Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies

Gender-affirming healthcare has a long history. The first trans-related surgeries were carried out in the 1910s–1930s (<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013797" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Meyerowitz, 2002</a>, pp. 16–21). While some doctors were supportive early on, most were wary. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, these skeptical doctors subjected trans people to all sorts of alternate treatments — from perpetual psychoanalysis, to aversion and electroshock therapies, to administering assigned-sex-consistent hormones (e.g., testosterone for trans female/feminine people), and so on — but none of them worked. The only treatment that reliably allowed trans people to live happy and healthy lives was allowing them to transition. While doctors were initially worried that many would eventually come to regret that decision, <a href="https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">study after study</a> has shown that gender-affirming care has a far lower regret rate (typically around <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">1 or 2 percent</a>) than virtually any other medical procedure. Given all this, plus the fact that there is no test for being trans (medical, psychological, or otherwise), around the turn of the century, doctors began moving away from strict gatekeeping and toward an informed consent model for trans adults to attain gender-affirming care. <a href="https://juliaserano.medium.com/gender-affirming-care-for-trans-youth-is-neither-new-nor-experimental-a-timeline-and-compilation-b4bb8375d797">Visit Now</a>