Just this morning I was chatting with a close friend of mine who is a transgender man. That last bit is, sadly, almost irrelevant to this conversation, because his family consider him to be a woman.

He's several years past the age of majority, and he's recently been diagnosed with an illness that's going to require surgery, a large mass to be removed from his uterus.

But when he finished an MRI this morning, medical staff came out to talk, and they immediately spoke to his father instead of to him. (This didn't happen in the United States, for those who would protest that the story can't be true. No HIPAA where this went down.)

Actually, my friend would like to have a hysterectomy, which would be a simpler and safer procedure, but nobody will even consider that, because they won't consider that he has control over his own body, and they think that his reproduction function is more important than he is.

So, because people think he's a woman, he doesn't get to make his own medical decisions, and he doesn't even get consulted about his own health.

Quite a state of affairs!