NBC News has some big news for all the young dudes out there. (It’s Monday. You can forgive me one Mott the Hoople reference.) If you’re a man, you can get pregnant and deliver a baby. But you’re facing some unfair challenges because the medical community isn’t really up to speed on the whole situation and they will probably make some mistakes in your prenatal care. Here’s part of the coverage in this breaking story.
Transgender men say they face misinformation, bias and a lack of understanding from the medical establishment when they decide to start a family.
When Jay Thomas, 33, decided he wanted to get pregnant in 2016, he spoke to his physician.
Thomas, a cook who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, explained to his doctor that he and his wife, Jamie Brewster, 33, a bank employee, are both transgender, and that he had been on testosterone for more than two years. The physician said Thomas had likely gone through early menopause, and that if they were able to conceive at all, he would have to go off the hormone for at least 18 months.
The situation described in the article is a case of taking the whole transgender moment and spinning the dials up to eleven. (Yes, I’m adding a Spinal Tap reference. Feel free to shun me.) The husband in this marries is a biological woman – or just a woman if you prefer – and the wife is a male. So when the husband went to the doctor to talk about conceiving, mistakes were made. And the couple feels that this is a sign of a lack of sensitivity, empathy or something else on the part of the medical community.
This has led to what the author describes as cases of “misinformation and discouragement ” in the transgender community. They blame it on a lack of research or the “inherent bias” of some doctors against them. While I’m neither a doctor nor an actor who plays one on TV, I have a third possibility I’d like to offer for consideration.
Perhaps some doctors are unsure about the prognosis or not up to date on all the latest research because you’re delving into areas that are very new and completely foreign to medical science. Stuffing women full of testosterone for years on end, so they can look like men, isn’t something the medical community has had to grapple with for very long. And we haven’t been doing it long enough or to a large enough sample of patients suffering from gender dysphoria to have a firm grasp on what all of the downstream effects might be.
Similarly, there are some doctors out there who are injecting prepubescent children with cocktails designed to stave off puberty, sometimes for years on end. (How these doctors are not in jail remains a mystery to me.) Yes, there is some data out there, but certainly not the volumes of medical information spanning decades and centuries that we rely on for more normal medical procedures.
We’re playing Dr. Frankenstein with human bodies in the name of supporting a politically correct theory of medicine while abandoning centuries of confirmable science. Mistakes will be made. And I don’t just mean the mistake of performing these procedures in the first place. If you want to volunteer to be a science experiment for this social reconstruction project, please give the doctors a little time to catch up in their mad scientist laboratories. As you’ll recall, things didn’t work out well for Frankenstein on the first go either.
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