Informative Essay - Transgender

Transgender, or trans, is a term that applies to over 700,000 Americans who feel their internal gender identity does not match the sex that they were assigned with at birth (Lopez, 2015). A large majority of tans gender people undergo medical treatments to change their physical traits. Such treatments include hormone therapy as well as what can be a very complicated, invasive medical procedure. While sexual reassignment surgery has become more widely accepted in today’s society, prevalent health risks and ethical concerns that accompany such a surgery exist. Throughout this essay, I plan to further inform about what it means to be transgender, the process of “transitioning,” and the health risks and ethical concerns of such therapies and surgeries.

Increasing media coverage of gender identity has altered the publics understanding of what it actually means to be transgender. For example, Caitlyn Jenner and television star Laverne Cox are two examples of the media drawing attention to the lives of a transgender. While the media has been focusing on the lives of these two glamorous stars, the media fails to depict some of the many challenging aspects that the rest of the transgender community struggles with as they come out and begin their journey of transitioning.

Gender identity is a person’s personal identification as a male or female. Most Americans are cisgender, which means that they identify themselves as the gender that they were assigned at birth. For example, this means a person born with a penis identifies themself as a male. A transgender on the other hand, does not identify themselves as the gender that they were given at birth. For example, a female born with a vagina and raised as a girl may internally identify as a male.  Studies have shown that people may express their gender identity as soon as they can talk, as soon as they can say the words “girl” and “boy” (Gruener, 2015).

Transitioning is the process of permanently changing one’s gender presentation to the gender that they internally identify themselves as. Not all transgender people take the same path to transition. Some transgender people will only come out to their friends or family, which is called social transitioning. Other transgender people may undergo hormone therapy and multiple surgeries, which is called medically transitioning.

Often times transgender people have a tough time as they struggle with gender identity; they may feel rejected or alone, face discrimination and sometimes even violence. Such struggles may cause the person to feel depressed or even have suicidal thoughts. It is important in these cases that the person seeks help either by seeing a psychologist or ensuring that they have support from family or friends. Ethically speaking, doctors require transgender patients to see a psychologist before beginning any medical treatment. If the psychologist feels as if the patient is stable and ready to proceed, the medical transitioning begins.

The first step of medically transitioning begins hormone therapy. The next step may involve surgery. Sexual reassignment surgery is a surgical procedure that a transgender undergoes to alter their physical appearance and function of their sexual characteristics to resemble that of their identified sex (McIntosh, 2015). There are both male-to-female (trans female) and female-to-male (trans man) surgeries (Dargie, Blair, Pukall & Coyle, 2014).

Before most surgeries, the patient’s primary care doctor does pre-surgery assessments. However, as apart of the standard of care, routine mental health assessments are done before a patient is to undergo a sexual reassignment surgery (Mclintosh, 2015). There are commonly three main components of the asessments including diagnosis/differential diagnosis, eligibility asessmenet, and readiness asessement. Readiness is the part of the assessment that most resembles a “general psychiatric assessment, in which a full biopsychosocial formulation” of the patient’s current status to determine their readiness (Mcltosh, 2015). Undergoing any surgery has its risks. Surgical treatment may require multiple surgeries with the inherent surgical and general anesthetic risks, which may include bleeding, anesthetic complications, and infection that can lead to significant morbidity and mortality. Regarding sexual reassignment surgery, a majority of the cases require multiple surgeries.