In short, because of:
1. patriarchy
2. money
Minds more finely tuned to economics and politics
than mine can draw the map (please!). For example, how much money can pharmaceutical companies make from the life-long hormone treatment that transgender individuals are encouraged to purchase? Is it a coincidence that as hormone replacement therapy for perimenopausal and menopausal women waned in popularity, the use of the same hormones for male to female transgender individuals rose? And, interestingly, many insurance plans do not reimburse women for HRT, but do reimburse transgender male to female individuals for those same hormones, even though their use for transgenderism is off-label (ie not endorsed by the federal licencing bodies for that use in the market).
Transgenderism is an industry, analogous to harm reduction, which dispenses an abundance of sandwiches and clean needles but a paucity of detox beds, treatment programs, counseling, housing, and employment training. Both transgenderism and harm reduction allow people and institutions to profit at the expense of entrenching patients in their disease. These profiteers appropriate women's narratives and perpetuate their disenfranchisement.
If transgenderism, like harm reduction, is about patriarchy, why would men choose to be women? It seems obvious why women might choose to be men - to avoid the demands of being female, to try to access the privilege of being male; however, no woman who attempts to be a man truly gains male privilege, she simply becomes even more marginalized, more invisible - a win for patriarchy. As for men choosing to try to be women, well, one patriarchal success out of that maneuver is that men who identify as women then say that their identity grants them the right to say what it is to be a woman, thereby erasing the right of biologic women to claim that knowledge and experience - another win for patriarchy. Regardless of the direction of changing gender, it is about sustaining male privilege and erasing women.
Patriarchy is about privilege, privilege is sustained by capitalism, and capitalism is comprised of industries, including the industry of health care and the industry of transgenderism. Even well-intentioned health care providers are part, intentionally or as captives, of these industries: for example, a nurse who works in a local clinic for pregnant street-involved women spends almost half her day in staff meetings and administrative tasks, and her clinical time in harm reduction, and although she predicts the day when male to female transgendered "clients" will be admitted to the clinic, she declines to speak up against this, even endorsing the employment of a trans man in the clinic, opting "to be careful," because she doesn't feel safe to express her opinions, though her position is unionized and she cannot be fired. Yet, such is the coercive power of peer pressure.
Working from within the system necessarily means condoning and being complicit with the system. It means being the system.
Whenever we make a health care decision which is premised to any degree on keeping our job, and at our job we profit more than do our patients, we fail in our ethical duty to put the patient's best interests first. Health care providers must speak up, for the long-term best interests of their patients.
Cowardice may grant immediate access to personal privilege, but it is not rewarded by history.
As a society, it seems we care more about sorting our plastics for recycling than about the well-being of one another.
If transgenderism, like harm reduction, is about patriarchy, why would men choose to be women? It seems obvious why women might choose to be men - to avoid the demands of being female, to try to access the privilege of being male; however, no woman who attempts to be a man truly gains male privilege, she simply becomes even more marginalized, more invisible - a win for patriarchy. As for men choosing to try to be women, well, one patriarchal success out of that maneuver is that men who identify as women then say that their identity grants them the right to say what it is to be a woman, thereby erasing the right of biologic women to claim that knowledge and experience - another win for patriarchy. Regardless of the direction of changing gender, it is about sustaining male privilege and erasing women.
Patriarchy is about privilege, privilege is sustained by capitalism, and capitalism is comprised of industries, including the industry of health care and the industry of transgenderism. Even well-intentioned health care providers are part, intentionally or as captives, of these industries: for example, a nurse who works in a local clinic for pregnant street-involved women spends almost half her day in staff meetings and administrative tasks, and her clinical time in harm reduction, and although she predicts the day when male to female transgendered "clients" will be admitted to the clinic, she declines to speak up against this, even endorsing the employment of a trans man in the clinic, opting "to be careful," because she doesn't feel safe to express her opinions, though her position is unionized and she cannot be fired. Yet, such is the coercive power of peer pressure.
Working from within the system necessarily means condoning and being complicit with the system. It means being the system.
Whenever we make a health care decision which is premised to any degree on keeping our job, and at our job we profit more than do our patients, we fail in our ethical duty to put the patient's best interests first. Health care providers must speak up, for the long-term best interests of their patients.
Cowardice may grant immediate access to personal privilege, but it is not rewarded by history.
As a society, it seems we care more about sorting our plastics for recycling than about the well-being of one another.
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