Medical transition—no matter how it turns out for individuals—is a win-win as far as powerful industries are concerned, opening up new markets for pharmaceutical products, cosmetic surgeries, fertility treatments, surrogacy, and more. Meanwhile, woke activism seals off lines of criticism as stigmatizing, ableist, and cisheteronormative.
Either your identity hinges on lifelong use of artificial hormones and a cascade of surgeries in pursuit of an impossible goal or you detransition and if you’ve gone far enough you’ll still need a lifetime of hormone replacement therapy. (Tell me this doesn’t sound like Purdue Pharma’s opioid playbook... hook patients on addictive drugs and then sell more drugs to manage opiate addiction.)
If you transition and your dating pool dries up, you can always hire a sex worker (there’s no shame in it: after all, the most ‘progressive’ of activists will assure you that “sex work is work!”).
If transition steals your fertility, why not hire a surrogate? Hope you froze your eggs first.
If puberty blockers destroy your sex drive, you can commiserate with the growing community of asexuals, who will assure you your new identity is absolutely valid (and—conveniently—'innate').
And if transition complications leave you disabled, well, who’s ableist enough to complain about something like that? It’s downright problematic to think there’s something wrong with being disabled—no matter the role ideology and industry played in disabling you.
I read you for the way your mind somehow captures fresh camera angles on the intersections of gender ideology, marketing, ethics (or the lack thereof), and sophistry — and then from out of your mental darkroom you craft a vignette that perfectly develops those original images and relations. Your process seems to go the entire distance from analysis to synthesis. With an appearance of effortlessness. What you are able to do in writing is a thing of beauty. Thank you for your writing behavior.
If you were implicating any industry other than Big Pharma I'd be wondering if your suspicions are too cynical. Sadly, if the industries in question are responsible for human health and wellbeing, there probably is no bar too low.
My favorite line is your parenthetical remark, "Tell me this doesn’t sound like Purdue Pharma’s opioid playbook... hook patients on addictive drugs and then sell more drugs to manage opiate addiction." I've been thinking for some time that the rise of the medicalization of trans ideology is suspiciously parallel to the projected decline in income generated from opioid addiction.
Increasing profit margins may be sufficiently attractive to account for the increasing multiples of millions going into TRA lobby coffers, but when you couple that incentive with the financial pain confronting most of the biggest pharma companies as they are gradually forced into accountability for their crimes, it strikes me as highly likely that the highest-level executives have been really busy trying to find ways to reassure their shareholders that they don't need to sell.