Backlash Mounts Against Sex Change Operations for Minors

AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott

Shortly after once again securing GOP majorities in both the state House and Senate, Tennessee Republicans announced that their first priority when the legislative session resumes in January will be a bill banning sex change operations and irreversible “gender-affirming” hormone treatment for minors. In recent months, several other states, as well as other countries around the world, have implemented similar policies, delivering a resounding rebuke of supposed “advocates” for transgender children who have pushed for the ever-more radical and unproven treatment of youth who identify as transgender.

For decades, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has released “Standards of Care” for individuals identifying as transgender hospitals worldwide. Typically, hospitals go along with whatever WPATH recommends, and liberals have used the Standards of Care to justify the so-called “gender-affirming” treatment of minors.

While WPATH’s recommendations were always scientifically dubious at best, they have become increasingly radical over the past decade. In 2011, the only surgeries for minors that the “Standards of Care Version 7” recommended were double mastectomies (removing healthy breast tissue from young girls).

That policy was bad enough. In the Standards of Care Version 8, released on September 6 of this year, however, things got much worse. The guidelines removed any age limits for children to be given puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or even sex reassignment surgeries like phalloplasties and vaginoplaties. The guidelines do not describe gender confusion, or gender dysphoria, as a mental illness, even though evidence indicates that 94 percent of children who are confused about their gender eventually grow out of it. The guidelines also make no mention of the fact that hormone treatment often causes permanent infertility (many of the “puberty blockers” given to minors are the same drugs used to chemically castrate sex offenders).

Transgender activists and doctors have long insisted that such treatments and procedures are only ever performed on individuals who are 18 or older, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Last month, for example, conservative podcaster and Daily Wire host Matt Walsh raised the alarm about Vanderbilt University Medical Center performing irreversible and dangerous sex change operations on minors. Shortly after the revelations went viral, Vanderbilt paused all operations on children under 18 and scrubbed its website of all mention of the surgeries.

Many elected Democrats and left-wing activists have insisted that banning gender surgery and puberty blockers for minors is an affront to the so-called “affirmative care model” of transgender health. This line of thinking asserts that once a child, at any age, declares themselves to be transgender or “non-binary,” or even does something to indicate that they might be in the “wrong” body (such as a boy playing with dolls or a girl playing with action figures) their parents, mental health experts, and medical professionals should all accept and encourage this identity without challenge. Furthermore, this model of care stipulates that drugs like puberty blockers, hormones, and testosterone injections should be administered early enough to delay or outright reverse the effects of puberty. In practice, this means that children will undergo irreversible treatment starting as young as nine years old.

Throughout most of the Western world, countries are rejecting this idea and reversing the course on “gender-affirming care” for children. In July, England’s National Health Service shut down its only “youth gender clinic” in the country and is shifting from the “affirmative care” model to more comprehensive care that emphasizes therapy first. Germany, Norway, and Ireland are all limiting access to hormone therapy drugs for minors. This year, Sweden announced it would not give puberty blockers to children under 18 and, alongside Finland, will prioritize therapy for trans-identifying children and discourage drug interventions for individuals under 25.

The fact that these countries – many of which are typically far more liberal than the United States – are moving away from “gender-affirming” treatments should be a warning sign for Americans on both sides of the political aisle. Yet more and more children are seeking life-altering surgery and drugs, while elected Democrats are pushing harder and harder for even fewer limits on the practice. In September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would allow “legal refuge” to children who want to undergo sex change surgery but reside in a state that does not allow the practice.

As more evidence emerges about just how dangerous these procedures are, doctors who raise the alarm are increasingly being silenced by organizations like the American College of Pediatrics. In the aforementioned Vanderbilt case, doctors were warned that there would be “consequences” if they refused to perform the surgeries.

Already, we are starting to see the disastrous effects of the left’s gender-affirming care model. A woman in Sydney, Australia, for example, is suing her psychiatrist for medical malpractice after recommending she begin hormone treatment after one meeting and a recommending double mastectomy after only her second meeting. Within three years of the first meeting with her psychiatrist, she had hormone treatment, testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and a complete hysterectomy. In the lawsuit, the woman claims the psychiatrist “failed to take precautions…in the nature of loss of her breasts, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries.”

More than five percent of Americans aged 18-29 say they identify as a sex other than the one they were “assigned” at birth – a nearly five-fold increase from the number of 30-49-year-old Americans who say the same. Given trends among Gen Z, it’s likely that number will grow exponentially in the years ahead. With evidence already mounting that many of the young people who undergo sex change treatment as minors come to regret it as adults, the country could soon have a crisis of tens of thousands of disaffected young people who are filled with remorse for the rest of their lives – all because they were allowed to make decisions that they were nowhere near mature or informed enough to make.

A society that fails to protect its children is one that is doomed to fail. In the coming years, Republicans and any Democrats willing to stand up to the trans lobby would do well to ensure that puberty and physical development is allowed to occur naturally for every child and that life-altering decisions are reserved for when individuals mature into adulthood, no sooner.

Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.