The laws inhibiting access for adequate gender-affirming care for transgender children and adults are amoral, and an affront to the patient-doctor relationship. They insert politicians into a conversation that should be between the doctor and patient, following established evidence-based medical guidance. That last sentence there is key.
I recently read another inflammatory article about a minor who underwent a double mastectomy without proper therapy or informed consent (the total psychological evaluation time she underwent totaled 75 minutes). The article was pushing for more Desantis-esque legislation. I don’t need to get into the reasons why this is a wildly inappropriate response. We know. But the response by left-wing movements also enrages me: they say that the government is intervening in their private health-related affairs. They say they won’t have access to healthcare they need. They say they need people to donate their own money to transgender individuals to move out of state. And they fail to acknowledge the giant gaping wound that led to this: the precedent that set the stage for allowing lawmakers to do this at all. The so-called “opioid crisis.”
We know a lot of things, and I’ve written about them before: mostly that the “opioid” crisis is wildly overblown, and the “illegal use” they abhor comes down mostly to three things: drug abusers using opiates instead of heroin or other drugs, patients with a legitimate need for pain medicine having to obtain it illegally to survive, and people who abuse their medication becoming addicted to it. This should have no effect on the access compliant patients have to their legitimately-prescribed medicine. There is a dearth of data showing that proper use of opiate painkillers causes these tragedies. Because this story is not real. Millions of Americans take a steady dose of painkillers as prescribed and it changes their lives for the better, allowing them to function. The mantra of “little Jenny got a leg injury and then ended up prostituting herself for oxy she didn’t need after becoming magically addicted from 4 weeks of low-dose oxycodone” is exceedingly rare and more likely attributed to genetic predispositions to addiction. But the “little Jenny” story, as I call it, is so popular among “anti-opiate” advocates who don’t give a shit about the lives of the millions of responsible Americans who diligently work with their physicians to maintain a healthy pain medicine regimen, that we are rarely even spoken of. We don’t matter in this conversation. People would rather save fictional Jenny’s than allow those of us who desperately depend on pain medicine to survive. There are no cures and no viable treatments for one of my rare diseases. The other has been treated well with a steady and unchanging dose of tramadol for years. And as both of my doctors have said, taking tramadol every day for life will lead to one potential side effect: constipation. Taking inadequate NSAIDs (e.g., ibuprofen) would not only leave me incapacitated by pain, but also would likely cause a plethora of dire side effects that are lethal. It is not safer for me to take NSAIDs than painkillers. Period. That is an objective fact, and it’s a fact that the public hates. It doesn’t jive with their mantra of “painkillers are evil!” And I don’t see any left-wing movement screaming about how lawmakers have interfered in our care for years and the millions of Americans who are dying without medication as a result.
Notably, only one of these two types of care—access to gender-affirming care, and proper pain medicine—that are inhibited by inappropriate legislation is required to live. Untreated pain can be lethal, not just by suicide and overdose from illegally obtained medicine, but also by cardiovascular events that are brought on by extreme, uncontrolled pain. I’m not aware of anyone dying from not getting their HRT. What this does to both groups is severely damage their quality of life. Both groups are prone to suicide as a result of not receiving required healthcare.
I am not saying that transgender patients are less deserving of care than pain patients. Both are equally deserving of care. There are patients who are both transgender and chronic pain patients! I am pointing out the relatively dire nature of our situation as chronic pain patients, because it highlights the hypocrisy of the refusal of the left-wing movements that are working at rapid pace to help transgender individuals access care. I am saying that we have been suffering for far longer and in an objectively more lethal situation, and that no one on the Left has said a word for us. No one is marching in the streets for us. No one is collecting money to help us. No one is forming fundraisers to move us to places where we can obtain medicine. No one is even actively helping organize physicians who will treat us. These are all things happening immediately in the wake of these Florida bills for the transgender community. Everyone immediately gathered to do everything in their power to help this important but very small minority of Florida citizens who is suffering, in a way that would be unfathomable to the same people to help us. The sick. The chronic pain patients. The disabled. Because they don’t care about us.
There are more of us, by far. We are being left to die in the streets from overdoses, withdrawal, and more by the millions. And that’s why the Left doesn’t care about us, or our inability to get the medicine we need to survive from our doctors. We span the political spectrum. We’re gay, straight, bisexual, transgender. We’re everyone. And we don’t vote one way. We won’t necessarily vote the way they want in the next election. Why should we? The Left is immediately prioritizing a group that isn’t facing nearly the degree of inhibition of access to care that we are over millions of Americans who have been suffering for years with no end in sight. I won’t even get into the total absence of any adequate help or care for the disabled at large and the Left’s total refusal to even acknowledge this problem exists.
When’s the last time you saw a march for disabled rights on the news? Ever? I’ve asked that question of dozens of people and 100% have answered softly, “Never.”
The Left does not care about the disabled, the chronically ill, the forgotten minority group that hasn’t received one speck of attention or assistance since the passage of the ADA. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t frustrate me when I see thousands (is it now millions?) of dollars being raised to move people out of state to receive better care on the exact same basis that affects disabled Americans in chronic pain. The same sort of paternalistic legislation has been crippling our community and literally killing us for years without any assistance or even acknowledgement whatsoever. Everyone I speak to on this issue either is totally unaware of it, or spews some nonsense akin to “but people get addicted!” Inappropriate use of medicine happens with every type of medicine. We need more oversight of physicians by those who are qualified to oversee them to ensure informed consent and proper prescribing. Not legislation by politicians and lawyers without scientific or medical training. And that applies to both groups. The problem is, the Left will only acknowledge one group exists and is in need of assistance. The transgender community will get through this crisis, and will never even realize that they’ve received a form of immediate, significant assistance that has never been offered to their brethren who face daily crises due to being unable to function without pain medicine. I can’t move out of state because I risk never finding another physician willing to take on a new pain patient who needs medication. Where’s my assistance? That’s a joke. There won’t be any. I’ve faced that and accepted I won’t be able to ever leave the state and I try very hard every day not to think about what will happen when my pain management physician retires. That day will be terrifying and there won’t be any movement to help me. Not even the LGBT movement will acknowledge this is a problem, even when it affects a large subsect of their own people. I certainly won’t receive any fundraising dollars or assistance from them. They don’t touch causes that may incidentally include conservatives or third-party voters.
The irony is that the interventionist policies promulgated to kill off the disabled and chronic pain patients served as precedent to allow similar policies to be enacted to harm transgender patients. They refuse to acknowledge this, either, because it would mean admitting that we do have a problem. It would mean acknowledging that they have failed to assist us, have entirely ignored us, and don’t care about us. That they’re not as concerned about the health of their own people as they claim to be: they’re more offended by Desantis and the fact that these are his policies than the effect that have on those within our communities. This enrages the LGBT rights movement because it is political and right-wing in nature. Not because it affects the lives of Americans who need access to proper healthcare. Transgender people only matter to them, their healthcare only matters to them, because it is in line with their left-wing politics.
If you’re reading this and screaming about how wrong I am, please—prove me wrong. I would love to be wrong. But until you put your money where your mouth is, or put your feet on the ground and start screaming as hard as I have to make it stop and to help chronic pain patients who’ve been facing an identical if not more dire situation for years, you will remain a hypocrite. Because that’s what this is, at its core: hypocrisy. Left-wing movements care about uninhibited access to healthcare for transgender individuals because they are mostly left-wing: not because they are transgender, or a part of their community, or human beings deserving of proper care. And they don’t care if those same people need pain medicine and cannot obtain it on the same basis. The irony there is palpable, if you choose to acknowledge it. Most never will. And I’m sure someone will cherry pick this article to claim I’m not an ally of the transgender community, instead of acknowledging their own hypocrisy and how much damage their intentional ignorance has done to the disabled community, and how wholly inactive they’ve been to our detriment for decades.
When I talk about these issues in LGBT circles, I rarely get more than a nod. I never get outrage, let alone action that those same individuals will pony up at any moment for LGBT causes. Because this isn’t about human rights and access to care. It’s about protecting their own community from those they view as “other.” If the attack comes from all sides, or even from within, those of us who are being harmed are pressured to remain quiet and suffer in silence as the disabled have for years while politicians on both sides of the aisle make our leaves more and more intolerable, even killing us, with no end in sight.
It’s time that the LGBT community shows that they care as much about the rights of the disabled as anyone else, as they claim this is a human rights issue. The needs of disabled people within their own community have been entirely ignored for decades. If this is about human beings having access to proper healthcare, they’ll prioritize the needs of the chronically ill, pain patients, and the disabled, who’ve been suffering horribly for decades without any support of any kind from any civil rights movement, with laws that directly block our access to care and leave us to die without any support. We are part of their community just like transgender individuals are. Why don’t they care about our access to care? I know why. I just want you to answer for yourself.
I would like to see an LGBT rights movement that actually demonstrates the same compassion towards disabled members as transgender members of their community. Because that would prove that they actually care about us, and not simply what political clout they can gain by using us. The LGBT rights movement is one of the most effective and well-funded movements I can think of, and it is entirely capable of helping us and has chosen not to. That hurts us. It tells the world that we don’t need help we desperately need to survive. But until they start looking at us as humans and not pawns in a political game, nothing will change. And I don’t see any member of my community who thinks it should.
Call me bitter. Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve been left to die by people I know who would chop off their left arm to get someone else HRT tomorrow. I didn’t have access to food for months and still don’t have access to healthcare I need or even basic support. The same people donating thousands won’t help ensure someone comes to check on me and make sure I’m okay. I’ve been bedridden for days from lack of access to food and medicine. This is all a political game and nothing more, and I’m having trouble with compassion fatigue given I’ve been on the receiving end of no help and lots of derision from the same people who scream and shout about “human rights” from dawn to dusk for those who “matter.” I’ve learned that disabled people don’t matter to them: the LGBT rights movement, or anyone else. Our human rights and civil liberties don’t matter. Whether we can survive or have access to medicine we need to live doesn’t matter to them. And we’re not a separate group: disabled, LGBT individuals do not matter to the LGBT community. And if you disagree, do something to show it instead of just telling me I’m wrong. I’ve never seen a single person lift a finger as a response. Just more screaming about how it’s “not a contest.” But it is. It is a contest for resources, for airtime, for everything. And disabled Americans objectively lost years ago. And it does not seem to matter to anyone but us.
Sarah Semnyetzky of Ember 