Well the 70s Renee Richards/Wendy Carlos one

• Really drew on the authority of the two master disciplines of midcentury health care - surgery and psychiatry - just as they had peaked and were on the downslope
• Consider how now in our present pharmaceutical paradigm hormones are the important thing and “informed consent” transition might not involve therapy or surgery
• In particular, a lot of “sex assignment” theorizing was based off of theories of infinite human plasticity especially re: intersex births that didn’t pan out
• as the 70s became the 80s, benefit payors - insurers and welfare providers - became more suspicious of psychiatric stuff as a blank check black hole, this was when the DSM started displacing Freudianism with cost-benefit proven therapies
• second-wave radfems jumped on this to frame transition as a noncovered elective procedure - few could afford it, only a few specialists could make training in it worthwhile
• even if you could afford it it was heavily gatekept towards passing which means people maybe didn’t notice it in the 80s-2000s, exemplary I think was a Veronica Mars episode that turns that if reminded you’d be like “oh someone’s dad could become someone’s wife” but you’d never suspect unprompted