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I have noticed, from my now terminated stays in forums and places proximal to these kinds of people, a lot of trans people who are "Dr Wikipedia" types. They think they can DIY better than any clinics can help them, that they're fully informed and aware, and that they have a right to pass that knowledge on and push it onto minors with basically no oversight. I have never seen this kind of behaviour in any other kind of group; you don't get depressives telling each other which pulls to cut with which other ones and what substances to take at the same time in nearly the same kind of way.
I know that a lot of people on some level, think doctors are idiots sometime, but these types of people eschew the medical establishment entirely and think their internet research trumps actual formal education. Is this what leads to sub-optimal trans outcomes being so common? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet that it has no role -- and the existence of anyone who would tell minors not to go to a doctor and just take the stuff they'll send them through the post instead because trust me bro I read it on wikipedia breaks me out in hives.
Is there any other population of people who thinks they know better than doctors? Maybe the only ones I can think of are faith healing types or new age alternative medicine types, and I don't think that's quite precisely analogous.
I think the "tell your doctor you have these symptoms so he'll prescribe you T" people are just the tip of the self-dx iceberg. For years on Tumblr (and now TikTok) it was common to see teenagers insisting that they were perfectly qualified to diagnose themselves with autism and to say otherwise was literally classist gatekeeping because not everyone can afford a doctor????
See also innumerable contested illnesses like fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme.
This is an interesting comment as an adult who has recently realized I have autism. Where I live there doesn't exist any publicly funded way for an adult to be assessed for autism, you can pay a lot of money out of pocket to get a verification from a psychologist. This isn't like cancer where the medical system will go out of its way to save me. There isn't anything to do to save me. They don't really even care to even know. So the stigma against self-diagnosis is very curious to me.
What's the alternative to self-diagnosis? Where do I go? What's the point of that pursuit? Whether I have autism or not, the path forward is the same either way, I figure out how to cope with my struggles or I don't. There's no pill I need, no specific talk therapy which will change everything. What I needed most was an understanding of why I've been so different my whole life, and I got that without a doctor's involvement.
I think the reason why self-diagnosis is more common in the autism community is very straightforward. When you don't want or need anything from a doctor, you don't have any reason to interact with a doctor. Does that mean people self-diagnose incorrectly? For sure. Does that mean I feel any reservations about self-diagnosing? No, definitely not. It's the only sensible option for me.
I don't doubt that you have good reasons for believing that you have autism, but I am not persuaded by your argument. If someone has a mental illness or disorder, we make various accommodations for that person and take their diagnosis into account when interacting with them. We don't make special accommodations for neurotypical people because by definition they don't need them, by virtue of being "typical". This arrangement depends on an assumption of good faith: if someone tells me that they have a mental disorder and expect me to make accommodations for them on that basis, I assume that they were formally diagnosed with that disorder by someone qualified to do so. If someone is often rude or inconsiderate, I will treat them with a great deal more forbearance and forgiveness if they have been diagnosed with autism (and hence find it harder to read social cues than a neurotypical person) than if they are neurotypical.
If you think you're autistic, but don't intend to mention this to anyone and don't expect anyone to make special accommodations for you, then fair enough. But if you do intend to mention this belief about yourself to other people and for other people to treat you accordingly (as seems to be the case, given that you've just brought it up to me), I think that's dishonest when you've never been formally diagnosed with this medical condition by someone qualified to make that assessment. It sounds like stolen valour.
I think the phrasing "the stigma around self-diagnosis" is a bit weaselly and disingenuous as well. It's not that self-diagnosis is stigmatized, it's just that most people aren't qualified to do it. If anyone could accurately diagnose themselves with medical conditions, people wouldn't spend years and small fortunes training to become doctors or psychiatrists.
If I said that lay people with no medical training shouldn't be performing neurosurgery, I don't think this position could be reasonably characterized as me trying to "stigmatize neurosurgery".
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