Medicine often works from criteria, not a single test
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
There's no real way to diagnose gender incongruence because there's no test for it. Unlike a broken bone or an infection, you can't scan for it or measure it in a blood sample, so how can anyone be sure it's real?
Medicine works from criteria far more often than people realise. Around 40 percent of appendices removed turn out to be healthy, because appendicitis has no definitive test either: clinicians use a pattern of symptoms, examination findings, and blood results to make a judgement call. That is not a failure of medicine, it is how medicine works across dozens of conditions. Gender incongruence is no different. There are established criteria, developed over decades, asking whether a person has experienced a persistent sense that their gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. The criteria exist, they are applied carefully, and the absence of a blood test does not make the condition any less real or the diagnosis any less valid.
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