Earlier this year, during a virtual symposium hosted by Duke University with multiple clinician activists, Marci Bowers, a surgical pioneer of so-called gender affirmation, compared the potential loss of sexual functioning in children subjected to transgender drugs and surgeries with the outcomes suffered by those subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Bowers was not trying to suggest that gender-affirmation treatment is, like FGM, a human-rights violation. Quite the opposite. Still, the comparison was revealing.
On Bowers’s website, a blog about female genital mutilation describes sexuality as “one of the basic human senses”: “Imagine if we took our children and poked their eyes out in childhood? or their sense of hearing? or even smell? it would be an outrage and we all should feel no less outraged about this process of FGM.” This is true. But it also applies to transgender drugs and surgeries used to impair children’s sexual development for ideological reasons.
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