Ok, so this is weird.

Blurred lines: A pregnant man’s tragedy tests gender notions

https://apnews.com/b5e7bb73c6134d58a0df9e1cee2fb8ad

The article opens like this:

>When the man arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pains, a nurse didn’t consider it an emergency, noting that he was obese and had stopped taking blood pressure medicines. In reality, he was pregnant — a transgender man in labor that was about to end in a stillbirth.

>The tragic case, described in Wednesday’s New England Journal of Medicine, points to larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions in a society increasingly confronting gender variations in sports , entertainment and government . In medicine, there’s a similar danger of missing diseases such as sickle cell and cystic fibrosis that largely affect specific racial groups, the authors write.

>“The point is not what’s happened to this particular individual but this is an example of what happens to transgender people interacting with the health care system,” said the lead author, Dr. Daphna Stroumsa of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

>“He was rightly classified as a man” in the medical records and appears masculine, Stroumsa said. “But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.”

This gives the impression that they weren’t aware he was transgender, and they failed to treat the patient appropriately. But shortly after, we get this:

>The 32-year-old patient told the nurse he was transgender when he arrived at the emergency room and his electronic medical record listed him as male. He hadn’t had a period in several years and had been taking testosterone, a hormone that has masculinizing effects and can decrease ovulation and menstruation. But he quit taking the hormone and blood pressure medication after he lost insurance.

>A home pregnancy test was positive and he said he had “peed himself” — a possible sign of ruptured membranes and labor. A nurse ordered a pregnancy test but considered him stable and his problems non-urgent.

>Several hours later, a doctor evaluated him and the hospital test confirmed pregnancy. An ultrasound showed unclear signs of fetal heart activity, and an exam revealed that part of the umbilical cord had slipped into the birth canal. Doctors prepared to do an emergency cesarean delivery, but in the operating room no fetal heartbeat was heard. Moments later, the man delivered a stillborn baby.

>A woman showing up with similar symptoms “would almost surely have been triaged and evaluated more urgently for pregnancy-related problems,” the authors wrote.

So if you have the intro set the stage and then only half pay attention, this sudden short paragraph about a woman will jump out at you and more likely stick in your brain. But they knew the patient was biologically female upon intake, and that a home pregnancy test had been positive.

1- They were (presumably) slow with a pregnancy test for someone who already had it positive at home. So they didn’t put a rush on it. They didn’t exactly treat the patient as a man, who couldn’t possibly be pregnant. Rather they treated the patient as likely not pregnant, showing that the bias is against transpeople being reproductively healthy, rather than the “typical” bias against trans people. It’s like how democrats are racist.

2- They acknowledge that if they had treated her by her biological sex, it would have gone better.

The tone an arrangement of the article give the impression of “here we go again, not treating transgender people right” the way the media does when someone treats a trans person based on their sex instead of gender. But here it is the opposite, and that is what caused the serious medical emergency.

But, as the article concludes:

>Transgender people often run into problems getting gender-specific health care such as cervical cancer screening, birth control and prostate cancer screenings.

>More needs to be done to improve medical awareness and recognition of diversity because “the consequences can be so dire, as this case shows,” Branstetter said.

Yes: treat them in regards to their bodies, their biological sex. This dude who said he’s a lady is a lady. Talk about diversity!