cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10091907
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As the political debate over health care for transgender youth has intensified across the U.S., elected officials and advocates who favor withholding gender-affirming medical procedures for minors have often said parents are not acting in their children’s best interest when they seek such treatment.
Major medical associations say the treatments are safe and warn of grave mental health consequences for children forced to wait until adulthood to access puberty-blocking drugs, hormones and, in rare cases, surgeries.
Youth and young adults ages 10–24 account for about 15% of all suicides, and research shows LGBTQ+ high school students have higher rates of attempted suicide than their peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Sending a transgender child to a unit that does not align with their gender identity should be out of the question, no matter a hospital’s constraints, said Dr. Jack Turban, director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California, San Francisco, and a researcher of quality care barriers for trans youth in inpatient facilities.
“If you don’t validate the trans identity from day one, their mental health’s going to get worse,” Turban said. “Potentially, you’re sending them out at a higher suicide risk than they came in.”
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Our mental health inpatient facilities suck in the US. (I don’t know if they’re any better outside the US. Bedlam is still active, though allegedly a state-of-the-art institution). The rate of patient abuses in our wards run similar to abuses of prison inmates by staff, about one in three patients is a victim.
Violence and sexual violence from orderlies is common, but also nurses like to get patents prescribed with tranquilizers to keep them easy to manage (and drooling) and hospital pharmacists are complicit in this kind of mistreatment.
This is why our suicide response in the US sucks, since the typical procedure (when police don’t turn an incident into a blue suicide) is to lock the patient in a hellscape like this.
So yes, it’s little surprise that trans patients will be misassigned accommodations and then left vulnerable to abuse. Here in the states, the psych sector gives few fucks once someone is in lockdown.
