The New York Times published a piece by Azeen Ghorayshi on “top surgery,” a euphemism for amputating gender-distressed patients’ healthy breasts. Ghorayshi suggests that trans-identifying adolescents likely benefit from having healthy breasts removed and expresses disdain for legislation that prohibits these surgeries from being performed on minors.
In Florida, where the medical board is considering such a ban for minors, Gov. Ron DeSantis has argued that surgeons should be sued for “disfiguring” children. In Texas, where parents of transgender children have been investigated for child abuse, Gov. Greg Abbott has called genital surgeries in adolescents “genital mutilation.”
Dr. Bowers, the president of WPATH, said that politicians should not be involved in personal medical decisions. “They just don’t understand this care, so they just want to shut it down,” Dr. Bowers said. “That is a very dangerous precedent.”
As I noted earlier on the Corner, Bowers has also likened the loss of sexual functioning in post-surgical gender-distressed youth to victims of female genital mutilation. (He said: “I know that from my work with female genital-mutilation survivors that the lack of being able to be intimate with a partner is very important. And so, this is what really raised the red flag for me.”)
Given that doctors such as Bowers have almost admitted that, despite providing this “care,” they have scant idea about the long-term effects, why do they continue to experiment on patients? One obvious reason is financial. The Daily Wire’s report on the Vanderbilt transgender clinic indicated that there is as much as $40,000 to be made from a double mastectomy and as much as $100,000 to be made from phalloplasty.