Brutkey

Doc Impossible
@Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io

Hmm, what else...

I wish there was better access to surgeons, in terms of wait times and availability of surgeons. There just plain aren't enough surgeons who do this work, especially for phallo- and metoidioplasty. Wait times for medically necessary surgery that range into years is always wrong.

At the same time, I also understand why there aren't more. My mom teaches in a nursing program, believe it or not, and she's the only instructor who even addresses gender-affirming care. There's zero gender-affirming care on any med exams.

That's typical, and it's a big part of why trans broken arm syndrome is so common.

For someone to get into bottom surgery, they basically have to apprentice with an existing surgeon, and that training takes time, which decreases the number of surgeries the surgeon can complete.

It's a catch-22. Either we maximize surgeries now, and accept that as the trans population rises proportionally fewer of us will be able to get surgery at all, maximize training, in which case few people now will get surgery, or the system as more or less it is.

Until gender-affirming care is a significant item on the NCLEX and the USMLE (and equivalent licensing exams internationally), med schools won't teach gender-affirming care, and the problem will stay the same. Med schools crunch out everything that's not a major concern on those exams.