Quite a few years ago, my sister, as part of a fight with breast cancer, had a partial mastectomy. She recovered from cancer at that time, and her courage in doing so was remarkable. She was a single mom with twin boys in elementary school, and she would go in on Friday afternoon for chemotherapy so she could recover over the weekend and go to work on Monday to support them all. Later, after her boys were grown, the cancer returned, and she underwent a total double mastectomy - and, I'm still saddened to say, several years later, she lost the fight with cancer. But I remember her after both the partial and the total surgeries; she was visibly shaken, depressed, and she told our oldest sister that she felt disfigured.
So it is through that filter that I look at "transgender" people going through this voluntarily. Adults, I suppose, may do as they please, but children? Children cannot give fully informed consent and should not be undergoing these treatments. At CityJournal, on Sunday, I happened across this piece by a plastic surgeon, Richard T. Bosshardt, who described this process in detail - and why the claims of gender-theory activists regarding these surgeries are utterly false.
I am a plastic surgeon. Over the past 35 years, I’ve seen many of my colleagues abandon the most basic premise in human biology: that there are two, immutable sexes. Their capitulation to “queer theory” has resulted in children receiving needless, dangerous, and life-altering surgeries—all based on the lie that people can change their sex.
Each of these “gender-affirming” procedures is grotesque. I want to focus on just one—“top surgery,” a breast procedure that I, as a plastic surgeon, understand well. Top surgery is a euphemism that refers to cutting off a woman’s natural breasts to masculinize her chest. Because most of today’s trans-identifying adolescents are girls, top surgery is the most common gender-related operation, and is performed on girls as young as 13 years old.
13? That's an atrocity. But it happens, and it's a matter of the platform of the Democratic Party to support this. Dr. Bosshardt adds:
Top surgery has lasting consequences. The procedure results in permanent nerve damage and surgical scars. Since the surgery removes all duct tissue, it renders patients permanently unable to breastfeed.
Advocates of “gender-affirming” care often insist that this damage is reversible. Asked about girls who later regret their decision to have their breasts removed, Joanna Olson-Kennedy, a pediatrician and prominent advocate of transgender medicine stated, “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them!”
Her comments are unacceptable and dangerously naive. If she is telling patients that they can easily “go and get” breasts after a mastectomy—that breast reconstruction is a low-risk procedure—she is misleading them. Breast reconstruction is a major surgery. It requires inserting implants and/or shifting skin, fat, and, sometimes, muscle, from one area of the body to the chest. Some procedures leave two distinct surgical sites, both with potential complications. In the worst case, reconstruction can have catastrophic consequences, such as failed reconstruction or even death. Even if the procedure avoids these harms, the patient’s reconstructed breasts will never look or feel normal.
I'm not a plastic surgeon, but I was educated in biology and have a better-than-average understanding of mammalian anatomy, and Dr. Bosshardt here is, I have no doubt, absolutely correct. These surgeries are permanent, permanently disfiguring, and permanently scarring. Like the even more horrific "bottom surgeries," they eliminate any possibility of the proper function of the tissues being altered.
Children should not be undergoing these procedures. I'm as libertarian as anyone you're liable to find, but there are limits, and this is one of them; informed consent is a basic principle in the delivery of medical care, and children cannot give such consent; they lack the judgment and experience. That's why we don't let them buy booze, guns - that's why we don't let them vote. But Democrats and transgender activists are all right with them deciding on these surgeries?
See Also: 'Transgender' High School Runner Blows Out Competition, Sets Records
You Are Funding 'Gender-Affirming Treatments' and Planned Parenthood Is Bragging About It
What's baffling about all this is the Hippocratic Oath that practitioners supposedly take, which includes the ethical doctrine of primum non nocere - first, do no harm. These procedures, the cutting and removal of perfectly healthy, perfectly functional tissue - there is no universe, no field of discourse in which one can claim that these surgeries are not doing harm. They are not necessary, they are not advisable, and they involve the deliberate removal of healthy tissue.
I'm still inclined to let adults do as they please. If they want to have tattoos and facial piercings until they receive FM radio in their faces, fine - and at least were I hiring for a company, I'd know not to even bother interviewing them. If they want to have disfiguring surgeries, fine, as long as I'm not bothered. Lunatics, in fact, should be conspicuous; it lets us know who to avoid.
But not children. We, as competent adults, are tasked with protecting children. Lunacy like this is precisely the kind of thing we should be protecting them from.
