The distance between opinion and the consulting room
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
People who speak loudly about what trans people should or shouldn't do medically are engaging in a legitimate form of oversight. That public debate about someone else's body is a reasonable substitute for the conversation that actually happens between a person and their doctor.
What I was pointing to there is the sheer distance between a studio opinion and a consulting room. When someone sits with their doctor and works through a medical decision, they bring their whole life into that room: their history, their distress, their hopes, what they've already tried, what they can't keep living without. The person on the panel has none of that. They have a category and a strong feeling about it. Those two things are not the same, and we should stop pretending they carry equal weight. Nobody campaigns to have a say in a stranger's knee replacement or their antidepressants. The only reason trans healthcare gets treated differently is that some people have decided trans people's bodies are a public matter. They are not.
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