Last week I posted about two rival conferences being run in London on the subject of medical treatment for transgender youths, in particular the use of so-called “puberty blockers” which, depending on who you listen to, either buy time for adolescent kids to decide what they want to do with their lives before biological changes make that choice much more complicated, or turn innocent kids into freaks and perverts. Christine Burns attended the conference and has a collection of interviews with participants in a podcast available online. It is worth noting that even Kenneth Zucker appears to think that the UK’s medical practices are somewhat behind the times. There’s some comment from me below the fold.

The interview with Zucker is particularly interesting because even he believes that there are people for whom the correct treatment is gender reassignment. I think that there are two areas where he gets into trouble. Firstly, like many older doctors in the field, he is very concerned about the possibility of mistakes. He is right in saying that gender identity is not fixed, and can vary with time, but because of the fear that people will change their minds doctors have a habit of making their patients jump through hoops to prove that they deserve treatment. Often this simply adds to the pain and frustration that those patients are already suffering.

In addition Zucker (and some of the other doctors interviewed) are very much concerned with gender conformity. They appear to divide the world into “good trannies” who undergo reassignment and become thoroughly gender normative in their new lives, and “bad trannies” who will not be gender normative in either role. If a doctor believes that his role is to help people become gender normative them he won’t be of any help to around half of the transgender population. Zucker even appears to believe that it is important to ensure that gay kids are gender normative so that they don’t get bullied in school or by their parents. He may be thinking that changing individuals is easier than changing society, and I can’t help but agree with that. But telling people to shut up and conform is not a good way of creating a fairer society. Besides, by having a reputation as a man who “cures” trans and gay kids, he is going to attract all the wrong sort of parents to his practice.

I was also interested by the way that Marvin Belzer was using the word “moral”. Look the word up in a dictionary and you’ll find definitions talking about “right conduct” with the implication that being “moral” is the right thing to do. Belzer, however, was using “moral” in the sense of a system of narrow behavioral rules that the rest of society may not agree with and may even find abhorrent. Interesting.

Finally I have to agree with Christine that having rival conferences is not a good way for medical science to go forward. It would be much better if all of the doctors got together and talked. Possibly Zucker will have done some good at the RMS conference, even if they do see him as a dangerous radical. But I’m afraid that refusal to listen to the views of patients, their families and support groups is all too typical of the medical establishment in the UK, so I can’t see the RMS making their conferences more open any time soon.