It did thanks.
> I think it is fine for society to be critical
Of course. Critical in the sense of skeptical. However a lot of "critics" of trans people act much more like schoolyard bullies or people worried that rock 'n roll music will make the children worship satan than people with fair concerns about the wellbeing of others.
> I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets
There isn't any decision that people can make that will leave 100% of people satisfied. Gender therapy has existed in its modern form for about 100 years now and in that time study after study shows that people who go through with it are happy with the results 90%-98% of the time. This is higher than most treatments of any kind.
You'll find that almost every commentator who talks about detransitioners or trots some out for a political show has the end objective of ending all gender affirming care for all people and replacing it with conversion therapy due to their ideology. In the case of someone like Janice Raymond that reason is radical feminism. For someone like Matt Walsh it is traditional Catholicism. In both cases they are misleading the public by insinuating that gender therapy is some sort of factory process where hapless victims are swept onto a conveyor belt and mutilated haphazardly.
People who transition and then regret it will always exist. Just like people will regret getting any sort of elective surgery. Just like people will come out as gay and then later regret it and then later regret that they regretted it and so on.... It's a story as old as time.
This study tracked people over a 50 year period and found a regret rate of 2%.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262734734_An_Analys...
> The FM:MF sex ratio fluctuated but was 1:1.66 for the whole study period. There were 15 (5 MF and 10 MF) regret applications corresponding to a 2.2 % regret rate for both sexes. There was a significant decline of regrets over the time period.
The worrying thing is not that 2% regretted their decision, the worrying thing is that the people who are against trans people would be LESS happy if the figure were to be 0%. They want 100% of trans people to regret transition and repress because that would make reality conform better to their ideological leanings where "men are men" and "women are women" because God made them that way.
What percentage of detransitioners have been taken in by anti-trans panic and social contagion? What percentage will regret detransitioning? There are already quite a few examples: Elisa Shupe and Ky Schevers, who were both politically active in anti-trans movements, later retransitioned (and/or found a gender identity that works better for them) and regret the time they spent organizing against trans people.
Medicine has a social context as well. This relatively recent idea that someone can become more female or more male through drugs and surgery is one that has repercussions on how we as a society view the two sexes, what constitutes a woman or a man, and what is an acceptable expression of one's masculinity or femininity.
Maybe it's the right idea. But we should all reserve the right to be critical and consider alternatives, for this and any other idea with broad societal implications.
The social context has nothing to do with it, that's just a way to say that if enough people say that you can't do to yourself what you want to that that makes them right, which has historically led to all kinds of wrongs. See also: the right to euthanasia, abortion, being gay and so on and so on. It's always the sanctimonious groups that are hell bent on telling others how to live, but it never was any of their business.
How 'we as society' view this has no bearing on something that is ultimately the domain of a single individual, the person affected.
In the United States this is codified by "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" though of course there is plenty of hairsplitting going on about what that actually means, even though the simplest reading is to take it for what it says.
The implications of this are far reaching (for instance: I'm on the one side against a vaccine mandate because it would infringe on that right, on the other I think that a lot of people have allowed themselves to be pushed towards this on a pretext).
If you naively consider the topic only from a bodily autonomy perspective, then the answer is deceptively simple: get the blades out and start slicing. But this ignores the wider medical ethics concerns over whether it's the right thing to do for the patient, if the surgeon is causing harm by doing so, if gratifying the patient's short-term desires genuinely helps them in the long-term over their entire life, if it's reasonable to expect a surgeon to perform such a procedure and how they may feel in the aftermath, if there are any other interventions that would be more effective. And societal questions over whether it's ethical to deliberately add new members to a population who already find it difficult to find the support they need, how this will affect others who may now be situational obliged to assist with this person's new disability, and so on.
It makes no sense to focus solely on the individual and ignore the wider context, when there are so many other factors to consider.
So this strawman won't stand.
So before you go off on a tangent about what is and is not accepted practice and which things doctors are required to do and which things they abstain from on ethical grounds I will have to bow out because we are at the limits of my knowledge on the subject and that's not for want of reading material. Let me close with: I know where the line lies in simple cases, but if you start dragging in things that I have not spent enough time on/read about/have knowledge about then I simply will not be able to hold that conversation. If you have this knowledge then more power to you, but so far you have not convinced me of it and you come across as an ideologue.
Pot, kettle, black.
The Hijra community (Indian trans/non-binary) has been around for thousands of years, and surgical castration has been one traditional way for them to achieve their identity during that period. It's not relatively recent.
https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/case-studies/ge...
In any event, I think in a free society we must start with the premise that all things are permitted and only with valid reason restrict that freedom. There are many valid reasons, but merely being critical of someone else's means of existence is not what I would regard as sufficient reason to restrict their personal freedom. At a minimum, potentially cognizable harm should be shown. And to be clear, I don't think there's any potentially cognizable harm to be found in someone conforming to their own gender identity.
Many trans people that join the hijra community leave it due to the abuse. The ex-hijra community is one of trans women that has been around for roughly as long as the hijra community has been.
Here's a project from former members of the hijra community that left because of the abuse they faced in it: https://aravaniartproject.com
In any case, trans people have been around for as long as people have been around.
The western idea of transness is better (more freedom, less suffering) so of course it is seeing adoption worldwide. I'm the exact opposite of a cultural relativist. I think it is morally good for the best cultural ideas to win.
In any case it still doesn't change the fact that something resembling trans people have been around in every single culture for a very long time. It is because transness is universal, a part of the human condition.
They've gotten consistently worse since about 2015.
I started transitioning in 2009 when I was 18. I come from a very conservative environment and growing up I'd even tried to come out as gay a few times only to be "shot down" more or less but in college I used my own money and I found doctors to help me look how I wanted and I started dating men openly and as awful as it is to say, because I looked and acted the part people got over it pretty fast and begrudgingly accepted that I - at least - wasn't a man. My parents even got upset with me a long while ago when I insinuated that I was a part of the gay community because they said it was disrespectful to my then boyfriend who is now my husband (he had only dated cis girls before me and is straight to anyone who hasn't run a DNA test on me ha).
These days I can feel a change even from people who were kind to me before. All the coverage on conservative media outlets, the JK Rowling "trans women are a threat to women" and the Matt Walsh "trans women are mentally ill perverts" talking points have eroded goodwill so much that more religious and conservative members of my own family avoid me now as where they didn't before and I feel that I'm only able to have a good life because I'm in the fortunate position of being "passable" and attracted to men.
In 2012 when I came out to someone they'd usually just be curious about my experiences. Even conservative Christians and Republicans. In 2022 almost nobody is curious except about which surgeries you've had because they've already made their mind up about how they feel about you. For about 50% of the population that means you're a piece of scum who deserves ridicule and punishment (if it looks like you could still pass as male physically) or excommunication (if it looks like you're so feminine and far gone that you couldn't fit in as a man), for about 40% of the population that means indifference akin to what you'd get back in the good old days and for about 10% it means an outpouring of support and love in an attempt to make up for the 50% who are openly hostile.
I think more and more trans people are taking the Wendy Carlos approach these days because of this. Much of the community wants to avoid attention and get along with their lives. There's a growing trend of people "boy moding" or "man moding" which is where they take hormone replacement therapies but dress in drag to try to fit in as their gender assigned at birth in public the same way that Wendy did. As an amusing sidenote, many of these people begin "male failing" which is where the hormone replacement therapies make it impossible for them to pass as their gender assigned at birth and so they are read as being trans still but coming from the other direction.... It's so sad that it has to be this way.