According to a report by City Journal’s Leor Sapir, The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) is challenging the “consensus” over “gender-affirming care” for minors.
ASPS represents 11,000 members and over 90 percent of the field in the U.S. and Canada. The organization told Sapir that it “has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”
Further, ASPS “acknowledged that there is “considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions” and that “the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty.”
Calling the evidence for youth gender transition “low quality” is not, as some gender clinicians say, a “scary buzzword” intended to “confus[e] non-experts.” In evidence-based medicine, “low quality” evidence means something very specific: that the true effect of an intervention is likely to be markedly different from the results reported in studies. As one expert in evidence-based medicine put it, low quality “doesn’t just mean something esoteric about study design, it means there’s uncertainty about whether the long-term benefits outweigh the harms.” As evidence for those harms—which include infertility, sexual dysfunction, and the agony of regret—continues to mount and ethical concerns get harder to ignore, European countries are increasingly prioritizingpsychotherapy and reclassifying endocrine and surgical approaches as experimental.
Aware that WPATH suppressed systematic reviews of evidence while developing its latest “standards of care,” ASPS says that it “is reviewing and prioritizing several initiatives that best support evidence-based gender surgical care to provide guidance to plastic surgeons.” I also asked ASPS whether plastic surgeons share responsibility for determining the medical necessity of gender surgeries for minors. ASPS responded that surgeons are “members of the multidisciplinary care team” and as such “have a responsibility to provide comprehensive patient education and maintain a robust and evidence-based informed consent process, so patients and their families can set realistic expectations in the shared decision-making process.”
In April, pediatrician and consultant Dr. Hilary Cass conducted a comprehensive and lengthy review of international research into gender medicine for children, culminating in a 388-page report submitted to NHS England.
Dr. Cass concludes that a lack of research and evidence on transgender medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and body-altering surgeries, is failing children.
Cass’s prior findings led to the banning of puberty blockers from children outside of clinical research in the UK.
The move from ASPS is a break from other medical organizations that have let woke voices push procedures that leave minors with life-altering consequences.
A whistleblower revealed that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) tried to silence members who raised serious concerns about the procedures and interventions and called for a “rigorous systematic review” to reconsider the policy on treating children with gender dysmorphia.
Further, according to the Washington Free Beacon. AAP let a small group of activists write their transgender standards.
AAP’s push to mutilate children goes beyond simply silencing critics.
For those who asked to see the email from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons: pic.twitter.com/QeXXmjn9rc
— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) August 13, 2024
ASPS’s statement comes after multiple “detransitioners” have come forward with concerns about their treatment and the life-altering mutilations they experienced.
Soren Aldaco was only 17 years old when she went on transgender hormones, and by the time she was 19, she had a body-altering double mastectomy.
Aldaco, who is now a 22-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, is suing the medical providers who allegedly enabled the body mutilations she now regrets.
In 2023, a 25-year-old North Carolina woman filed a lawsuit against doctors who aided her sex change when she was only 15 years old.
In July of 2023, Chloe Cole spent her 19th birthday before the U.S. House of Representatives reliving her horrifying, life-altering experience with “gender-affirming” care.
Cristina Hineman is suing Planned Parenthood after she was given life-altering testosterone following a brief 30-minute evaluation with a nurse practitioner. Less than a year after starting hormone therapy, Hineman underwent a double mastectomy.
