By Greg Ganske

December 29, 2023

You and your son are discussing treatment to change your son’s sex with the doctor. The doctor says a psychologist talked to your son and recommends starting him on hormone blockers as the next step. This would keep your son from developing as a man. The doctor says the hormone blocking treatment is reversible. (To the contrary, see my DMR op-ed Mar 19, ’23). You have your doubts, but the doctor says it is safe. What the doctor doesn’t tell you is that once your child is on the hormone track this treatment leads to sex change surgery in 85% of cases.

A year of two later, the doctor recommends sex change surgery for your son consisting of castration and the inability to father children. You are not sure about agreeing to such a permanent and radical change in your child. You ask why not wait until Johnny, now Joanna, is older and of legal age? The surgeon sadly shakes his or her head and says that studies show that if Joanna doesn’t have surgery she will be as much as 50% more likely to commit suicide.

Well, you love your child and know that he or she has been mentally troubled, and you don’t want her to kill herself. You especially don’t want to be responsible by refusing to go along. This is a frightening choice and meant to be, but what do you know! You are not a doctor. After all, the doctors are specialists, and you don’t have the medical knowledge to challenge this. Thus, Joanna has her testicles removed, probably also her penis, has breast implants, and continues taking feminizing hormones. She will live with this for the rest of her life.

What a choice! Either get your child castrated or they will kill themselves. But is it true?

In an article published in Plastic Surgery News, my friend and colleague Dr. Mark Constantion who is an expert on childhood abuse and body shame did an extensive review of the medical literature. He found that transgender adolescents do have higher incidence of suicide in comparison to cis-gender patients but they also have 25-75% higher chances of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as drug abuse, eating disorders, depression, and childhood trauma. Patients with ACEs have suicide rates up to 50 times higher than those without ACEs, regardless of gender issues.

One Danish transgender study looked at 3,759 patients. There were 92 suicide attempts and 12 were successful, or 0.3 per cent. Certainly not the high rates suggested by gender doctors. Furthermore, Dr. Constantion found that it is not known if transition surgery lowers the 0.3 percent rate. What is known is that transgender patients have six times more psychiatric co-morbidities and ACEs than do non transgender patients. We don’t know if those counted were receiving hormonal or surgical treatment, whether suicide attempts or successes occurred before or after treatment and even what percentage had concomitant mental health diagnoses. It is data like this that has caused several European countries to put a pause of most transgender surgery in minors.

We do know that there is a surge of lawsuits by unhappy transitioned patients who are trying to reverse their deformities, de-transitioning. This poses a threat to a booming $billion gender-transition business. An unhappy detransitioned patient, Prisha Mosley, 25, is suing her former doctors in North Carolina for facilitating her medical gender transition and double mastectomy when she was in her teens.

Another patient, Chloe Cole, received testosterone injections starting at age 13 and had her breasts removed at age 15. Now 19 she says that this did not improve her mental problems and that the “people that did this to me need to be held accountable. I wasn’t capable of giving informed consent at that age.” She doesn’t know if she will be able to conceive after the hormone treatment. She is suing Kaiser Permanente.

Those doing this surgery on minors say the rate of patients detransitioning is low, but we simply don’t know what the true rate is. The Dutch study showed 35% ceased hormonal treatment. We do know that the 2015 U.S. Transgender Study showed a detransition rate of 13.1 per cent, a number likely significantly under-reported since as many as 75% of detransitioners never return to their original doctors. And we are now seeing in the past few years an increase in early teen girls seeking trans care that indicates a social fad. “It appears that most children seeking trans treatment may actually be gay and then later regret missing sexual organs of pleasure or even never being able to orgasm as a result of puberty blockers or surgery.” Most ‘Transgender’ Kids Turn Out to Be Gay.

I predict the number of transitioned patients who publicly regret their sex change is just the tip of the iceberg. The rush to treat minors with sex-change treatment and surgery will go down in American medical history alongside the disastrous frontal lobotomy fad that tarred the medical establishment in the 1940’s and ‘50s.

Some think these decisions should be “just between the doctor, patient and the parents.” The fallacy of this is that most children and parents have no way of evaluating the veracity of gender change affirmation medical advice from doctors with possible ideological bias and definite financial conflicts of interest. States have always had an interest in legislating against child abuse. Castrating minors when the data on the numbers of detransitioning patients is becoming increasingly public should give us pause as it has in several European countries.

So, parents heed the gender doctors telling of dire consequences if they don’t sign on the line and pray their child will be happy and not commit suicide. However, when Joanna later wants to detransition back to Johnny the greatest plastic surgeons in the world can’t give Johnny back the penis he had amputated, or transitioned girls the breasts and vaginas they were born with.

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*This column was posted with permission by The Des Moines Register.

Greg Ganske, MD, is a retired plastic surgeon who cared for trauma victims, patients with cancer, farmers with hand injuries, and children with birth defects. He served Iowa in the United States Congress from 1995-2003.