Mick Hartley

Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, from the Center for Bioethics and Culture, look at the latest academic assault on normal medical practice, all in the name of trans inclusivity:

In recent years, a striking paradigm shift in medical ethics has emerged, driven by progressive political ideologies purporting to champion “Social Justice.” This shift has precipitated a surge in initiatives centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The resulting effects have varied considerably; they include the introduction of explicit racial bias in treatment protocols in a quest for “health equity,” and an unsettling disregard for biological sex as an important variable in both medical research and patient care. Instead, the new radical movement favors categorizing individuals based on their self-identified and medically irrelevant “gender identity.”

Even more alarmingly, we are witnessing a direct assault on the language associated with women’s health in medicine. Terms traditionally used in clinical settings, such as “mothers,” are being replaced with neutral alternatives like “birthing parents.” Similarly, the term “women” is frequently substituted with “individuals with a cervix,” even though nearly half of women don’t know what a cervix is and such language may therefore cause a significant number of women to forgo important routine cervical screenings.

This trend of overlooking biological sex as a critical medical variable stems from an ideological drive to “queer” the natural world. The proponents of this view resist categorization, arguing that such practices are instruments of oppression wielded by the powerful against the less powerful. According to this perspective, medicine must eschew not only biological categorization of patients, but also traditional notions of what is deemed desirable or adverse patient outcomes….

The authors, a group of transgender sociologists and enthusiasts, and healthcare activists, with not one medical degree among them, argue to dramatically move the goal posts of medical ethics, choosing to completely disregard the health, safety, and well-being of the developing fetus, all in the name of “trans” inclusion. Abiding by their paper’s guidance would land us in a vacuum devoid of medical ethics and a seismic shift away from the importance of scientific research and medical evidence in favor of activist directed healthcare.

The authors argue that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies, and that it might be okay for transmen to continue taking testosterone during pregnancy despite the known health risks to the fetus and effects on its normal development. The desire for “normal fetal outcomes,” according to the authors, is rooted in a problematic desire “to protect their offspring from becoming anything other than ‘normal’” and “reflect historical and ongoing social practices for creating ‘ideal’ and normative bodies.”

This is, quite frankly, insane.

The desire for a normal healthy baby now becomes part of an oppressive system of control. How easy it is, using progressive academic discourse, to advocate for suffering and cruelty in the name of trans ideology. To hell with the baby: the validation of the trans mother is all that matters. And keep taking the testosterone, even if it messes with the foetus.

In the paper, Pfeffer et al. maintain that:

[L]acking and uncertain medical evidence (HRT with testosterone during pregnancy and chest feeding) in a highly gendered treatment context (pregnancy and lactation care), both patients and providers tend to pursue precautionary, offspring-focused treatment approaches.

We argue that medical ethics exists to guide medical providers and protect both the expectant mother and her future offspring.

The authors of the article strive to underscore the prevailing power dynamic and expertise discrepancy between medical professionals and their pregnant patients. They also highlight “lack of training on trans pregnancy care,” and the failure of the current “precautionary approach” within a “highly-gendered space of pregnancy care.” However, conspicuously absent is any robust, concrete data to substantiate their claims. Instead, they bolster their argument by cherry-picking quotations from their study involving a pool of 70 international “trans” individuals and 22 “health care providers” or simply those who were “identifying as health care providers” at the time of the study.

Before continuing, we must point out the obvious flaw in the article: pregnancy care isn’t “gendered,” it’s sexed. Only the biologically fertile human females of our species possess the physical attributes necessary for pregnancy and childbirth. This is a simple biological reality.

But simple biological reality is of little concern to the ideologically driven.

Here's the paper – Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the “normal”: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender1 pregnancy.

[Via Ophelia B at B&W]