness itself.
But, of course, the catch is, as the fundamentals of transgender medicine became better understood over decades and the helpfulness of cheap HRT became pretty clear, he shifted his justification for gate-keeping to a concept that, looked at some angles, can be described as "it's important to prevent fake trans people from accessing trans medicine". It is hard to say whether he himself just enjoyed the raw power of controlling, and arbitrarily denying, people's transition as such — probably not in the beginning, but I wouldn't entirely exclude the possibility of he getting there by the end of his career —, but some powerful "sexologists" after him definitely did, and they propagated these particularly trans-hostile interpretations. These are now popular sources for anti-trans and truscum talking points about the importance of denying trans people important medicine.
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@riley This is very informative, thank you. Given that it still feels like we as a society have just begun accepting trans people, and it's still a surprisingly slow process with lots of friction, I think it's pretty cool that they at least did something back then. The gatekeeping and not getting with the times though is such garbage, and some of that "real trans" does sound very reminiscent of Swedish trans policy. Like, wtf let people be who they are!
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@riley Is this btw the same guy who said that all trans girls who are not sexually attracted to men masturbated with their mom's panties when they were teenagers, or some dumb shit like that? 🤨
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@macberg I lean towards this probably not being one of his sayings, but I'm not betting on it. These ideas were mostly popularised around the eighties, but they're built on a century of Freud's bullshit making circles.
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@macberg The trans acceptance has not been a story of linear progress. Outside the literal Nazi newspapers, early news reports of people transitioning were generally supportive, if a bit crude, focusing on the genitals, and generally paying much more attention to transfem than transmasc people.
But there's been a a couple of backlash waves even before the post-Obergefell anti-trans campaign. Even the idea of stealth supremacism — that trans people should live in full stealth after their transitions — has been justified by the rather dubious argument that there won't be backlashes if nobody knows they're trans.