A medical school professor and surgeon calls transgender surgeries and hormone treatments violations of medical ethics akin to eugenics. “We are in a very dark episode of medical ethics and medical history,” he said in a recent podcast with The Federalist.
“With the growth of ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries and ‘gender-affirming’ medical care … we’re right in the middle of an extraordinary medical atrocity,” said Dr. Michael Egnor. He has been a pediatric neurosurgeon for 30 years, and is a professor of medicine at Stony Brook University in New York State.
In the ethics course at Stony Brook, which he has taught, “We teach the students and the young doctors about various ethical atrocities in medical history” such as eugenics, lobotomies for the mentally disabled, and the Tuskegee Experiment, in which medical care was deliberately withheld from African-Americans with syphilis.
“We point out that at the time all these atrocities were widely accepted in the medical community. At the end of the course I ask them a fairly obvious question, and that is what are the ethical atrocities that we’re doing today? And they just gasp.”
“There’s been this enormous growth, this explosion of transgender ideology in the press and in the medical community. I’ve had parents come to me in panic asking whether there’s anything I can do to help on that.”
“Watching the news and knowing that the American Medical Association has endorsed this stuff, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association has endorsed this stuff, I really have come to feel over the past year or two that we are in a very dark episode of medical ethics and medical history.”
“I want to encourage others in the medical community, many of whom share my viewpoint, to speak out. If more senior physicians won’t stand up and say that this is wrong, then I am ashamed of my profession.”
Egnor spoke of the serious risks of drugs and surgery to treat gender dysphoria in young people: “The medical advice [parents and children] are getting regarding these treatments is malpractice. It is, in my view, basically criminal stuff.”
“Puberty blockers are very, very powerful medications that have a lot of side effects in themselves.”
“There are institutions in this country now that are performing mastectomies on children. There are institutions that are carrying out hysterectomies and removal of ovaries on adolescent girls. There are institutions that are removing the genitals of adolescent boys.”
Egnor described how his interest in medical ethics developed from picking up a book about how doctors sterilized people perceived as defective decades earlier, despite the devastating consequences it had for some of the sterilized people.
“Reading this book about doctors, every day they would go to work thinking about how they could sterilize people…[it] sickened me,” he said. “And the widespread acceptance of eugenics bothered me. And I wondered at the time, what would I have done? The risk I would take if I don’t speak up is that I could never look at myself in the mirror again.”
The staunchly progressive American Academy of Pediatrics supports surgeries and puberty blockers for many gender dysphoric young people. But the United Kingdom’s National Health Service recently released draft guidelines that endorse a more cautious, wait-and-see approach, rejecting sex-change surgery for minors and rejecting the use of puberty blockers outside clinical trials.
The London Daily Telegraph reports that Britain’s National Health Service says that transgenderism is just a ‘phase’ for most kids who claim to be transgender:
Most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase”, the NHS has said, as it warns that doctors should not encourage them to change their names and pronouns.
NHS England has announced plans for tightening controls on the treatment of under 18s questioning their gender, including a ban on prescribing puberty blockers outside of strict clinical trials.
In light of this finding, NHS is no longer going to give minors sex-change surgery or puberty blockers. It is also cautioning against even social transitioning:
NHS England says that the interim Cass Report has advised that even social transition, such as changing a young person’s name and pronouns or the way that they dress, is not a “neutral act” that could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning”.
The NHS describes a staggering 40-fold increase in use of “gender identity services” over the last ten years. Because many using these services are just going through a phase, and will not benefit from a sex change, the NHS will take a different approach to treating minors, noting “evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” which is a reason that “doctors should be mindful this might be a ‘transient phase.’”
Yet, in America, gender clinics are giving teenagers double mastectomies and other sex-change operations in many states, with the blessing of the Biden administration. The Biden administration has promoted puberty blockers, even though the FDA says puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and permanent vision loss.
As the New York Post notes, many girls who get sex changes will “struggle for the rest of their lives with the irreversible medical consequences of a decision they made as minors.” They temporarily identify as transgender boys, then get sex changes before realizing they are really just girls.
The number of girls temporarily identifying as “transgender” has skyrocketed. Dr. Lisa Littman, a former professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to describe this subset of transgender youth, typically biological females who become suddenly dysphoric during or shortly after puberty. Littman believes this may be due to adolescent girls’ susceptibility to peer influence on social media.
A variety of studies suggest that as many as 80% of dysphoric children could ultimately experience “desistance”— or coming to terms with their biological gender without resorting to transition. Which is why many professionals like Evans think it’s wise to hold off on potentially irreversible medical intervention for as long as possible….All these treatments run the risk of side effects that critics argue are too serious for children to fully understand. In the short term, puberty blockers can stunt growth and effect bone density, while the long-term effects are still unknown since they were only approved by the FDA in 1993. Side effects of testosterone include high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, blood clots and even infertility.
Being “gender affirming” shouldn’t be an excuse for a doctor to commit medical malpractice. But that may be happening in many cases.
The National Review provided a possible example. Doctors affirmed a man’s false belief that he had a female gender identity, and then mutilated his body by giving him a sex change he came to regret.
Plagued by self-hatred, he “heard about transgenderism” in college, and “seized on it as the solution.” A gender-affirming free clinic “immediately affirmed” his female gender identity. He was then given an “incomplete informed consent document to sign.” Later, his doctor told him that he “should really get surgery.” He was given an orchiectomy, but not told that it was castration. After being castrated, he “developed a drug habit” and began “ejaculating blood.” He said that “the gender clinic kept telling me, ‘Oh, it gets better.’” But it didn’t.
He says he was never given an independent psychological evaluation before getting surgery. After surgery, a different therapist diagnosed him with a different condition than gender dysphoria. But by then, he had already been castrated.
Getting a sex change caused havoc in the lives of thousands of people. The National Review gave an example of a woman who transitioned to being a man, and ended up with negative health consequences, “no hair,” and a “body mutilated.”
It’s not just doctors and psychologists who have made mistakes in their zeal to be “gender affirming.” So have judges.
Jamie Shupe gave an example in “I was America’s first ‘nonbinary person.’ It was all a sham.” Shupe is male, as he noted in the Daily Signal. But he wanted in vain to be a woman, due to a condition known as “autogynephilia.” When his therapist expressed skepticism about whether he would actually benefit from trying to change his sex, he filed a “formal complaint” against her, and found a new therapist, who affirmed his new “identity as a woman.” But eventually he changed his mind and declared he was nonbinary, not female:
When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed….To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.
As a result of this ruling, a “nonbinary option” now exists in many states, even though Shupe’s “sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.” The judge’s ruling was not based on any evidence. As Shupe observes, “the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did” the judge ask “to see any medical evidence….Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order,” even though he did “not have any disorders of sexual development.” But three years later, “unable to advance the fraud for another single day,” he “reclaimed” his “male birth sex.”
