Treatment
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care, or "WPATH SOC", are considered by some as definitive treatment guidelines for providers. Other standards exist - see those discussed in the WPATH SOC - including the guidelines outlined in Gianna Israel and Donald Tarver's "Transgender Care". Several health clinics in the United States (e.g. Tom Waddell in San Francisco, Callen Lorde in New York City, Mazzoni in Philadelphia) have developed "protocols" for transgender hormone therapy following a "harm reduction" model which increasing numbers of providers have adopted. Nick Gorton et al. suggest a flexible approach based on harm reduction, "Willingness to provide hormonal therapy based on assessment of individual patients needs, history and situation with an overriding goal of achieving the best outcome for patients rather than rigidly adhering to arbitrary rules has been successful."
Formal gender clinics for individuals seeking medical sex reassignment began operating in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to long-term follow-up studies that began appearing in the research literature in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies have examined transsexuals who received clinical approval to undergo reassignment and proceeded to do so. The great majority of patients who met clinics' screening criteria reported being satisfied in the long-term with the results.
Read more about this topic: Gender Identity Disorder
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“A regular council was held with the Indians, who had come in on their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides through an interpreter, quite in the described mode,—the Indians, as usual, having the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence. The most prominent chief was named Little Crow. They were quite dissatisfied with the white man’s treatment of them, and probably have reason to be so.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, “Go to sleep by yourselves.” And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)