As More Studies Are Done More Warnings From The Endocrine Society

The largest study involving transgender people is providing long-sought insights about their health done by The European Network for the Investigation of Gender Incongruence (ENIGI

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01237-z

Benita Arren wishes that the human body came with instructions. “We have a manual with every little thing we buy, in eight languages, but not for myself,” she says. 

About a decade ago, Arren was struggling with inner conflict. Designated male at birth, she had secretly dressed up in her mother’s clothes as a child, but she suppressed her feelings for decades. 

Then in her forties, married with two children and busy with a job in Antwerp, Belgium, she found them resurfacing. The masculine persona in her head — how she had long known herself to be — was falling away, leaving her feeling as though she had no personality at all. “Your consciousness is not fast enough to understand all those emotions,” she says.

The Endocrine Society, for example, warns doctors to consider a potential link between androgen hormone treatment and reproductive tract malignancies and tumors — a risk that could be important to trans people. 

Last year, Tangpricha’s team published a paper3 showing that transgender women had about 13.7 times the rate of blood clots as cisgender women. But such associations might not be meaningful — one way to identify causes is to do a prospective study like ENIGI.

Although transgender issues are becoming more mainstream, the topic remains politically charged. The European groups sometimes encounter transgender activists who oppose any medical intervention — T’Sjoen says he has had talks disrupted by people arguing that transgender people should not give in to social pressure. Although that could be true for some people, he says, for others, “even if they were living somewhere on a desert island, they would still want to change their body”.

Mental health tends to rank highly among health concerns, along with HIV. According to some studies, 25% of transgender women and 56% of African American transgender women in the United States are living with HIV, although this estimate could be high because it is based on people seeking treatment.