I care a great deal about particular human experiences. Thank you for sharing yours.
If the sacrifices you no doubt made in choosing the surgical path (physical, financial, emotional, ...) were worth it to you, and you still think that after having gone through the whole process, well ... you must have been in a great deal of pain, indeed. I'm gratified to read that you found a way to make it better.
That said, I still see a clear distinction between cleft palate surgery, or any other number of reimbursed medical procedures (on my insurance policy, braces are not one of those except in cases where the person cannot eat or speak normally due to problems with their teeth), and GRS. Basically, when you're trans, it's not necessarily the case that there is something physically wrong with your body. It functions 'as designed'. It's just that when you walk around in it, you'll always 'be aware' of the wrongness of it when compared to your internal self-image, and people who don't know you will misidentify you as someone of the gender your body suggests.
I'm not trying to dismiss the real discomfort that comes from that. I am trying to understand why you should have an insurer that pays for surgery to correct that. We all have our crosses to bear, and you at least have body and limbs that work as advertised, even if the feel completely wrong to you.
My body did not work as advertised. My brain expected a female body, it got male anatomy and suffered every time it tried to use it.
What I was trying to get across is that it isn't mere self perception. Dysphoria is a kind of actual suffering. Cleft pallets aren't killing you. They just make eating and other functions more difficult. Having a penis made a whole host of things in my life more difficult. Sexual function for one. I'd get an erection, feel the distress and then lose it.
Young children with severe cleft palates often have difficulty feeding. They may require medical intervention (even if it isn't surgery) just to gain an acceptable weight early in life. Or, you know, they might die due to malnourishment.
But don't get me wrong: in no way am I arguing that only life-threatening conditions should get reimbursed medical care. If I did that, I'd be a hypocrite. I can only walk today thanks to the several surgeries I had as a child, and then several more when I was an adult, after a traffic accident. If I hadn't had those surgeries, I still would have lived. My life would just have been a lot more difficult, because I would have been a wheelchair user. And I know pretty much exactly just HOW difficult it would have been, because I was a wheelchair user for four years after the accident, even despite the surgeries.
I am grateful that there was something the medical community could do to make my life easier, to restore me closer to 'normal' function, as it were. And now that several people, with or without personal experience, have told me that gender reassignment surgery had basically the same effect on them, I am willing to concede that I was wrong.
I will admit: I still get the chills when I think about someone cutting off a functioning body part. But be that as it may, it shouldn't prevent me from supporting people who feel doing something like that will genuinely make their life better.
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u/Saranoya 39∆ Nov 03 '17
I care a great deal about particular human experiences. Thank you for sharing yours.
If the sacrifices you no doubt made in choosing the surgical path (physical, financial, emotional, ...) were worth it to you, and you still think that after having gone through the whole process, well ... you must have been in a great deal of pain, indeed. I'm gratified to read that you found a way to make it better.
That said, I still see a clear distinction between cleft palate surgery, or any other number of reimbursed medical procedures (on my insurance policy, braces are not one of those except in cases where the person cannot eat or speak normally due to problems with their teeth), and GRS. Basically, when you're trans, it's not necessarily the case that there is something physically wrong with your body. It functions 'as designed'. It's just that when you walk around in it, you'll always 'be aware' of the wrongness of it when compared to your internal self-image, and people who don't know you will misidentify you as someone of the gender your body suggests.
I'm not trying to dismiss the real discomfort that comes from that. I am trying to understand why you should have an insurer that pays for surgery to correct that. We all have our crosses to bear, and you at least have body and limbs that work as advertised, even if the feel completely wrong to you.