Continuing the discussion from Judith Butler on feminism, gender and trans rights:
AF : What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate?
JB : I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.
On just one aspect of that subject, the article below is surpisingly sensible, level-headed, informative, and practical. The problems it addresses are, of course, in the words of John Cleese, âbleedinâ obviousâ, but I must admit I hadnât given much thought to this aspect of things. (I have only ever contemplated hormone treatment and surgery from a nervous distance, so their aftermath has remained rather hazy.)
By Zaria Gorvett 17th August 2020
Extract:
Whitley is a transgender man â he identifies as male but his biological sex is female. He has been living as a man for around 20 years. In his words, he fully âpassesâ as one, for want of a better term â and he is registered as a man on all his legal documents, from his passport to his medical records.
But most healthcare has evolved with a straightforward dichotomy of gender in mind. Though there are thought to be nearly a million transgender people living in the US (this is a rough estimate as this data isnât collected) thereâs concern that this group is being largely ignored by health services and the medical industry.
Rather than devising new ways to cope with changing social norms, transgender people are often shoehorned into inappropriate boxes instead.
In Whitleyâs case, the problem was how the severity of kidney disease is assessed. The usual protocol is to calculate a patientâs âestimated glomerular filtration rateâ (eGFR), which measures the amount of a certain waste product in their blood and therefore shows how efficient their kidneys are at filtering it out. If the eGFR is below a certain level, itâs an indication that their kidneys are failing and they are eligible for a transplant.
There are several different lower limits for an eGFR, depending on things like a personâs weight, age, gender and race, which are intended to reflect the natural variation in the human body. Based on the female cut-off, he would have been allowed a transplant immediately. But heâs registered as a man on his medical records, and this meant his doctors used the male eGFR level. He wasnât put on the list until he reached it â a decision that ultimately delayed the surgery by over a year, and very nearly cost him his life.
âIt was really cute and awesome that I was treated as male, but in being this way, they didnât necessarily take into account the body,â says Whitley, who points out that, though he has been taking testosterone for around 15 years, itâs a relatively small dose. âI was born female and I identify as male â they should have probably have set my limit as somewhere in the middle.â
Even Whitleyâs dialysis was complicated by the current lack of knowledge about transgender medicine â the calculation thatâs used to work out how regularly it needs to be done is based on another sex-specific assumption.
Whitleyâs experiences are just the tip of the iceberg.
When you factor in the large data gaps in everything from the average life expectancy of transgender people to the right dosages of medications for their bodies, along with the widespread lack of knowledge among doctors about how to address them â let alone treat them â and the high chance of them being refused treatment outright, it soon becomes clear that transgender medicine is in crisis. Few groups experience such significant barriers to healthcare, and yet their struggles are going largely unnoticed.
In some cases, the issues are baked right into the heart of our medical systems.
Consider this: if you were to look through every single medical record in the UK â all 55 million â you wonât find a single record labelled as belonging to a transgender person. This is also true for those assembled by many providers in the US.
âYou can register as male or female, but you can still only choose between these two options â you canât say if you are transgender or non-binary,â explains Kamilla Kamaruddin, a doctor who works for the National Health Service (NHS) and transgender woman. âSo thatâs quite difficult.â
Instead doctors must rely on their patient to tell them.
âSometimes this can be okay,â says Dina Greene, a clinical chemist and expert in transgender health at the University of Washington, Seattle. In many cases, if someone is going to see a medical expert where gender seems irrelevant, patients might not want their doctor to know they are transgender, she says. "Itâs stigmatised.â
But this rigid male-female dichotomy also has some bizarre, and much less desirable, implications. âThere are lots of simple things, like our medical record systems often cancel pregnancy tests if theyâre ordered on men,â says Greene. (Some transgender men can get pregnant, depending on the treatment they have had. And though very few countries track this aspect of their health, 250 gave birth in Australia in the decade leading up to 2019).
The gender youâre registered as also dictates which screening tests you are invited to, meaning that thousands of transgender men could be missing out on potentially life-saving cervical (Pap) smears and breast exams, while transgender women could be missing out on abdominal aortic aneurism check-ups (or prostate cancer screenings, if they live in the US).
When Charlie Manzano, a transgender man from Martinez, California, informed his healthcare provider that he would like to register as male, he was told that he would lose his gynaecologist â though he still retained his female reproductive organs. âMost of my doctors have no idea about trans patients,â he says.
Similarly, your gender shapes a number of other medical decisions, such as the dose of drugs youâre prescribed. For those whose gender and sex are the same, this makes sense, because male and female biology is fundamentally different â the former have more water in the body, a higher surface area, and a higher body mass. All of these factors can influence the way pharmaceuticals behave. Females also have more sites for certain drugs to bind to, and are therefore more sensitive to them. They tend to clear them more slowly, so they are more susceptible to overdoses.
Doctors already factor in the importance of tweaking the standard female dosages for pregnant women, who have a higher body weight and are simmering in a cocktail of hormones that change certain aspects of their biology. However, no such considerations are routinely made for transgender people, who, as a result of surgery or hormonal therapies, are known not to respond to certain drugs in the same way.
This is all layered on top of some alarming statistics about transgender health. The group has higher rates of heart disease, certain cancers, mental health problems, suicide, smoking, and substance abuse than the general population â as well as an HIV prevalence which is up to 42 times the national average. Transgender people are not only more likely to get sick, but less likely to seek treatment when they do.
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Even when doctors are well-informed, it can still be difficult for transgender people to access certain potentially life-saving interventions because of the systems that are in place.
âIn the UK, people are invited for cancer screenings based on whatever gender theyâre registered as in their medical records,â says Alison Berner, an oncologist and part-time gender identity specialist.
This means that transgender men wonât be asked to attend screenings for breast and cervical cancer, but they will be invited to have the least useful check-up, the one for abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). In the UK, patients registered as male are currently invited for these, which involve checking for a bulge in the major artery that runs from a personâs chest to their abdomen; if itâs swollen, it might eventually burst and lead to a medical emergency. Itâs extremely rare unless your biological sex is male.
Equally, transgender women who register as female will be summoned for breast and cervical screenings, but they wonât be asked to attend AAA exams. The former is often appropriate, because if they are taking female hormones they will be at a slightly higher risk of breast cancer â but of course this group do not have cervixes, and they could be missing out on important pre-emptive treatments if their AAAs go unnoticed.
If transgender patients donât attend these inappropriate appointments, the reminders will just keep coming â often becoming increasingly urgent. Kamaruddin recalls an incident which some people might have found upsetting. âI kept receiving letters, so eventually I had to call up and tell them look, I donât need this. It was the only way to do it,â she says.
The official guidance is that a personâs doctor should make sure that their record âfacilitates screening for physiologically appropriate risksâ, but there is no easy way to do so, other than adding a comment in their medical notes, which could be easily missed.
Kamaruddin says she keeps a list of her own transgender patients and trains her nurses about the cancer and sexual health screenings they need. They have to contact the relevant hospitals and get them appointments manually. But not only is this inefficient â itâs also unreliable. Only some medical practices keep such lists, and when they do, they depend on patients disclosing their status to their doctor voluntarily â otherwise there is no way of knowing.
Naturally, some patients choose to keep information about their biological sex to themselves. They donât always realise itâs still relevant after their gender transition. âA lot of transgender men donât know they need to have cervical screenings,â says Kamaruddin.
For those who identify as non-binary, the situation is even murkier. Roman Ruddick, from California, says the system has no idea what to do with them. âOne month they were like, âjust so you know, you should get your prostate checkedâ and I was really thrown off and then the next month I got, âyou should go get a pap smearâ and I found out that they were just sending me everything.â
