Clearly the real issue is “cosmetic dysphoria” - as in “I don’t like the way I look”, which, if taken at face value (so to speak) would also include liposuction, face lifts, breast augmentation and so on. Why should a straight woman be denied publicly funded breast augmentation when a male can get it on demand and paid for I assume... why should any male be denied testosterone on demand in any quantity if they are self-identified as muscle dysphoric? A small quibble: the link on eastern German athletes was more about anabolic steroids, which can have fairly dramatic and painful impacts on liver health among other things, not on Teatosterone per se.
Testosterone drugs for females are clearly dangerous. Scott Newgent in 'What is a Woman?' mentions some of the problems. The government regulatory bodies seem to be remarkably delerict
in their responsibility to regulate such drugs. One possible reason they are so obliging to TRAs is that there is a false popular perception that the trans community is marginalised and victimised. The reality is that TRAs are some of the most powerful people around.
The horse has long-since bolted in the inappropriate use of off-label drugs in the evolving ‘discipline’ of ‘gender medicine’.
The next challenge is cocktailing a rationale that justifies this one:
“For [female] people requiring masculinising hormone therapy for gender dysphoria, we use the authority indication ‘androgen deficiency due to an established testicular disorder’.”
As I’ve said before, this is the frontier where the rules don’t hold and the pursuit is considered noble.
The gender ideologues/clinicians have a big problem: in order to make services "billable" (paid for by taxpayers, that is) something must be deemed pathological, but it must not be the mind of potential patients, because they seek to normalise the phenomenon of people believing they're a different sex to the one they are.
The implication is there's an entirely new but natural variant of human being that is "born in the wrong body", though they never explain how this could happen; instead they trickily conflate it with an intersex condition. In this case, it's the brain that is "the right sex" while the body is "wrong". How the entirety of the rest of the body could be influenced by sex-typical hormones in utero, while the brain is mysteriously and singularly affected only by the opposite sex hormone (as some posit), is never explained or demonstrated.
Every known intersex condition affects the genitals and reproductive tissue of the affected person, causing varying degrees of sexual or reproductive ambiguity or dysfunction. There are no known intersex conditions in which the brain is the primary site of disordered development while the genitals and body remain completely typical for the sex of the person. The ideologues call it "different" rather than disordered development—again, we have the conflict between needing to pathologise and wanting to avoid it at the same time; they want the brain to be right and the body to be wrong, so “different” is a preferable description. The brain is "different" but "right"; the body is "wrong".
Hence this implied concept (they never come right out and call it that) of a whole new intersex condition of a type that contradicts everything known about intersex conditions since the late 1700s when they were first becoming understood, represents something never before seen or dreamt of, for obvious reasons: it makes no sense whatever!
But who needs empiricism or logic when you’re trying to achieve a pseudo-scientific sleight of hand?
The work-around for the activists’ dilemma of needing to pathologise while wanting to avoid pathologising is to simply pathologise the body. The mind is fine but the body stubbornly refuses to conform to the beliefs of the patient's mind, and the mind must be taken as the supreme authority on what reality is.
A truly bizarre turnaround in a discipline that prides itself on being scientific.
Will this now-explicit precedent of the mind being the authority over the body be extended to people with all kinds of beliefs about their bodies, e.g. those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder who believe their limbs are somehow “wrong” and urge surgeons to remove them, sometimes threatening suicide if they don’t? Currently surgeons are not licensed to “affirm” this “identity”.
By this new paradigm, the bodies of anorexic girls and boys must be deemed "disordered" and “wrong” because according to the supreme determinant of reality—the teens’ beliefs (“identity”), they should have no body fat. Therefore fat-reduction technologies must be made available to affected persons! No "gatekeeping" will be tolerated.
How about any of a myriad of other delusions about the body, known as “somatic delusions”? Will the mind in those cases similarly be taken as the authority on what the body should be?
Will people exhibiting Munchhausen’s syndrome be approved for surgery for medical conditions for which there are no objective signs? If not, why not?
What will happen to the term delusion, once we deem the mind the sole arbiter of good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lie?
Just how far might this go?
Or is this simply further evidence that all things related to gender exist in their own special silo, protected by hyper-aggressive lobbyists and activist doctors, where the Hippocratic Oath, the scientific method, and the Nuremberg Code setting forth the rules by which medical experiments should take place simply do not apply?
Shorter Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons: 'Look, we know we're not supposed to be claiming public subsidies for what are not medical (and probably not even cosmetic) procedures, so we've been fudging our claims and fleecing the public, and we want you to make this rort.. ah...er... legit.'
"A spokesperson did not give a direct answer, but noted that PBS testosterone requires a clinician to contact Services Australia for an authority to issue the prescription."
Artificial steroids, unlike sex, exist on a spectrum, one axis is anabolic strength and the other is weakly or strongly masculinizing (androgenic) for lack of simpler words. Testosterone, a natural steroid, is anabolic and androgenic - when using it your body retains substantial nitrogen for building muscles, red blood cells, strengthening bones among other things (anabolic). The androgenic properties activates sex drive, male pattern hair growth, skin sebum, and thickening of vocal cords.
Testosterone cannot be taken in pill form. High doses (supraphysiologic) of testosterone (injected) in men shut down natural testosterone production (balls shrink) and via “aromatization” is converted into excess estrogen - male bodybuilders can develop breast tissue (gynecomastia), and with testosterone induced hyperprolactinemia in extreme cases they lactate.
Oral steroids are chemically modified testosterone for the most part, and are configured to have low androgenic effects and high anabolic effects - the testosterone component is blocked from aromatizing. They are also modified to amplify the anabolic effects, so induce high nitrogen retention and all that goes with it. They are also good at distorting blood lipids and other effects leading to heart and circulatory disturbances.
They are also extremely harsh on the liver -“hepatotoxicity” - and cannot be taken for more than a few weeks at a time. Enlarged liver, hepatitis, and tumors are part of that game.
Anabolic (harshest), Dianabol, Turinabol… orals, and if overdone you’d have hepatic problems (stabbing pain in abdomen), infertility, gradual virilization, dramatic increase in strength and muscularity, bone density increases, high hematocrit (red blood cell count) causing increased chance of stroke (thick blood) and heart problems (having to pump that thick blood).
Comparing oral anabolic steroids in East German female athletes to testosterone injections in women doesn’t work. The method of dosing, volume, chemical makeup and and the side effects are vastly larger and unique in the athletes. You cannot prescribe oral steroids like these for humans, it would only be black market drugs.
Clearly the real issue is “cosmetic dysphoria” - as in “I don’t like the way I look”, which, if taken at face value (so to speak) would also include liposuction, face lifts, breast augmentation and so on. Why should a straight woman be denied publicly funded breast augmentation when a male can get it on demand and paid for I assume... why should any male be denied testosterone on demand in any quantity if they are self-identified as muscle dysphoric? A small quibble: the link on eastern German athletes was more about anabolic steroids, which can have fairly dramatic and painful impacts on liver health among other things, not on Teatosterone per se.
Until we pull the pernicious lie of "gender identity" out by the root clinicians will continue to promote the myth of "true trans."
Testosterone drugs for females are clearly dangerous. Scott Newgent in 'What is a Woman?' mentions some of the problems. The government regulatory bodies seem to be remarkably delerict
in their responsibility to regulate such drugs. One possible reason they are so obliging to TRAs is that there is a false popular perception that the trans community is marginalised and victimised. The reality is that TRAs are some of the most powerful people around.
The horse has long-since bolted in the inappropriate use of off-label drugs in the evolving ‘discipline’ of ‘gender medicine’.
The next challenge is cocktailing a rationale that justifies this one:
“For [female] people requiring masculinising hormone therapy for gender dysphoria, we use the authority indication ‘androgen deficiency due to an established testicular disorder’.”
As I’ve said before, this is the frontier where the rules don’t hold and the pursuit is considered noble.
The gender ideologues/clinicians have a big problem: in order to make services "billable" (paid for by taxpayers, that is) something must be deemed pathological, but it must not be the mind of potential patients, because they seek to normalise the phenomenon of people believing they're a different sex to the one they are.
The implication is there's an entirely new but natural variant of human being that is "born in the wrong body", though they never explain how this could happen; instead they trickily conflate it with an intersex condition. In this case, it's the brain that is "the right sex" while the body is "wrong". How the entirety of the rest of the body could be influenced by sex-typical hormones in utero, while the brain is mysteriously and singularly affected only by the opposite sex hormone (as some posit), is never explained or demonstrated.
Every known intersex condition affects the genitals and reproductive tissue of the affected person, causing varying degrees of sexual or reproductive ambiguity or dysfunction. There are no known intersex conditions in which the brain is the primary site of disordered development while the genitals and body remain completely typical for the sex of the person. The ideologues call it "different" rather than disordered development—again, we have the conflict between needing to pathologise and wanting to avoid it at the same time; they want the brain to be right and the body to be wrong, so “different” is a preferable description. The brain is "different" but "right"; the body is "wrong".
Hence this implied concept (they never come right out and call it that) of a whole new intersex condition of a type that contradicts everything known about intersex conditions since the late 1700s when they were first becoming understood, represents something never before seen or dreamt of, for obvious reasons: it makes no sense whatever!
But who needs empiricism or logic when you’re trying to achieve a pseudo-scientific sleight of hand?
The work-around for the activists’ dilemma of needing to pathologise while wanting to avoid pathologising is to simply pathologise the body. The mind is fine but the body stubbornly refuses to conform to the beliefs of the patient's mind, and the mind must be taken as the supreme authority on what reality is.
A truly bizarre turnaround in a discipline that prides itself on being scientific.
Will this now-explicit precedent of the mind being the authority over the body be extended to people with all kinds of beliefs about their bodies, e.g. those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder who believe their limbs are somehow “wrong” and urge surgeons to remove them, sometimes threatening suicide if they don’t? Currently surgeons are not licensed to “affirm” this “identity”.
By this new paradigm, the bodies of anorexic girls and boys must be deemed "disordered" and “wrong” because according to the supreme determinant of reality—the teens’ beliefs (“identity”), they should have no body fat. Therefore fat-reduction technologies must be made available to affected persons! No "gatekeeping" will be tolerated.
How about any of a myriad of other delusions about the body, known as “somatic delusions”? Will the mind in those cases similarly be taken as the authority on what the body should be?
Will people exhibiting Munchhausen’s syndrome be approved for surgery for medical conditions for which there are no objective signs? If not, why not?
What will happen to the term delusion, once we deem the mind the sole arbiter of good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lie?
Just how far might this go?
Or is this simply further evidence that all things related to gender exist in their own special silo, protected by hyper-aggressive lobbyists and activist doctors, where the Hippocratic Oath, the scientific method, and the Nuremberg Code setting forth the rules by which medical experiments should take place simply do not apply?
Shorter Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons: 'Look, we know we're not supposed to be claiming public subsidies for what are not medical (and probably not even cosmetic) procedures, so we've been fudging our claims and fleecing the public, and we want you to make this rort.. ah...er... legit.'
"A spokesperson did not give a direct answer, but noted that PBS testosterone requires a clinician to contact Services Australia for an authority to issue the prescription."
Enquiring minds want to know...
Artificial steroids, unlike sex, exist on a spectrum, one axis is anabolic strength and the other is weakly or strongly masculinizing (androgenic) for lack of simpler words. Testosterone, a natural steroid, is anabolic and androgenic - when using it your body retains substantial nitrogen for building muscles, red blood cells, strengthening bones among other things (anabolic). The androgenic properties activates sex drive, male pattern hair growth, skin sebum, and thickening of vocal cords.
Testosterone cannot be taken in pill form. High doses (supraphysiologic) of testosterone (injected) in men shut down natural testosterone production (balls shrink) and via “aromatization” is converted into excess estrogen - male bodybuilders can develop breast tissue (gynecomastia), and with testosterone induced hyperprolactinemia in extreme cases they lactate.
Oral steroids are chemically modified testosterone for the most part, and are configured to have low androgenic effects and high anabolic effects - the testosterone component is blocked from aromatizing. They are also modified to amplify the anabolic effects, so induce high nitrogen retention and all that goes with it. They are also good at distorting blood lipids and other effects leading to heart and circulatory disturbances.
They are also extremely harsh on the liver -“hepatotoxicity” - and cannot be taken for more than a few weeks at a time. Enlarged liver, hepatitis, and tumors are part of that game.
Anabolic (harshest), Dianabol, Turinabol… orals, and if overdone you’d have hepatic problems (stabbing pain in abdomen), infertility, gradual virilization, dramatic increase in strength and muscularity, bone density increases, high hematocrit (red blood cell count) causing increased chance of stroke (thick blood) and heart problems (having to pump that thick blood).
Comparing oral anabolic steroids in East German female athletes to testosterone injections in women doesn’t work. The method of dosing, volume, chemical makeup and and the side effects are vastly larger and unique in the athletes. You cannot prescribe oral steroids like these for humans, it would only be black market drugs.