Certainly is working as intended, as a means to torture us. But I think it’s also intended to have an appearance of being fair, and that part is breaking down. It’s designed for a time when trans people were not allowed to talk with other trans people. Now it turns out that there are several orders of magnitude more of us than were able to get through the gatekeeping in the old days. No gatekeeping system can scale up to the level needed to give all trans people the care they need.

Informed consent is the only humane way forward and the current breakdown of the system makes this the right time to finally demand change.

Rant: I legit had a psychologist ask me why I came out ”so late”. When I was a teenager our country had about a dozen people being allowed to transition per year. A dozen and she wondered why I wasn’t one of them. That’s when gatekeeping was ”working”. It’s a miracle I’m alive after all these years. There were several rules in place to prohibit someone like me from transititioning back then, but I’m like most trans people I meet these days. It’s highly unlikely that you, the one reading this, would have been allowed through.