Seattle Children’s Hospital Performs Some ‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgeries on Children under 18

The AMA and other medical groups have written the Biden Department of Justice to decry threats of violence against providers of gender-affirming care after the publication of what they claim is false information about which hospitals provide surgeries and puberty blocking.

Threats and violence are unequivocally wrong and properly illegal. They should be punished to the full extent of the law.

But facts matter too. Accurate reports about this issue need to be published because debates about the proper care of children are too important to suppress.

Here are some facts. Serious, body-altering surgeries are being performed on children under 18. Rather than characterize the medical interventions in my own words, I will simply quote from the website of Seattle Children’s Hospital that describes the “gender-affirming” surgical care offered. The links to the information are also included. In that way, there can be no question of veracity and accuracy.

First, it is worth noting that to be accepted in the Seattle Hospital’s Gender Clinic, the child/teenager must be referred by the patient’s primary-care physician and for medical interventions, have parental consent. Also, genital surgeries require the child to be 18. But not so other significant surgeries that can have a lifelong impact on the patient. From the “Surgical Gender Affirmation Program” information site:

We work closely with patients and families to make decisions about surgery age and timing. For gender-affirming genital procedures, patients must be 18 or older by the time of surgery. For other surgeries, timing depends on many factors, like the patient’s stage of puberty and how surgery fits with the rest of their gender-related healthcare. A typical age is mid-teens or older.

This would seem to mean that a 15- or 16-year-old girl identifying as transgender could have breasts removed.

In this procedure, surgeons remove breast tissue to create a natural chest contour that aligns with a patient’s gender identity. One option is to remove the nipple completely and then reattach it in a new position that will look natural (free nipple grafting).

Or, for a boy identifying as a girl:

To increase breast size, surgeons can use implants filled with sterile salt water (saline) or a plastic gel (silicone), or they can use fat taken from another part of the body.

But that’s not all. Such surgeries also include face and head altering:

Many different procedures can change the shape of the face to look more feminine or masculine. These are sometimes called facial feminization surgery or facial masculinization surgery. They include forehead reduction, forehead contouring or augmentation, brow lift, frontal sinus setback, facial fat grafting, cheek augmentation, nasal surgery (rhinoplasty), chin surgery (genioplasty), lower jaw surgery (mandible contouring) and others.

And altering the thyroid cartilage:

This is surgery that can make the Adam’s apple (thyroid cartilage) less visible (laryngochondroplasty) or more visible (thyroid cartilage enhancement).

Also liposuction and body contouring:

Procedures like fat grafting and liposuction can be done to shape a person’s body to better match their gender identity.

The hospital also offers puberty blocking and hormone injections and other such interventions — with parental permission.

This is very serious stuff, and much of it is irreversible, with potentially dangerous side effects, as these are invasive surgeries, some requiring deep anesthesia, not to mention being expensive.

And despite what the ideologues insist, the science is not settled that enthusiastic medical gender affirmation is the best approach for caring for gender-dysphoric children, some of whom change their minds as they mature. (See the Center for Bioethics and Culture’s documentary, The Detransition Diaries.)

We need to have a true societal conversation about caring properly for children with gender dysphoria, focus on their needs as well as wants, and assure that their beliefs are explored at length and in depth with a non-ideological mental-health professional, rather than immediately rush to affirm.

France, the U.K., Sweden, and Finland are hitting the brakes on all of this. Meanwhile, here in the USA, the gender-affirming-care children’s train is careening down the tracks, with the Biden administration and the medical and bioethics establishments shoveling coal into the burner.

If ever William F. Buckley’s famous maxim applies, it is here:

A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

On this subject, liberals should be conservatives too.