The Medical University of South Carolina initially said it wouldn’t be affected by a law banning use of state funds for treatment “furthering the gender transition” of children under 16. Months later, it cut off that care to all trans minors.
One Saturday morning in September 2022, Terrence Steyer, the dean of the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, placed an urgent call to a student. Just a year prior, the medical student, Thomas Agostini, had won first place at a university-sponsored event for his graduate research on transgender pediatric patients. He also had been featured in a video on MUSC’s website highlighting resources that support the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, Agostini and his once-lauded study had set off a political firestorm. Conservative activists seized on one line in particular in the study’s summary — a parenthetical noting the youngest transgender patient to visit MUSC’s pediatric endocrinology clinic was 4 years old — and inaccurately claimed that children that young were prescribed hormones as part of a gender transition. Elon Musk amplified the false claim, tweeting, “Is it really true that four-year-olds are receiving hormone treatment?” That led federal and state lawmakers to frantically ask top MUSC leaders whether the public hospital was in fact helping young children medically transition. The hospital was not; its pediatric transgender patients did not receive hormone therapy before puberty, nor does it offer surgical options to minors.
Dear people who tell LGBT+ people that we shouldn’t care what some right-wing nutters think:
This is why we have to care. What they think does affect us, unfortunately.
Someone here the other day had the gall to tell me that Trump didn’t do anything to oppress LGBT+ people.
They were strangely silent after I showed them this: https://www.hrc.org/news/the-list-of-trumps-unprecedented-steps-for-the-lgbtq-community
I was going to participate in a navy program that would put me through med school. Then Trump decided to ban folks like me from the military.
As an older trans person, things were better for us before he was in office. It’s exhausting hearing one’s existence debated every fucking day, by folks who have zero idea what they’re talking about. It wasn’t illegal for me to piss at work in 2015, it is now.
I’m an adult trans man who has been on testosterone for more than a decade now, and it’s a fight to stay on my medication. I almost want to live in this fantasy world where doctors just hand out hormones and blockers like candy. But most doctors are terrified - all it takes is your hospital ending up on LibsOfTiktok or something and it’s time for the bomb threats. My medical provider is one of the few that hasn’t left my state, and if he leaves I’m fucked.
Man, I’m sorry to hear that. Absolutely fucked that our medical care and career prospects and even just taking a shit can be destroyed because some Evangelical assholes somewhere feel weird in their pants about us or are so piss scared of their kids learning that they have to indoctrinate them
These are stupid people.
There’s an absolute moron down the road here from me who, despite it being 2023, has a large sign on his business (a small factory) that says “Trump 2020: For All Workers.”
Dude spent four years turning federal worker protections into a regular horror show. Every couple of weeks, some basic worker protection or another came under attack. I saw it for myself.
My dude, Trump tried to bring back asbestos.
Sounds like the business owner probably knows Trumps is bad for workers, but good for business.
It’s always “just ignore it, words can’t hurt you” until people listen to those words and vote/take action.
No, words matter very much, actually. In fact, I would say words, and language, is the very basis of our civilization. Without language, there would have been nothing.
I wonder what the same people criticizing trans health care as “mutilation of children” think of intersex babies having genital surgery forced upon them to align their genitals with gender binary ideals.
And just before anyone has a chance to say it, trans healthcare for teens is okay despite them not being able to consent because if they don’t choose quickly then one of the options is going to be forced upon them.
It’s like a child standing on train tracks with a train speeding toward them and the child expressing that they’d like to get out of the way while people telling them “No! You’re not old enough to make that decision!”
It’s not, but it happens to males, so no one cares. I certianly wasn’t consulted about it, and have only been ridiculed when I’ve suggested it should have been my choice.
You’re ridiculed because everyone knows that 99% of men wouldn’t choose to be circumcised if they had to do it as an adult. Yet because we do it to babies it’s fine.
Trans women certainly care. We didn’t ask for a lot of things, but circumcision still adds insult to injury.
The awful truth is that few people want to address fucked up shit. Almost everyone suffers from something forced upon us for no good reason, so if anything we need to support one another and work to end this crap.
And besides, the Hospital in the article doesn’t even do surgeries on minors, only hormone treatment. There is no mutilation involved whatsoever.
It’s like a child standing on train tracks with a train speeding toward them and the child expressing that they’d like to get out of the way while people telling them “No! You’re not old enough to make that decision!”
Awful analogy, even if your point is sound. We should focus on the topic at hand, instead of trying to pivot to literal life-or-death analogies. It’s a tactic people use to derail discussion instead of engage in it. Now instead of focusing on the topic at hand, we need to focus on how accurate your analogy is. It’s more fruitful to just leave the analogy at home and try to have your relevant arguments stand on their own.
Lots of people on these forums will disagree, though.
I am amazed that health companies are not penalized for discrimination on which human beings they treat. Sorry, but that makes no sense.
the neat part is the American health care system always finds a new way of disappointing everyone.
what’s truly upsetting is that the few trans people that may need to go to that hospital for the fastest health care are going to find out the shitty way they’ve been blacklisted.
there is probably a good legal case against this misinformation but how many trans have the time and energy to fight backdoor politics?
Yeah exactly, I’m trying to afford rent and stave off burnout too. I spent years doing activism but I’m almost 30 and I’m exhausted. And even when we do fight we’re a third of a percent of the population and economically disadvantaged before you take into account the expenses of transitioning (fortunately I’m past most of it, but spending my first years out of college saving up for a $20000 surgery was a serious financial hit)
And all this for what? My state government doesn’t give half a shit what we want. I’ll keep trying to vote them out but they realized they don’t even actually have to do what courts say. The courts won’t actually punish the legislature, just the state coffers if that.
Have they really been ‘blacklisted’, or are they just unable to get certain procedures done?
It can be both. There are cases of paramedics refusing to treat trans women, to the point where they die.
Doctors will also assume that any medical issue you have is due to your hormones and not treat you. I passed a kidney stone on my own because I was hurting in the “wrong” place.
Penalized? The people in goverment are bigots who want the hospitals to discriminate.
There are constitutional guarantees that preclude it. Just needs someone to take it to court.
Well if you decide that it’s religion you can hurt people by deciding that their medical care isn’t something your god approves of. And no you don’t need to find sufficient text or historical justification
Wasn’t there a case before SCOTUS where they held only “closely held beliefs” (or some shit) was allowed?
I can’t find the actual case or verbage but basically it made it possible to force, say, spaghetti monster believers to adopt laws against their beliefs. Essentially paving the way for Christian nationalism.
This is the private free market at work.
Free market gave us: lead pipes, lead paint, leaded gasoline, asbestos, PFCs (forever chemicals) in water, chat for the kids to play on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_(mining)), and countless (literally) other grievances all so people richer than us could be even richer.
What’s not to like?
Long term thinking is what is needed, the reality is that many things like space travel and even construction would be much better if we all recognised that everyone deserves access to have a holistic understanding of things, not like how it is now with engineering theory in the West, half baked practicals, and the flip side of the coin over in the East with lots of hardware availability, old textbooks, but next to no design software or systems level engineering to incorporate with. Sure it’s great to differentiate skill sets but some systems are like Babylon, the less holistic and overlapping knowledge we have, the more communication issues and short term design problems we all come across
