Gender - Affirming

You know the apocalypse is upon us when the President of the Endocrine Society responds to a WSJ article critical of “lifesaving gender-affirming care” claiming efforts to ban disfiguring surgery and puberty blockers on minors is “motivated by politics”, bans that are “fueled by misinformation.”  Dr. Hammes of Rochester, NY cites “more than 2000 studies” that “form a clear picture” that “gender-affirming care improves the well being of transgender and gender-diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide.”  Really. If it truly was “gender affirming” then we would be seeking to affirm the patient’s actual gender rather than convincing them they can be miraculously morphed into another. The good doctor appears mostly to be well versed in all the trans-community buzzwords but apparently failed to take into account the recent body of evidence from his European colleagues, doctors who have been at this a lot longer than we have, that shows no such improvement in mental health or suicide rates. Any physician who suspects that surgically altering one’s appearance to resemble that of the opposite sex, particularly in minors, results in not only a sense of well being but is somehow curative of what can best be described as raging mental illness should revisit their medical school training in psychiatry, genetics and anatomy.  And relying on data in psychiatric literature is downright laughable when it is widely reported that studies in the field are rarely reproducible. DNA is a blueprint on which the organism is built. Tearing down the facade will fail to affect the foundation. It’s high time the medical community stopped yielding to political opinion and returned to common sense and science.