‘Woke’ doctors who are providing cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries to individuals who claim to be transgender may be committing medical malpractice in many cases.
Washington, DC-based attorney Hans Bader writes at CNSNews.com that “being ‘gender-affirming’ shouldn’t be an excuse for a doctor to commit medical malpractice.”
“But that may be happening in many cases,” he adds.
National Review, for example, cites the case of Debbie, a biological female who was one of the subjects of a recent BBC documentary on “detransitioners” – people who have changed their minds about their gender identity transition and now identify as their biological sex. According to the report:
At age 44, Debbie transitioned medically, taking testosterone, which gave her a beard and made her go bald. She then transitioned surgically, having flesh from her arm grafted to construct a pseudo-penis. Debbie told the BBC that she got the idea about being transgender after watching TV coverage of trans people: “It was like a Eureka. I thought, This is me. This is what I’ve got to do.” Debbie had struggled with many issues and had been sexually abused as a child.
She hoped that changing gender would help her “become a different person” as well as “accepted in the world.” However, after 17 years on testosterone and changing her name to Lee, and after having had “multiple procedures,” she realized she had made a mistake:
I remember breaking down. It was like this was a mistake. It should never have happened. But what the hell do you do about it? How do you go through yet another harrowing transition? What do you do? I’ve got no hair. I’ve got a beard. I’ve had all my body mutilated. How the hell do I go back to being the Debbie that I was?
Idaho-based endocrinologist Dr. William Malone told Breitbart News it is “inevitable” that malpractice lawsuits will be brought forward in the cases of individuals with gender dysphoria holding the belief that life-changing physical alterations will make them happy.
“When bad ideas get put into practice, bad outcomes occur, and then the people who have been hurt will seek to hold those who hurt them accountable,” he said, adding:
Given the number of detransitioners coming forward and reporting they weren’t offered adequate counseling to help them explore the underlying causes of gender dysphoria—which could have helped them resolve their distress without the irreversible effects of hormones or surgery—it’s widely anticipated that there will be an avalanche of lawsuits in the near future.
At the end of November, over 26,000 females from around the world were seeking financial assistance at crowdfunding site GoFundMe in order to have “top surgery” – or an elective double mastectomy – to appear more masculine.
Physicians anxious to be “gender-affirming” are enthusiastically treating gender dysphoria with expensive and life-altering medical interventions and surgeries.
Transgender treatment for those with gender dysphoria has grown into an elaborate industry. The cost of top surgery, for example, is over $10,000.
One website that advertises top surgery is the International Center for Transgender Care (ICTC) at the American Institute for Plastic Surgery in Dallas.
“Patients who opt for cosmetic mastectomy can expect to experience a number of benefits, including a greater congruence between their outside appearance and experienced gender, improved self-esteem and self-image, and an increased ability to blend-in society as a man,” touts ICTC, which features a photo of a perfectly muscular bare male torso as a suggestion of a final result.
Hacsi Horváth, MA, PgCert, an expert in clinical epidemiology and a “detransitioned” man who says he “masqueraded ‘as a woman’” for about 13 years, wrote last year at 4thWaveNow of the new industry of “affirming” physicians:
Proponents of affirmative care have dealt the deathblow to what little gatekeeping that remains. Their activities could well be described as marketing and recruitment for “being trans.” Patients of any age need only say they think they are really the opposite sex, or wish they were, and affirmative care clinicians are happy to get busy, scheduling surgeries and prescribing lifelong drug regimens. They seem to see themselves as affirmative pioneers, especially those who work tirelessly to provide medical interventions to more and more children and teens, thus creating an iatrogenic illusion from which the kids may never emerge.
As an example of a trans industry physician, Horváth pointed to Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
He noted Olson-Kennedy’s paper in May 2018 in which she recommended gender-confused girls as young as 13 for top surgery.
Based on 136 “completed surveys” at her gender clinic, she and her colleagues determined, “Chest dysphoria was high among presurgical transmasculine youth, and surgical intervention positively affected both minors and young adults.”
“Given these findings, professional guidelines and clinical practice should consider patients for chest surgery based on individual need rather than chronologic age,” she concluded.
In November 2018, Olson-Kennedy said during one conference that a double mastectomy for a young teen girl is not a big deal, even if she regrets the surgery later on in life.
Insisting that teens make positive, life-altering decisions all the time, she said, “Adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned, logical decision” about removing their breasts.
“And here’s the other thing about chest surgery,” she added, “if you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”
Charlie Evans, 28, a female who lived as a male for nearly ten years but then detransitioned and founded the Detransition Advocacy Network in the UK, suggested transgender individuals who regret their transitioning efforts tend to be “around their mid-20s, they’re mostly female and mostly same-sex attracted, and often autistic as well.”
Researchers at Boston University and the University of Michigan found in an expansive study that 78 percent of gender-dysphoric students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, compared to 45 percent of students who are comfortable with their biological sex.
Transgender activists, however, reject the notion that those who seek cross-sex hormones or sex change surgery may have underlying psychological disorders. Instead, they claim any psychological disturbance is caused by rejection of their new “identities” by families and society.
National Review points to the case of a 41-year-old man from the Midwest who said he was often teased as a boy because of his “feminine” mannerisms, and became “fearful, self-hating about the way that I walk, speak, stand — the way that I move and the way that I dress.”
“In college I heard about transgenderism and I seized on it as the solution,” he said.
At a gender clinic on the West Coast, a doctor “immediately affirmed” the man’s female gender identity, National Review reported:
He was then given “a rather incomplete informed consent document to sign . . . Then at every appointment that followed, [he was] given information that contradicted the informed-consent documents.”
After a period of homelessness, he managed to get a job, at which point his doctor told him that he “should really get surgery.” He was given an orchiectomy, having been told that it would help him and remove the need for cross-sex hormones. But that isn’t what happened.
“I went into shock because I wasn’t told that [orchiectomy] was castration. I was told it was some gender bullshit.” After this 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.
The man said he never had an independent psychological evaluation prior to transitioning. “I confronted the doctor about this, and the doctor said that the lying was done to grant me greater access to care,” he told National Review.
After he was castrated, another therapist diagnosed him to be on the autism spectrum.
Eye opening firsthand account of how many gender clinics work https://t.co/XPMtJqrvXL via @TheEconomist
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 4, 2019
“Detransitioner” Carey Callahan wrote at the Economist Tuesday of the “horror stories” at transgender clinics.
At Callahan’s former place of employment, a California transgender clinic, “people were informed that they were waiving the mental-health screening recommended by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.”
“Its standard of care recommends that patients seeking HRT [hormone replacement therapy] be screened for schizotypal disorders, autism-spectrum disorders, personality disorders, dissociative disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders and more,” Callahan noted, adding:
In a comprehensive examination of peer-reviewed articles on medical-transition between 1991 and 2017 by researchers at Cornell University, called “What We Know” … there have been no studies on what percentage of clinics in America follow the standard of care recommended by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health versus their own informed-consent protocols.
One writer at 4thWaveNow, a self-described “community of parents and others questioning the medicalization of gender-atypical youth,” has been following the malpractice lawsuits brought against California-based phalloplasty surgeon Curtis Crane, M.D., who constructs penises for biological females who want to appear as males.
In August, “Worriedmom” wrote:
[A]s of this writing, there no longer appear to be any open civil cases against Dr. Crane in the state of California. All eight of the malpractice cases that had previously been pending in the San Francisco Superior Court have now been “dismissed with prejudice.”
The writer noted that since “over 90% of all medical malpractice cases never go to trial,” it is likely the lawsuits against Crane were all “settled out of court.”
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