Fixing What Wasn't Broken
This is really a horror story, and it may enrage and/or depress you terribly.
Short form: Trans-gender woman and her roommate/best friend get hit by a car. Roommate killed, woman very badly injured. Family takes over her care, and:... So they were instructing caregivers to call her by her old name, call her “he,” because otherwise it would just be too confusing to explain. They took her off the transitioning medical regimen she’d been on and started talking about memory reconstruction. Her memory would be heavily damaged because of the injuries to her brain, they said. There would have to be a lot of recovery, and it would just be confusing to her to bring up her transitioned life. She’d been a boy with another name for eighteen years, right? Wasn’t that who she really was, at the core? Wouldn’t that be more normal to her? Wouldn’t she just be better served by rebuilding her from the ground up, from the beginning, with the memories that seemed more normal? Maybe if she recovered significantly, if she recovered enough memory and motor function and consciousness, they could start bringing up her transitioned life, but otherwise, they said, she didn’t need to be confused by all of that. The four years of life she’d found worthwhile could just be wiped away like a bad dream, treated as confusion when she woke up, if she woke up, and they could rebuild her on terms that made sense.
They had ultimate power over her-her body, her brain, everything. She was disabled, and couldn’t speak for herself, and couldn’t express her own preferences, and they were next of kin, and they knew best, and the authority for medical decisions was in their hands. They loved her more than anyone, and had her best interests in mind, and were just looking to her recovery, just listening to the doctors.
And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, she’d wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, she’s just confused, shhhh, calm down, let’s work on fixing your memory some more.
I cannot express how obscenely wrong this is to me. Just... everything.
(h/t siliconshaman)
Short form: Trans-gender woman and her roommate/best friend get hit by a car. Roommate killed, woman very badly injured. Family takes over her care, and:... So they were instructing caregivers to call her by her old name, call her “he,” because otherwise it would just be too confusing to explain. They took her off the transitioning medical regimen she’d been on and started talking about memory reconstruction. Her memory would be heavily damaged because of the injuries to her brain, they said. There would have to be a lot of recovery, and it would just be confusing to her to bring up her transitioned life. She’d been a boy with another name for eighteen years, right? Wasn’t that who she really was, at the core? Wouldn’t that be more normal to her? Wouldn’t she just be better served by rebuilding her from the ground up, from the beginning, with the memories that seemed more normal? Maybe if she recovered significantly, if she recovered enough memory and motor function and consciousness, they could start bringing up her transitioned life, but otherwise, they said, she didn’t need to be confused by all of that. The four years of life she’d found worthwhile could just be wiped away like a bad dream, treated as confusion when she woke up, if she woke up, and they could rebuild her on terms that made sense.
They had ultimate power over her-her body, her brain, everything. She was disabled, and couldn’t speak for herself, and couldn’t express her own preferences, and they were next of kin, and they knew best, and the authority for medical decisions was in their hands. They loved her more than anyone, and had her best interests in mind, and were just looking to her recovery, just listening to the doctors.
And if she woke up as from a deep sleep, she’d wake up into a world where her best friend was dead, where her body had been forcibly edited back to its pre-transition state and given a few more years of the influence of testosterone to boot, where her memory and self were hazy and confusing and nobody was calling her by the right name and pronouns, they were in fact pretending four years of her life, the four years she finally got to be honest and true to herself, those had never happened, and shh, she’s just confused, shhhh, calm down, let’s work on fixing your memory some more.
I cannot express how obscenely wrong this is to me. Just... everything.
(h/t siliconshaman)