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The American Medical Association asserted for years that transgender surgeries for minors were “medically necessary,” according to its website. On Feb. 4, the organization officially recommended against gender transition surgeries for minors, following a growing precedent around the world.
Closer to home, Michigan’s attorney general continues to defend these treatments as best practice. Michiganders should remind her of the facts.
The recent reversal on “gender-affirming care” has a simple explanation: Facts win when people are bold enough to speak them out loud.
“Gender-affirming” surgeries and hormone treatments are based on a false narrative. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said gender dysphoric teenagers’ lives depended on aligning their bodies with their inner sense of self through irreversible surgeries, an idea contradicted by both the best practices of medicine and the experiences of many who underwent and regretted the procedures.
A narrative without facts can only be maintained through force. Without facts behind them, defenders of sex-change surgeries and hormone treatments simply labeled all dissenters as violent bigots. This worked until a few people, led by the very victims of these surgeries, spoke out.
Critics such as swimmer Riley Gaines and University of Sussex Philosophy Professor Kathleen Stock were labeled as violent and ostracized from society. Parents who questioned whether their 15-year-old son should get an estrogen implant were asked whether they “wanted a dead son or a live daughter.”
The cardinal rule of medicine is “do no harm.” As an independent review in the U.K. found, permanently altering gender surgeries and hormone treatments for minors lack the evidence and safeguards necessary to prevent harm. Instead, as whistleblowers such as gender clinic case manager Jamie Reed have now admitted, these treatments were given the green light out of “political considerations.”
Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas — like medical procedures driven by politics instead of facts — have victims. One of these victims was British woman Keira Bell, one of the thousands of young women fast-tracked into these medical procedures who regretted her choice. But unlike most, Bell took action.
“I was an unhappy girl who needed help,” Bell said in a statement online. “Instead, I was treated as an experiment. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all of my comorbidities, not just to affirm my naive hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.”
In 2019, Bell started a public campaign against “gender-affirming” surgery for minors, suing the prominent Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in court. A year later, despite death threats, she won.
Others joined the campaign, including Chloe Cole, driving a movement against sex-change surgeries and hormone treatments that activists could neither silence nor dismiss as conservative bigots clutching for control.
Transgender activism drew its authority from the experiences of people with gender dysphoria. When those same people’s lived experience was that “gender-affirming” care was criminally irresponsible, the narrative began to crack.
Drawing on the testimonies of detransitioners like Bell, the Cass Review, an independent investigation for U.K.’s National Health Service, declared in March 2022 that gender-affirming procedures lacked the evidence and safeguards of best practice medicine and pointed out evidence of irreversible long-term harm — such as infertility, fragile bones, and endocrine disruption — caused by the treatments. In conclusion, the researchers recommended postponing these gender treatments until adulthood. The U.K. closed its youth gender clinics.
America moved more slowly. However, in recent months, not only the AMA but also the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Academy of Pediatrics have revised their standards. The state of Michigan, meanwhile, has doubled down, releasing a letter threatening healthcare providers who refuse sex-change treatments to minors with prosecution.
According to a poll this month, a majority of the American public now supports banning sex-change treatments for minors. Once a few courageous people spoke up, citizens could see the facts through the narrative.
The President Donald Trump-era political climate has helped. But the monumental shift on “gender-affirming” surgeries ultimately is due to the willingness of brave individuals such as Keira Bell to speak the truth regardless of personal cost.
Still, more truth must be spoken.
Teens wrestling with gender dysphoria, defined by the American Psychiatric Association as “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex and one’s psychological sense of gender,” often have several problems, including depression, dissociative disorders, and autism spectrum disorders. Thus, the teens who’ve been rushed into these surgeries are often the most vulnerable, isolated, and desperate for identity.
Banning the “gender-affirming” treatments harming these teens is important. But it’s not enough. Instead of being guided toward a healthy acceptance of their whole person, teenagers are told they’re born in the wrong body, destabilizing their identity from external reality.
This is manipulative and cruel, and it needs to stop. Every American medical association, including the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, should follow the AMA’s lead and work to help young people accept their bodies rather than lie to them.
This won’t happen unless brave individuals keep speaking the truth out loud.
Know a doctor? Have him over for dinner to share your concerns. Is your state legislator unsure about this issue? Give them a call. Have a friend struggling with gender dysphoria? Be a good friend and tell them the truth to help them accept their own bodies.
As Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said, “Live not by lies.”
Daniel Johnson is a sophomore studying philosophy and religion.
