The fact that that scishow hrt video kind of quips outright about no one on the writing team taking feminizing hormones is what baffles me like was that not embarrassing to say? I feel like if a big science youtube channel made a video about a more general health topic and half way through implied that there were no women on the writing team you’d be like. “okay why are you joking about that. That kind of calls into question the accuracy of the information you’re presenting and also the kind of workplace that is going on behind the scenes”. But when it’s specially about trans stuff they can just be like yeah we didn’t speak to any trans women about that first part lol.
That’s… That’s not what they say? I’m assuming you’re talking about the intro to the Testosterone section but the direct quote is “Now this next bit is the bit that our writer, Alex, actually has experience with. In other words we’re moving on to Testosterone”
It absolutely doesn’t claim that no trans women were talked to during this, nor that there aren’t any trans women on the writing staff.
Okay let’s look at the possible scenarios that could exist in which this sentence is said:
1: There was a trans woman with experience with feminising hormones on the writing team for the episode, but for some reason they differentiated the part on testosterone as having someone with personal experience, which is pretty insulting to the trans woman and feels unlikely
2: there is a trans woman with experience with feminizing hormones on staff but she wasn’t called to work on this specific episode (this is probably one of the worst case scenarios that is like. Pretty egregiously transmisogynistic)
3: there is a trans woman that worked on the episode that just doesn’t have experience with feminizing hormones (perfectly reasonable scenario that does not alter anything because it still means there wasn’t anyone on the writing team with personal experience with feminizing hrt)
4: no trans women writers work for the studio, but they did contact outside trans women for their personal experiences with hrt, and were either given accurate information that was ignored, or innacurate information that wasn’t properly vetted to the same degree as was the case with testosterone, which was more accurate because there was someone with personal experience with masculinizing hormones writing the episode. Which should make a point in and of itself.
5: no trans women were contacted in the creation of the video.
The fact is that none of these scenarios are good. They all point to transmisogyny. The video gave harmful misinformation on a sensitive and politicised topic that most people are ignorant about. Regardless of what went on behind the scenes it’s an irresponsible mess
I gave this video way more benefit of the doubt when I originally saw it, but thinking about it got exhausting fast.
I thought of it as a way to tell cis people the bare minimum about hrt, but the tone of it clearly oriented it towards trans people.
The misreadings of the ucsf SoC are extremely blatant.
Where are trans women supposed to go for information? I guess transfemmescience is as good as it gets, and its mostly fantastic, but there are still some issues there.