Doctors dismiss regret complaints as OCD or other conditions
Andrew Gold said:
“people come back all the time and say, I'm not happy with this, and the doctors go, Yes, yes, are, you're fine, you've just got OCD. That's what Ritchie was told, and that's what countless others have been told.”
The idea that clinicians might dismiss post-surgical complaints to protect their own decisions is a recognisable concern about any medical field, and citing a named individual makes it feel documented rather than speculative.
What the research actually shows is that regret following gender-affirming surgery is documented in the literature, taken seriously by clinicians, and consistently low, though researchers are the first to acknowledge those studies have limitations. The jump from one person's experience to a systemic pattern of dismissal is doing a lot of work here: a named individual makes it feel evidenced, but a single disputed account is not evidence of widespread practice. Clinicians who work in this field are not, as a rule, in the business of telling people their distress is OCD to protect their own professional decisions; that is a serious allegation, and there is no published body of evidence behind it. The people who pay for this framing are trans people who have had surgery and are living well, because the implication that any reported satisfaction has been managed or manufactured quietly erases their reality.
Trans people who have had surgery, whose positive outcomes are erased by the implication that any satisfaction they report has been manufactured by clinicians unwilling to admit error.