This article literally is the basis and evidence for a comment I made in a previous article titled, 'Very human problems in the field of gender medicine'. That being that most clinicians are not unaware, innocent and well meaning but very actively practicing deceptive and unlawful behaviour that goes against lawful requirements (and at the very least their behaviour is morally reprehensible, lacking in moral integrity and self motivated by lucrative financial incentives).
The trouble is in the trans issue particularly, on all levels, we get caught up and are so easily taken in by 'the visuals' of what is presented to us. Smoking mirrors. A therapist, nurse or doctor look kind and well meaning and we immediately put our whole trust into what they say and do. Whereas in reality they are Wolves in Sheep's clothing. 360 degrees in the trans scenario, what you see is not what get.
Most of these parents have been bamboozled by these clinicians and taken into a 'group think' environment where they are the odd person out and are seduced into finally thinking they must be wrong for not letting their child transition because look how happy 'Anya' is now 'she's' transitioned and living as 'her' authentic self and who 'she' was meant to be.
The whole scenario is truly tragic and these clinicians need to be held accountable for the roles they played.
"Whereas in reality they are Wolves in Sheep's clothing" I think many of the affirming therapists are not wolfs - they are sheep from coat to brains, bleating feebly about affirmation
, TRA dogs watching and keeping them firmly in line.
The health care industry is a for profit entity. These surgeries make lots of money. In a strange twist what should be healthcare is in fact sickcare. Our health system has been hijacked just as our political system has. Since there is no money in health we take completely healthy young women, slap a diagnosis on them such as gender dysphoria and now we can make money off their bodies. What is sick is a system that sees this as fine and appropriate!
And we trans widows can tell you the whole field was developed for men who go out to gay bars "crossdressing" to test out their cross-sex ideations. Often stemming from childhood abuse. Talk about malpractice--and many of us, in my data, 20 of 56, experienced sexual assault from panty-wearing husband before we extricated ourselves
Exactly right. And if there's any mention of trans widows, forget it! Despite the fact we attest that our husbands were 'affirmed' in one appointment way back in the 1990s! Like, wow, man.
Is everyone mad about nose jobs and breast augmentations or reductions, too? I am very interested gender critical analysis broadly. But what are the most reliable statistics for how frequently trans kids are getting mastectomies/augmentation and bottom surgery? This is a genuine question.
Yes, it is an excellent question but those numbers are obscured for multiple reasons (our decentralized health system, insurance coding, patient privacy, etc).
However, how important is it that we know exactly how many children are being operated on in this way? I'm not trying to be facetious but the activists use the lack of data to obfuscate the harms. The sequence goes like this: It's not happening at all. It's happening but very rarely so calm down. It's happening but it's just fine. Most nice people when they get to the awareness that it *is* happening then turn to the activist position that it must be rare and since no one has the numbers, it has got to be rare.
That's when I say: even if it's rare, even if it's only ten girls, or 100 girls, or 1,000 girls, that's still too many girls losing their futures.
Consider Dr Brinkley, the goat gland doctor. In the 1920s he promised renewed virility to mean by implanting animal glands in them. He had patients. People freely chose to have this surgery done. Some even claimed renewed virility. Was that okay? Even if he only implanted in ten men? 20 men? No, none of it was okay. The authorities finally shut him down (IIRC he moved to Mexico?).
We will never know how many young people have gone through this. But we can come to the conclusion even without those numbers that these procedures are harmful to young people. We can say that mastectomies that remove nipples (and thus erotic sensation, not to mention breastfeeding ability) from young people is wrong. (This is quite different from a breast reduction procedure.) We can conclude that even if only 100 children are harmed. Or ten. Or 5.
For the record, as DDD bra size in high school my life would have been vastly improved by a breast reduction at that time rather than waiting until I was ~35.
In the US, it's hard to track. Reuters published some data from the Komodo insurance data base as part of their series in 2022 (I think), so you can look that up. There are other glimpses like that but nothing comprehensive. I don't think we have any way to track how many out-of-pocket gender surgeries take place, which many are.
I don't think you will find many fans of nose jobs and breast augmentations among gender-critical folks. Personally, I think those surgeries should be banned for under-18s. But there's a huge difference between those surgeries, which everybody acknowledges to be cosmetic, and gender surgeries, which claim to be life-saving medicine, so of course a different and higher standard of scrutiny applies to gender surgeries. I do not think gender interventions should be offered under the banner of medicine. I think these interventions are purely cosmetic in their benefits, and wide-ranging in their harms and risks, but they are not 'sold' to patients as cosmetic.
Breast reductions in a different category than both cosmetic surgeries and gender surgeries and it makes a lot of sense that if breast size is debilitating for a young woman, that she should be able to get such a surgery, which doesn't compromise health/function the way gender surgeries do.
To ETA: I am not negating your experience. But here is just my perspective as a middle aged woman who underwent breast reduction at age 16, 30+ years ago. In many ways, most days, I am glad for having underwent the surgery. I have surely been spared much back pain and physical discomfort since. And yet, many aspects of the experience for me echo the criticisms of these youth gender surgeries today. After the suggestion from my mother, I was whisked through the primary care office and to the plastic surgeon. I was assured that though I was young, I was "very mature" and special in my ability to handle it. Any complications were skimmed over, including the inability to breastfeed in the future: "it's modern times...there's always formula." A low rate of regret was emphasized. No mention or attention to the psychological aspects or impact on my sexual development and romantic relationships, other than to emphasize that I would look great in clothes and my self-esteem would skyrocket. All I know is that I did not, could not, consent at that age despite thinking I could while all the adults around me encouraged it.
Similarly, the doctor exaggerated the back pain and other limits posed by the size of the breasts to get insurance to pay for it. Again, the cosmetic and the medical were being blurred.
Finally, when discussing regret/satisfaction I think taking a long view is important. I went from elated to devastated very quickly in high school as my body became the subject of even more attention. In my 20s I indeed felt more confident in clothing but less so in romance and engaged in self-destructive behaviors that I think stemmed in part from the violation and lack of bodily agency I had experienced. I was later comfortable with it until having my children and being faced with social, psychological, physical experiences (including shame) for not being able to breastfeed. After recovering from severe postpartum depression with therapy and time I feel at peace with having had a breast reduction so young. In many ways I wish I had waited at least a few years... the breast size was in some ways debilitating but so were the ramifications.
This is a very helpful perspective. Thank you for sharing it. I recognize in your situation a difference in mine: I got mine as an adult and I never wanted kids. Also no one suggested the surgery to me. I was as confident at ~16 that I never wanted kids as I am now at 47. So I still think I really could have offered properly informed consent owing to how much I wanted the surgery and that breastfeeding complications wouldn’t be a concern for me. But I can see how your situation differed and why the experience leads you to suggest caution.
For me this reinforces that these decisions should be made thoughtfully; but that sometimes they can be made. In my case I have no doubt that having this cosmetic surgery at 16, 17, or 18 would have been quite life-enhancing.
Thank you for this reply, I appreciate it. Your points are well taken.
Following Jesse Singal’s work and commentary on youth transition has me sold on the idea that selling hormone treatments or surgeries as “life-saving” is an overstatement. That said, should we care too much if these surgeries are cosmetic? As I mentioned, had I the means to get my breast reduction as a teenager, I would have. It would have been a huge benefit to me. It’s also a surgery with one of the lowest regret rates.
I understand that we can’t know that actual number of surgeries taking place but if we could know the data by surgery type, couldn’t we all… settle down a bit? For example, I ca. or imagine more than, say, 50 bottom surgeries a year in the US in sub-18 kids. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m willing to have my mind changed by data. And *completely setting aside* the question of hormone blockers.. even if top surgeries number in, say, 5000 a year… the affects of this surgery are cosmetic and someone reversible (though with scarring… which isn’t the worst thing, having faint scars myself on my breasts…). I’m still not convinced that surgeries are happening to minors on a scale *or* a level of irreversibility that warrants so much panic. And I say this, obviously, as someone who pays to read your substack! I’m interested and responding in good faith.
Maybe a question I can throw out to you is: let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that we got real data and the numbers were so low that you personally decided: this isn’t really where the problem is… what would be the 2 or 3 highest-order problems you would focus on as you look at how kind of deranged things have become when we talk abo it gender? Because I’m not sure this is *it*, but I think some of your worries and obsessions are really productive and generative. If you said to me: “fine, youth surgeries aren’t it…. But you should really be thinking about X and Y because those are areas where this ideological creep shows up and it’s a major problem.”
Thank you for your Substack. It’s edifying even on occasions I’m not sure I agree.
>> That said, should we care too much if these surgeries are cosmetic?
We should care a lot if cosmetic surgeries are offered as anything other than cosmetic because it's making a false promise to patients. And I think that goes for adult and underage patients alike.
If it were truly tiny numbers of patients -- and the number of underage patients we know about is too many for me, and we only know about a subset of such patients -- I would honestly still worry about this area of medical practice and youth surgeries specifically because the history of gender medicine is = tiny number of patients who are exceptionalized by medical providers, experimented on in ways I think are super unethical (because cosmetic interventions are offered as medical interventions but cannot deliver on range of promises made, whether that's "you'll feel better" or "you'll pass" or "you'll become a man/woman"... I think the whole harm the body to placate the mind approach is doomed to fail), and because we've seen the potential to scale up from already worrisome exceptional/last resort to huge numbers of patients without safeguards, but I'm not ready to give up on the exceptional/exceptionalized patients either.
Ack, sorry. Setting aside issue of surgeries on minors? I think it's worth looking into adults and their expectations for transition. In my (necessarily quite limited) experience, I know some adults who transitioned who are mostly happy with what they got and the thing they all have in common was low expectations: they knew the interventions were cosmetic, wouldn't make them a man/woman, that they might pass sometimes but not all the time, that they weren't going to be able to reliably change the way other people saw them or even the way they saw themselves, but that it was the best way they had been able to find to deal with the distress they had. They usually seemed to think of themselves more as unusual/unconventional members of their sex who wanted to live a certain way and were able to be pretty inwardly focused when it came to assessing success. My sense from talking to adults transitioning now and from reading their accounts online is that reasonable/low expectations are out and this is setting up a world of hurt for adults, too, and throws possibility of informed consent into question. Cosmetic surgeons are supposed to screen for BDD and not operate on patients with unrealistic expectations for surgery (not that they always do this, of course). My sense is tons of trans patients are coming in with wildly unrealistic expectations for surgery and this is not considered a problem by surgeons, not evaluated for.
Ooh, my ex-husband's nieces, whose father wrote for the NY Times back in the day, both got "rhinoplasties' to make their noses "less Jewish." Ach, du Lieber Gott! Surgeries to "pass as Aryan" then morphed into f--ing this. And Exulansic is taking all this guff from Karen Davis and "them" about her schnoz. Part American Indian. So f--- them.
Hi Eliza! Where can I send a media request, is there a public email people can contact you? Would love to talk wit you about your research for my Substack. Sorry to barge in!
This article literally is the basis and evidence for a comment I made in a previous article titled, 'Very human problems in the field of gender medicine'. That being that most clinicians are not unaware, innocent and well meaning but very actively practicing deceptive and unlawful behaviour that goes against lawful requirements (and at the very least their behaviour is morally reprehensible, lacking in moral integrity and self motivated by lucrative financial incentives).
The trouble is in the trans issue particularly, on all levels, we get caught up and are so easily taken in by 'the visuals' of what is presented to us. Smoking mirrors. A therapist, nurse or doctor look kind and well meaning and we immediately put our whole trust into what they say and do. Whereas in reality they are Wolves in Sheep's clothing. 360 degrees in the trans scenario, what you see is not what get.
Most of these parents have been bamboozled by these clinicians and taken into a 'group think' environment where they are the odd person out and are seduced into finally thinking they must be wrong for not letting their child transition because look how happy 'Anya' is now 'she's' transitioned and living as 'her' authentic self and who 'she' was meant to be.
The whole scenario is truly tragic and these clinicians need to be held accountable for the roles they played.
"Whereas in reality they are Wolves in Sheep's clothing" I think many of the affirming therapists are not wolfs - they are sheep from coat to brains, bleating feebly about affirmation
, TRA dogs watching and keeping them firmly in line.
And there's that going on for some. True!
The health care industry is a for profit entity. These surgeries make lots of money. In a strange twist what should be healthcare is in fact sickcare. Our health system has been hijacked just as our political system has. Since there is no money in health we take completely healthy young women, slap a diagnosis on them such as gender dysphoria and now we can make money off their bodies. What is sick is a system that sees this as fine and appropriate!
Of course - the whole “trans” thing is manipulation of reality, truth and emotions. Lying is paramount to achieving what they want.
thank you!
The logic of the means justifying the ends: lying is acceptable in order to ensure girls can continue to be surgically mutilated.
I first typed “young women” but 14-year-olds are girls not women.
And we trans widows can tell you the whole field was developed for men who go out to gay bars "crossdressing" to test out their cross-sex ideations. Often stemming from childhood abuse. Talk about malpractice--and many of us, in my data, 20 of 56, experienced sexual assault from panty-wearing husband before we extricated ourselves
Exactly right. And if there's any mention of trans widows, forget it! Despite the fact we attest that our husbands were 'affirmed' in one appointment way back in the 1990s! Like, wow, man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTUmEUXM5wc&t=5s
Is everyone mad about nose jobs and breast augmentations or reductions, too? I am very interested gender critical analysis broadly. But what are the most reliable statistics for how frequently trans kids are getting mastectomies/augmentation and bottom surgery? This is a genuine question.
Yes, it is an excellent question but those numbers are obscured for multiple reasons (our decentralized health system, insurance coding, patient privacy, etc).
However, how important is it that we know exactly how many children are being operated on in this way? I'm not trying to be facetious but the activists use the lack of data to obfuscate the harms. The sequence goes like this: It's not happening at all. It's happening but very rarely so calm down. It's happening but it's just fine. Most nice people when they get to the awareness that it *is* happening then turn to the activist position that it must be rare and since no one has the numbers, it has got to be rare.
That's when I say: even if it's rare, even if it's only ten girls, or 100 girls, or 1,000 girls, that's still too many girls losing their futures.
Consider Dr Brinkley, the goat gland doctor. In the 1920s he promised renewed virility to mean by implanting animal glands in them. He had patients. People freely chose to have this surgery done. Some even claimed renewed virility. Was that okay? Even if he only implanted in ten men? 20 men? No, none of it was okay. The authorities finally shut him down (IIRC he moved to Mexico?).
We will never know how many young people have gone through this. But we can come to the conclusion even without those numbers that these procedures are harmful to young people. We can say that mastectomies that remove nipples (and thus erotic sensation, not to mention breastfeeding ability) from young people is wrong. (This is quite different from a breast reduction procedure.) We can conclude that even if only 100 children are harmed. Or ten. Or 5.
For the record, as DDD bra size in high school my life would have been vastly improved by a breast reduction at that time rather than waiting until I was ~35.
In the US, it's hard to track. Reuters published some data from the Komodo insurance data base as part of their series in 2022 (I think), so you can look that up. There are other glimpses like that but nothing comprehensive. I don't think we have any way to track how many out-of-pocket gender surgeries take place, which many are.
I don't think you will find many fans of nose jobs and breast augmentations among gender-critical folks. Personally, I think those surgeries should be banned for under-18s. But there's a huge difference between those surgeries, which everybody acknowledges to be cosmetic, and gender surgeries, which claim to be life-saving medicine, so of course a different and higher standard of scrutiny applies to gender surgeries. I do not think gender interventions should be offered under the banner of medicine. I think these interventions are purely cosmetic in their benefits, and wide-ranging in their harms and risks, but they are not 'sold' to patients as cosmetic.
Breast reductions in a different category than both cosmetic surgeries and gender surgeries and it makes a lot of sense that if breast size is debilitating for a young woman, that she should be able to get such a surgery, which doesn't compromise health/function the way gender surgeries do.
To ETA: I am not negating your experience. But here is just my perspective as a middle aged woman who underwent breast reduction at age 16, 30+ years ago. In many ways, most days, I am glad for having underwent the surgery. I have surely been spared much back pain and physical discomfort since. And yet, many aspects of the experience for me echo the criticisms of these youth gender surgeries today. After the suggestion from my mother, I was whisked through the primary care office and to the plastic surgeon. I was assured that though I was young, I was "very mature" and special in my ability to handle it. Any complications were skimmed over, including the inability to breastfeed in the future: "it's modern times...there's always formula." A low rate of regret was emphasized. No mention or attention to the psychological aspects or impact on my sexual development and romantic relationships, other than to emphasize that I would look great in clothes and my self-esteem would skyrocket. All I know is that I did not, could not, consent at that age despite thinking I could while all the adults around me encouraged it.
Similarly, the doctor exaggerated the back pain and other limits posed by the size of the breasts to get insurance to pay for it. Again, the cosmetic and the medical were being blurred.
Finally, when discussing regret/satisfaction I think taking a long view is important. I went from elated to devastated very quickly in high school as my body became the subject of even more attention. In my 20s I indeed felt more confident in clothing but less so in romance and engaged in self-destructive behaviors that I think stemmed in part from the violation and lack of bodily agency I had experienced. I was later comfortable with it until having my children and being faced with social, psychological, physical experiences (including shame) for not being able to breastfeed. After recovering from severe postpartum depression with therapy and time I feel at peace with having had a breast reduction so young. In many ways I wish I had waited at least a few years... the breast size was in some ways debilitating but so were the ramifications.
This is a very helpful perspective. Thank you for sharing it. I recognize in your situation a difference in mine: I got mine as an adult and I never wanted kids. Also no one suggested the surgery to me. I was as confident at ~16 that I never wanted kids as I am now at 47. So I still think I really could have offered properly informed consent owing to how much I wanted the surgery and that breastfeeding complications wouldn’t be a concern for me. But I can see how your situation differed and why the experience leads you to suggest caution.
For me this reinforces that these decisions should be made thoughtfully; but that sometimes they can be made. In my case I have no doubt that having this cosmetic surgery at 16, 17, or 18 would have been quite life-enhancing.
Thank you for this reply, I appreciate it. Your points are well taken.
Following Jesse Singal’s work and commentary on youth transition has me sold on the idea that selling hormone treatments or surgeries as “life-saving” is an overstatement. That said, should we care too much if these surgeries are cosmetic? As I mentioned, had I the means to get my breast reduction as a teenager, I would have. It would have been a huge benefit to me. It’s also a surgery with one of the lowest regret rates.
I understand that we can’t know that actual number of surgeries taking place but if we could know the data by surgery type, couldn’t we all… settle down a bit? For example, I ca. or imagine more than, say, 50 bottom surgeries a year in the US in sub-18 kids. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m willing to have my mind changed by data. And *completely setting aside* the question of hormone blockers.. even if top surgeries number in, say, 5000 a year… the affects of this surgery are cosmetic and someone reversible (though with scarring… which isn’t the worst thing, having faint scars myself on my breasts…). I’m still not convinced that surgeries are happening to minors on a scale *or* a level of irreversibility that warrants so much panic. And I say this, obviously, as someone who pays to read your substack! I’m interested and responding in good faith.
Maybe a question I can throw out to you is: let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that we got real data and the numbers were so low that you personally decided: this isn’t really where the problem is… what would be the 2 or 3 highest-order problems you would focus on as you look at how kind of deranged things have become when we talk abo it gender? Because I’m not sure this is *it*, but I think some of your worries and obsessions are really productive and generative. If you said to me: “fine, youth surgeries aren’t it…. But you should really be thinking about X and Y because those are areas where this ideological creep shows up and it’s a major problem.”
Thank you for your Substack. It’s edifying even on occasions I’m not sure I agree.
>> That said, should we care too much if these surgeries are cosmetic?
We should care a lot if cosmetic surgeries are offered as anything other than cosmetic because it's making a false promise to patients. And I think that goes for adult and underage patients alike.
If it were truly tiny numbers of patients -- and the number of underage patients we know about is too many for me, and we only know about a subset of such patients -- I would honestly still worry about this area of medical practice and youth surgeries specifically because the history of gender medicine is = tiny number of patients who are exceptionalized by medical providers, experimented on in ways I think are super unethical (because cosmetic interventions are offered as medical interventions but cannot deliver on range of promises made, whether that's "you'll feel better" or "you'll pass" or "you'll become a man/woman"... I think the whole harm the body to placate the mind approach is doomed to fail), and because we've seen the potential to scale up from already worrisome exceptional/last resort to huge numbers of patients without safeguards, but I'm not ready to give up on the exceptional/exceptionalized patients either.
Thank you.
To my other/last question… setting aside this issue, what else should I worry about / read about?
Ack, sorry. Setting aside issue of surgeries on minors? I think it's worth looking into adults and their expectations for transition. In my (necessarily quite limited) experience, I know some adults who transitioned who are mostly happy with what they got and the thing they all have in common was low expectations: they knew the interventions were cosmetic, wouldn't make them a man/woman, that they might pass sometimes but not all the time, that they weren't going to be able to reliably change the way other people saw them or even the way they saw themselves, but that it was the best way they had been able to find to deal with the distress they had. They usually seemed to think of themselves more as unusual/unconventional members of their sex who wanted to live a certain way and were able to be pretty inwardly focused when it came to assessing success. My sense from talking to adults transitioning now and from reading their accounts online is that reasonable/low expectations are out and this is setting up a world of hurt for adults, too, and throws possibility of informed consent into question. Cosmetic surgeons are supposed to screen for BDD and not operate on patients with unrealistic expectations for surgery (not that they always do this, of course). My sense is tons of trans patients are coming in with wildly unrealistic expectations for surgery and this is not considered a problem by surgeons, not evaluated for.
Ooh, my ex-husband's nieces, whose father wrote for the NY Times back in the day, both got "rhinoplasties' to make their noses "less Jewish." Ach, du Lieber Gott! Surgeries to "pass as Aryan" then morphed into f--ing this. And Exulansic is taking all this guff from Karen Davis and "them" about her schnoz. Part American Indian. So f--- them.
Hi Eliza! Where can I send a media request, is there a public email people can contact you? Would love to talk wit you about your research for my Substack. Sorry to barge in!
Hi there -- you can write to me at elizamondegreen@gmail.com
Right!