A North Carolina hospital network is referring transgender psychiatric patients to treatment facilities that do not align with their gender identities.

…

As the political debate over health care for transgender youth has intensified across the U.S., elected officials and advocates who favor withholding gender-affirming medical procedures for minors have often said parents are not acting in their children’s best interest when they seek such treatment.

Major medical associations say the treatments are safe and warn of grave mental health consequences for children forced to wait until adulthood to access puberty-blocking drugs, hormones and, in rare cases, surgeries.

Youth and young adults ages 10–24 account for about 15% of all suicides, and research shows LGBTQ+ high school students have higher rates of attempted suicide than their peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

…

Sending a transgender child to a unit that does not align with their gender identity should be out of the question, no matter a hospital’s constraints, said Dr. Jack Turban, director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California, San Francisco, and a researcher of quality care barriers for trans youth in inpatient facilities.

“If you don’t validate the trans identity from day one, their mental health’s going to get worse,” Turban said. “Potentially, you’re sending them out at a higher suicide risk than they came in.”

  • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
    111·
    11 months ago

    Medical Trauma is an issue, and can be also observed at higher rates particularly in women, black people, disabled people, and of course trans people too. Trauma informed perspectives need to get more popular, especially among those on the political stage imo.

    • PiousAgnostic@lemmy.world
      181·
      11 months ago

      Why Genocide? That word gets thrown around a lot. Might feel good to say, but words have meanings.

      Why not say it is a deliberate and largely coordinated program of institunalized emotional abuse? Or similar language. Using the wrong emotionally charged word makes an argument fall flat.

      • moistclump@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        Good point. I agree.

        I understand that they’re trying to drive home the fact “people are dying because of the impact of these decisions,” but I’m not sure that was the best word choice to do so.

          • Can_you_change_your_username@kbin.social
            1·
            11 months ago

            Science says that there is good evidence that both gender identity and sexual orientation are strongly biologically influenced. There appears to be a genetic predisposition and influence from prenatal hormonal development. There is also a difference in neuroanatomy with transgender individuals brain structure and function being more similar to the sex that they identify with than to their biological sex. Genital sexual differentiation happens earlier and separately from neurological sexual differentiation and there are biological explanations for incongruencies between the two.

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6677266/

          • quindraco@lemm.ee
            11·
            11 months ago

            I don’t understand. You say psychiatry is how you handle feelings, and then seem to decry feeling-based medicines. Are you arguing against anti-depressants? Mood stabilizers? How much psychiatric care are you saying we should abandon?