One of the things that trans people have to put up with when we try to transition is cis doctors refusing to prescribe hormones for us until we’ve jumped through their stupid fucking hoops. I basically had to lie to the shrink I was seeing to get mine in a timely manner. This was in 2011, when I was homeless and constantly on the edge of suicide. I told my doctors this. They knew this. Still, they delayed, out of some allegiance to a medical standard written by cis people from a cis-centrist perspective. I remember vividly that some of my nastier brushes with ideation would happen after various frustrating delays of the process of being allowed to start taking hormones. They played with my life, and they thought they were helping me.

Waiting periods for hormones are an inhuman abomination. They have no moral justification whatsoever. It is not, however, an enormous surprise that they remain hugely popular among the various groups that get to set policy for the prescription of hormone replacement therapy. Cis people would rather torture a trans woman for three months or an entire year or however long they decide is sufficient for them to allow us some self determination, they’d rather keep our lives and sanity right up against the precipice, they’d rather we suffer in miserable agony knowing every day the damage gets worse, than risk allowing even a single cis man to “make a mistake.” Because trans lives don’t matter, and cis comfort does.

But isn’t there room for reasonable people to disagree–

NO. There is no room for reasonable people to disagree about this. What we have room for is us forgiving you for supporting and promoting a system that does incalculable damage to us every fucking day. And in most times, in most ways, we do forgive you, without grudge or hesitation. But don’t ever confuse that forgiveness with us agreeing to disagree.

The care and treatment of transgender people should be done in accordance with medical ethics guides written by transgender doctors and bioethicists. That’s the only way I see the system ever really working for us. Of course, I hardly expect this to ever be the case, what with the “conflict of interest” and all. More plausible in the short to medium term, we need to make the informed consent model the default model, and the one that the laws defer to. Until then, more of us will suffer needlessly, all for the sake of a hypothetical cis man who got confused.