LogFAQs > #886045682

Soviet_Poland posted...

Callixtus posted...

So could you please tell me the reason why you support sex reassignment surgery and not amputation for apotemnophiliacs, despite both operations resulting in the destruction or degrading of functional body parts?

Well for starters, there already are procedures that result in destruction or degradation of functional body parts. It's called a vasectomy or a tubal ligation and they're perfectly valid forms of birth control.

But the real reason for the difference in your example is that no surgeon is going to perform the operation for the apotemnophiliac. First off, someone with that would be extremely rare compared to a transgendered individual. So someone coming into a surgeon's office asking for an elective amputation is going to be laughed out. That's just inviting over liability. Given it's incredible rarity, there isn't any literature supporting amputation as a valid treatment modality with good outcomes. The same can't be said for HRT or SRS, because there is some evidence to suggest it helps (albeit weak evidence).

So like I get your desire to grasp for consistency here, but your incredibly esoteric zebra of an example doesn't really have a lot of real world applicability. Apotemnophilia is just not something clinicians encounter, but transgenderism is. And not addressing that component, even just psychosocially, is asking for poorer outcomes and less than standard of care for transgendered patients.

Those are bad arguments. The thing about principles is that you don't have to go into the nitty gritty details about whether or not it works in practice or not, in order to affirm whether the principle is worth upholding. So we don't have to worry about whether doctors in practice will provide amputations, only that it is morally permissible for them to do so and that we as a society should support such practices at least in theory. Otherwise, 80 years ago, when no one would have conducted SRS both because of moral concerns and the technology of the time, we could have established a rule for all time that no one would ever perform a sex reassignment surgery, regardless of changes in circumstances.

A vasectomy is also quite different from both SRS or amputations, by the way, so I don't think those examples are on point. First, a vasectomy is a form of birth control. It has nothing to do with the false mental image issues which are prevalent in gender dysphoria or apotemnophilia. A person getting a vasectomy just doesn't want to have children. Again, I still think this is wrongheaded because I always think it's wrong to render a human being less than functional, but it's nowhere close to SRS which attempts to completely remake a human being from one sex into the other, even though this is impossible, and only crudely done, in an attempt to match a false self-image.
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KhanofKhans, KhanJohnson, Saloonist, Basileos