I'm not aware of any cases either. The Mayo Clinic web page is helpful to understand the process. I'll note that there are exceptions but we should not focus on the rare exceptions when considering policy but the rule.
Treatment can help people who have gender dysphoria explore their gender identity and find the gender role that feels comfortable for them, easing distress. However, treatment should be individualized. What might help one person might not help another.
Treatment options might include changes in gender expression and role, hormone therapy, surgery, and behavioral therapy.
...
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health provides the following criteria for hormonal and surgical treatment of gender dysphoria:
- Persistent, well-documented gender dysphoria.
- Capacity to make a fully informed decision and consent to treatment.
- Legal age in a person's country or, if younger, following the standard of care for children and adolescents.
- If significant medical or mental concerns are present, they must be reasonably well controlled.
www.mayoclinic.org
@sunrise, the following isn't really directed at you, but at the posters in general.
It strikes me that there is a lot of semantic confusion on this topic, in the world and on this thread. What I'm about to say has been debated before on RF, but that doesn't mean it's been settled:
I continue to claim that "gender" and "gender identity" are both ill-defined ideas, and we should not be basing laws and medical practices on these terms. If anyone disagrees, I welcome your definitions of these two terms with the understanding that I will challenge you to support them logically. Not with appeals to dubious authorities such as WPATH.
So, for the sake of discussion, if we leave the term gender out of the discussion it seems clear that:
- There are two biological sexes and a host of rare variants of biological sex. Biologic sex is not expressed solely by our genitalia, it's also deeply embedded - in many ways - in every cell of our body. Sex is - at this stage of our science and medicine - immutable. I'm sorry if this fact is offensive to anyone, but sex is immutable.
- Attraction: It's clear that who we're attracted to is infinitely varied, hooray, we should support that. Being opposite sex attracted is the most common, but same sex attraction is also quite common. And some people are attracted to everyone and so on... It seems that attraction is fluid for some people.
- Ease in your own body: It's clear that some people feel uncomfortable in their own bodies, they wish their bodies were different, perhaps of the opposite sex. When young people have this discomfort it's often called gender dysphoria or GD.
How to help kids with GD has been the topic of ongoing, heated debates. I think a useful summary of the support system is that a group called WPATH, based their ideas about how to treat GD in kids on a Dutch study done maybe 15 years ago or so. WPATH's approach is called the "standard of care" or "SOC". it's I believe it's now on its 8th version (v8). WPATH's SOC is largely the basis for the standard protocol used in the US and in Europe and it's called GAC or gender affirming care. GAC is based on the idea that if a kid has GD, health care providers should "Affirm" the kid's feelings and allow the kid to pursue exploring what it might like to be the opposite sex through a series of interventions that are supposed to go from least permanent and dangerous to most. These include: social transitioning, then puberty blockers, then hormones, and then surgeries. Not all of these steps are taken for every kid. There are a couple of facts that are important to keep in mind when considering GAC:
- many studies have shown that kids with GD often grow out of it naturally as they pass thru puberty, and that many of these kids end up being happy and gay.
- a large percentage of kids with GD have other severe mental health conditions such as autism.
I'm of the opinion that GAC is a horribly wrong approach. That it IS dangerous and irreversible and that the evidence of its benefits are of low quality. In England a 4 year study of GAC was done by Dr. Hillary Cass and her team and her results largely echo what I just said about GAC.
IMO, the people who created and support GAC are making a series of extraordinary claims, it is their responsibility to provide extraordinarily good evidence, which they have not done.
Again, the topic of GAC has been endlessly debated on this forum and there are quite a few people on RF who violently disagree with me.
But for this thread, I think we can stick to biological sex and attraction, and jettison "gender" and "gender identity" until someone can provide a solid, defendable definition for those terms.
I think it's critical to attack these terms because if we accept them without scrutiny, a lot of dangerous ground has been given.
