I think this is an extremely important question. Trans people’s suffering is no doubt real, but dilemmas are posed by medical professionals and activists like “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” These set up emotional and medical hostage situations with immense pressure on patients to begin treatment they may not have wanted and parents to go along with it.
The medical industry has a great incentive to do this because it creates a pipeline for people to become lifetime customers for medications and other therapies. We already know that, in the US, dialysis centers game the Medicare system by giving less effective treatments because they have a captive market and make more money with this approach. People who go through transitions will need medical treatments for the rest of their lives, both to primarily maintain their new bodies and to deal with the side effects of their primary therapies. Again, a captive market, but this time created through inappropriate emotional pressure.
It’s a sad situation. People who question their gender identity absolutely should be taken seriously and helped through their struggles, just like anyone else with significant physical, mental, or emotional challenges. The threat to their mental health is important. But is telling these patients that they will commit suicide if they don’t begin gender-affirming care the best approach? Or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? I hope we can explore the topic more.
Sounds anecdotical. Citation needed.
This article poses the question explicitly, and here is another woman suing her healthcare providers for using this argument. The query
"Would you rather have a living" "or a dead"has hundreds of results on Google and the article mentions people saying this to her family.
How fucking clueless are you? Most trans kids are suicidal or practicing self harm already which is exactly why doctors say this.
No doctor will ever tell you this unless your kid is at risk of self harm or death, already.
Stop fucking lying you vile piece of shit.
Most trans kids are suicidal or practicing self harm already which is exactly why doctors say this.
No doctor will ever tell you this unless your kid is at risk of self harm or death, already.
First off, it isn’t just doctors who say this. People on the streets or on social media shout down friends and family with hostage situation language like this. This also sets up vulnerable people to say it to those who disagree with it, or even worse, reframes suicide as an acceptable response if their friends and family argue against the treatment.
Second, someone should never tell someone else, “you are going to kill yourself unless you do what I tell you.” This goes double when the other person is already in a vulnerable state, and quadruple when the person saying this is in a position of authority. People often kill themselves because they believe there are no other options, and telling them that only cements the “no way out” problem in their minds.
Third, we often tell people who are suicidal not to seek out permanent solutions to temporary problems - like committing suicide because of current mental troubles or life problems. Telling an at-risk individual to get medications and surgeries that irreversibly change their body is a clear-cut case of a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The woman in the article is so distraught by her double masectomy she felt pressured to get that she’s now suing the people who convinced her to go through with it. Even if this only happens to a minority of people, we shouldn’t accept situations like this as “acceptable losses” or anything of the sort.
Fourth, if someone is at serious risk of ending their life, they should be in the emergency room, not arguing over medical procedures with their parents. That’s an extremely volatile situation and hanging the threat over parents’ heads of finding their child’s corpse is a severely wrong approach.
Would you tell someone with severe depression “you will kill yourself if you don’t take SSRIs and get X surgery”? Would you say the same about stimulants to someone with ADHD? Or about antipsychotics to people with bipolar or schizophrenia? Is it acceptable for someone to threaten suicide to maintain a romantic/friendly relationship with someone who doesn’t want it anymore?