Health Care For Trans-People

I came across this article and at first the title threw me…

Healthcare of transsexual persons causes unnecessary suffering
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Nov 10, 2011

In 1972, Sweden became the first country in the world to legislate healthcare for transsexualism within the state-financed healthcare system. In an international perspective, this was considered to be radical. It was expected that the life situation of people in the transsexual group would improve, now that state-financed healthcare was available for this group. A thesis published at the University of Gothenburg, however, describes this care as an oppressive gender-conservative system that causes suffering for transsexual persons.

When I read that I thought what are they talking about? All the studies that read said the exact opposite, reading further…

“Those who qualify for gender-corrective measures also known as sex reassignment treatment, become legally acknowledged as the gender in which they recognize themselves. But a prerequisite for this is that they lose something: namely the possibility of having biological children, since the law states that a transsexual person must be sterilised (sterile) ”, says ethnologist Signe Bremer. Her thesis describes studies of autobiographical blogs and in-depth interviews with people at various stages of gender-corrective care.
[…]
Her thesis shows that the physical bodies that transsexual persons wish to correct, play an important role in the assessments made by the psychiatric system about who is considered to be suitable for gender correction. A transsexual woman who demonstrates visible beard stubble, for example, may receive negative comments, while a transsexual man with a muscular body and flat chest may receive compliments. In summary, a “suitable” body can be described as a body that health care staff consider compatible with that gender that the transsexual person recognize him/her-self.
[…]
“The gender investigation tends to focus heavily on the genitals. One of the transsexual women I interviewed did not express sufficient rejection of her sexual organ, and the investigation was delayed because of this”, says Signe Bremer.

So what the author is talking about is not about the healthcare, but the selection of patient. By requiring sterilization, choosing only candidates who pass and that you have to hate your sex organ to have treatment “has severe consequences for individual persons’ lives”.