Activist Florence Ashley argues trans youth and adults wanting to modify their bodies shouldn’t be forced to undergo mental health assessments first
Doctors should stop insisting transgender teens undergo “dehumanizing” psychiatric assessments before granting them body-altering hormones, argues a new paper by a McGill University scholar.
“We generally trust what other people say about their own mental states,” wrote Ashley, a fellow of the McGill Research Group on Health and Law. “If someone says, ‘My arm hurts,’ we typically grant credence to their claims. “And the illness model is, ‘Well, we have to figure out what this illness is because there is this underlying ‘disease’ we have to cure.” The medical establishment, said Ashley has failed to keep up “with our evolving understanding of transitude — the fact of being trans — as part of normal human diversity.”
“Many others are not so lucky — and my own luck ran out when I had to seek two referral letters for genital surgery,” Ashley said. Cross-sex hormones can cause irreversible physical changes — breast development with estrogen, or a permanent deepening of the voice with testosterone, “For a very long time — and it’s still weirdly a thing that continues to happen today — you’ll have people that say, ‘Oh, I’m not really sure you are trans because you didn’t know you were trans when you were a kid,’ or horrendous stuff like, ‘You don’t wear enough dresses and, therefore, you’re probably not a woman.”
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