Why do doctors prescribe too low dosages of hormones for trans women (and I'm pretty sure also trans men)? Like they are prescribing women and girls I know like a quarter of what my mum has for menopause in gel. Oral is just such a bad method though.
Are the doctors uneducated, stupid, or is it malicious? I don't get it at all. Do they want people to not transition?
At least in the NHS I would think it would make more logistical sense for them to just prescribe oestrogen injections for monotherapy since they already buy plenty of needles and it means they don't have to buy anti-androgens which would streamline the supply chain.
Flood dected; post discarded :3
>Are the doctors uneducated, stupid, or is it malicious? I don't get it at all. Do they want people to not transition?
all of the above, they probably see transness as some sorta of hormone imbalance or mental illness, so the right amount of estrogen would be enough to cure it/make you able to function as a normal man
the reason, particularly in britain, is a culture of absolutely wanting to avoid responsibility and minimize risk at all costs, combined with aggressive short termism.
estrogen will increase your risk of blood clots (to the female level), nobody wants to be responsible for you having a blood clot, a blood clot is a specific and unambiguous risk (unlike osteoporosis or depression or failed transition) so they act to avoid that instead of to help you.
this is also one of the reasons they don't let you do injections: because if needles wind up being redirected from health use to drug use, someone might get in trouble. plus, you might hurt yourself if a responsible, credentialed authority figure carefully protected by mountains of paperwork doesn't do it for you, and if you manage to hurt yourself someone will have to get in trouble…
doctors are usually ignorant, sometimes so self-preserving as to be malicious, but mostly it's an institutional and cultural problem of the UK as a whole. there is a persistent cultural need to have someone's permission to do something and a persistent cultural fear that if something goes wrong it will all be your fault unless you can point out the specific documents that make it someone else's fault instead. moreover, as we're not really an individualist society, "just let people take risks for themselves and let them suffer the consequences" isn't an option. we can't have people living for themselves, not in britain.
this runs adjacent to the sort of right-wing "oh muh 'elf n safety" whining, but you must understand that as half bullshit lies to get people angry, and half a sort of pressure release valve where, because this is a persistent cultural problem, you need to inoculate the population with a sort of shikata ga nai attitude. a ragebait article about how annoying it was that a supervisor at a construction site made everyone wear hard hats. the figure of the jobsworth.
a competent doctor may think to himself, illustratively, it's more than my job's worth… as he underdoses you, because it helps resolve the contradiction between knowing he's doing something wrong but also knowing that to do otherwise is to put himself in the firing line, so he's just got to follow procedure… but most likely the doctor isn't competent and is busy. the NHS is a whole other shitshow. great at acute care, ration everything else to the bone.