Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s transgender clinic in Nashville has temporarily suspended gender-transition surgeries for minors after a wave of backlash.
On Friday, Republican Tennessee state Representative Jason Zachary posted the hospital’s letter responding to the state House GOP’s demand to discontinue those operations.
“We are pausing gender affirmation surgeries on patients under 18” pending a review of new treatment guidelines published by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, VUMC’s Chief Health System Officer, Dr. C. Wright Pinson wrote. The review “may take several months,” he noted
The medical center clarified that, since its inception, it has performed an average of five so-called gender-affirming surgical procedures a year, none of which have been “genital” and all of which received parental consent. Presumably the procedures it did facilitate were mastectomies, or the removal of a young girl’s breasts. A report from the Daily Wire on the Vanderbilt transgender clinic indicated that “top surgery” is a lucrative operation, with as much as $40,000 to be made from a double mastectomy. While the hospital implies it has not yet administered a phalloplasty or vaginoplasty, it is evident from its website that it had offered urologic surgeries before the pause.
Pressure on the Nashville center intensified after Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire pundit, leaked a 2018 video showing Dr. Shayne Taylor, a LGBT specialist at the hospital, explaining how profitable transgender surgeries are for the medical industry. She emphasized that it’s a “big money maker,” especially because the surgeries require a lot of “follow up” appointments and check-ups, Walsh reported.
“Some of our VUMC financial folks in October of 2016 put down some costs of how much money we think each patient would bring in,” Taylor said. “And this is only including top surgery, this isn’t including any bottom surgery, and it’s a lot of money.”
Following the exposé, Zachary asked VUMC to permanently end sex-change surgeries for children. His colleagues, Republican Tennessee state representatives William Lamberth and Jack Johnson, had similarly proposed legislation with the same goal. Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn also both demanded an investigation into the facility.
Multiple Republican-controlled states have introduced or passed bills to ban child gender-transition medical interventions. Vanderbilt Medical’s retreat represents a victory for those seeking to protect youth from making irreversible medical decisions they may regret in adulthood.
As the debate over the ethics of sex changes for children escalates, three major pro-trans medical organizations have urged the Department of Justice to take unprecedented federal action. Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Children’s Hospital Association asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate and prosecute threats against health-care facilities that provide gender-transition procedures to children.
Their letter cited incidents of “threats” in Boston, Mass., Akron, Ohio, Nashville, Tenn., and Seattle, Wash. The groups alleged that “an intentional campaign of disinformation” waged by a few high-profile social-media actors is fueling intimidation against hospitals that provide such services. In addition to calling for federal intervention, they also asked technology companies — presumably Twitter would be chief among them — to censor content that is critical of transition surgeries for children on their platforms.