College professor: Gender-affirming care has a long history in the US since 1960 – and not just for transgender people. Really!

This article was written by a "As a trans woman and a scholar of transgender history, I have spent much of the past decade studying these issues.". How really scholarly or biased could this article be? 

Was she appointed as a professor, because of her special transgender credentials, but otherwise scholarly unaccomplished like the controversial President of Harvard University? Perhaps, she was the First at this college? Neither Google Scholar nor Semantic Scholar list any of her publications if I am not mistaken.

However, Gender affirming care is one the most horrific euphemisms of our times! It stands for e.g. double mastectomy or castration!

When it happens to girls and women outside of Western countries it is usually quickly and loudly condemned as female genital mutilation!

I suspect there is a lot of twisting and turning of history going on this article! E.g. possible there was one nutty doctor in the 1960s who applied treatments that could be considered transgender treatment in hindsight.

Ok, there was one biological male, an actress, who became the first to receive hormone treatment and sex reassignment surgery in the early 1950s, but she was an adult at the time. My guess is that this male was not necessarily transgender, but perhaps actually more obsessed with the then new sex reassignment surgery (Caveat: I am not familiar with the details of this case).

Then the author cites this obvious and unrelated quackery as if it were gender affirming care:

"... I also learned that gender-affirming hormone therapies have been prescribed to cisgender youths for generations – despite what contemporary politicians may think. Disability scholar Eli Clare has written of the history and continued practice of prescribing hormones to boys who are too short and girls who are too tall for what is considered a “normal” range for their gender. Because of binary gender norms that celebrate height in men and smallness in women, doctors, parents and ethicists have approved the use of hormonal therapies to make children conform to these gender stereotypes since at least the 1940s. ..."

Caveat: I did not read the whole article.

Gender-affirming care has a long history in the US – and not just for transgender people

The Author: Dr. Samantha Rosenthal, Associate Professor, Roanoke College