Mick Hartley

Here's a powerful and important critique of the practice of gender medicine in the US from Erica Li, a paediatrician in Washington State. 

I believe medicine is being “queered,” or Postmodernized. Let me clarify.

There exist diverse metanarratives about health and healing globally. The mainstream form of allopathic medicine, typically referred to as “Western Medicine,” presumably stands in contrast to “Eastern Medicine” or other alternatives. This categorization suggests parity between “Western” and “Eastern” or “alternative” medicine, implying all these different metanarratives are equally valid. However, I would contend it is more accurate to place medicine as practiced around the world into three categories: “Premodern,” “Modern,” and “Postmodern.” The distinction should be based on underlying philosophy rather than incidental geography or ethnicity.

Examples of Premodern medicine would encompass practices such as attributing illnesses to witchcraft, consuming tiger penises to increase virility, or cannibalizing albino people’s body parts to gain health and good fortune. These practices, rooted in superstition rather than empirical evidence, were once common worldwide, including in the Western world, and they still exist in various forms today. On the other hand, Modern medicine, typically practiced at your local hospital or clinic, is a product of the Enlightenment, prioritizing reason, science, and individual sovereignty. It transcends geographical boundaries and ethnic divides, benefiting humanity globally.

Postmodern medicine seems to have a particular foothold in the West, especially in the United States, where it has become institutionalized. It is relatively new but is embedded in multiple American medical societies and medical schools. While it leverages the same technologies as Modern medicine, thereby superficially resembling it, it fundamentally seeks to dismantle Modern medicine’s underlying philosophy. While Postmodern medicine is being propagated across American medical schools through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracies, nothing exemplifies Postmodernity more than the gender ideology that drives the American “gender-affirming” model of care. […]

Modern pediatric care strongly emphasizes collaboration with parents and guardians. Like any pediatrician, I sometimes encounter disagreements with the parents of my patients. When working with teenagers, we strive to maintain family cohesion, even if the parents don’t seem so reasonable to us. It is unthinkable to deliberately drive a wedge between a teenage patient and her parents, let alone emotionally blackmail parents with statements like “would you prefer a living son or a dead daughter?” It is unthinkable to pit a divorced mother and father against each other, using the parent more willing to transition their child as leverage against the hesitant one. It is unthinkable for pediatric doctors to treat parents who don’t consent to puberty blockers “as if the parents were abusive, uneducated, and willing to harm their own children.” […]

The Postmodern perspective on ethics sheds light on the behavior of some American gender medicine practitioners. As staunch advocates for cultural constructionism and cultural relativism, Postmodernists express profound skepticism towards the existence of universal ethical standards. They have also declared that the idea of the sovereign individual is a construct of oppressive Western culture. Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, and her co-author Ozlem Sensoy argue that “The ideal of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.”

With the concept of the universal and individual out of the way, Modern medicine’s concerns about morbidity, mortality, providing false hope, and patient abandonment vanish. What becomes paramount is the trajectory of Trans People as a class, a group, and a concept. Will this group gain power? Under Gender Ideology there is no such thing as individual dignity and therefore there is no harm that can be done to individuals. There is only collective Social Justice.

In Postmodernism, language wields immense power. This is evident in gender clinics where clinicians are instructed to replace the term “detransitioner” with “people who changed their gender goals.” The existence of detransitioners represents medical malpractice catastrophes, but in a Postmodern world, language constructs reality itself. By manipulating language, such as avoiding the use of the word “detransitioner” and claiming its use harms “the community,” a Postmodern practitioner conveniently sidesteps acknowledging individual harm, placing blame instead on the child seeking medical transition and the consenting parent(s).

But yes – read it all.