But the idea that trans people and their doctors are in cahoots is laughable: the reality is starkly different. The entire trans healthcare infrastructure emerged in the course of the twentieth century under the mantle of the highly patriarchal field of psychiatry. Institutionally, doctors came to understand hormone treatment and surgery as a means to police the parameters of what they deemed was or wasn’t an ‘acceptable’ trans person – and, by logical extension, the boundaries of gender itself. When medical transitioning was first devised as a technology, its primary purpose was not to help
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