Vaishnavi Sundar, “Dysphoric: Fleeing Womanhood like a House on Fire (Part 2: Medicalisation)” (2020)
In Part 2 of her four-part series on gender identity ideology and its effects on women and girls already living in a world hostile to them just for being female, Sundar focuses in more detail on how gender identity ideology has changed current medical practice into a tool to push women and girls into transitioning into the opposite sex. Starting with the Informed Consent Model, which apparently urges medical professionals to agree with their patients that they are transgender if they say so, and to allow them to obtain hormonal treatments and undergo surgery without their undergoing mental health evaluation or referral from a mental health expert, this episode investigates the various forms of hormonal drug treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormonal treatments and their side effects. As in other episodes in the documentary series, Part 2 is structured around interviews with medical and psychological counsellors and therapists, and with individuals who have undergone transitioning and then detransitioned. Near its end, the episode asks if transitioning has improved the mental health of those who have undergone the procedures and treatments involved, and based on the studies it cites, the episode finds that to the contrary, transitioning has not only made transitioners’ mental health worse but has made them feel more suicidal than they might otherwise have felt had they not transitioned.
In concentrating on interviews with therapists and people who have “been there, done that”, the episode does ignore exploring the wider context and agenda behind transitioning and the medical profession’s sudden enthusiasm for transitioning over alternative explanations and treatments as to why so many people, particularly women and girls, loathe being female. Few medical professionals, either male or female, consider that the Western cultural stereotyping of what is desirable feminine behaviour, and society’s disapproval of behaviour unbecoming for women and girls, are what may be driving large numbers of women and girls to reject being female. If to be female is to be shallow and to be obsessed with frivolous activities and desires, and to shun serious study or activity in other areas of life, then it is no wonder that women and girls are rebelling against this narrow definition of being female. This could be an opportunity for Western society to re-examine what it really means to be male or female, and to allow youngsters, boys and girls alike, to express themselves regardless of their sex; instead, societies in the West are compelling young people to undergo invasive surgeries and hormonal treatments at the cost of their own health and quality of life to conform to increasingly narrow definitions of what is appropriate behaviour and thinking for males and females. The pharmaceutical industry’s interest in transitioning and the surgeries and drug treatments that must accompany such transitioning, with all the potential profits to be made, is not mentioned.
Sundar chooses not to condemn but rather to explore and explain what is involved in transitioning and the hazards that exist therein, which makes this episode an informative and educational one for people wanting to transition and for their families as well. Families of teenagers wanting to transition will be made aware of current medical practice and medical models that encourage, even coerce, transitioning at the expense of exploring alternative, if perhaps more difficult and complicated, solutions.
Perhaps the most hair-raising moment in this episode is its brief focus on a gender identity activist who claims that babies can express gender preferences and that a boy baby is expressing his preference for being a girl by simply unbuttoning his onesie! This is one demonstration of how an ideology becomes a crude and simplistic credo that reduces complex emotions and behaviours into black-and-white / either-or categories.