approximately infinite universe

kiriamaya:

In the early eighties, there was a report, written for the US Government, called Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery. This report argued that transition-related treatments were medically unnecessary. As a result, consideration of federal and state aid for trans people was dropped, and private insurance companies quickly followed suit, disingenuously expanding the definition of “transition-related” to include absolutely anything that could even conjecturally be related to hormone treatments, including various types of cancer. Trans people have died as a result.

I wonder how many people know who was responsible for that report, who it was that convinced the US government (and, indirectly, insurance companies) that helping trans people wasn’t important. You’d probably think it was some fundiegelical Republican, right?

Nope. It was Janice Raymond.

If you feel like being enraged, you can read a copy of her report (trigger warning for transphobia, obviously). If you don’t feel like reading, you’re not missing much, as it’s basically the same “morally mandate it out of existence” horseshit that was in her book. (And yeah, like most transphobic feminists, she almost makes a couple of really good points, but is so focused on eliminationism that she doesn’t actually arrive at helpful conclusions. Or so it appears — frankly, I can only read a few sentences of it at a time without wanting to scream and kick things.)

So yeah — if you’ve ever wondered why I can’t be “understanding” and “patient” with feminist transphobia, now you know why: tens of thousands of trans people have died because of it.