Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?

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.

-30-

Greg Ganske

*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.

Comments 29

  2. According to Cook County’s Chief Judge, Tim Evans, “They (teens) don’t have the pre-frontal cortex that is developed, and the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, does not, itself fully developed until you’re closer to the age of 25 years of age.” Yet children and teenagers are allowed to make monumental decisions regarding whether they want to play boy or girl for the rest of their lives. The collective insanity in the “progressive” world is astounding.

    1. Bill Maher said it best. When he was a kid he IDENTIFIED as a pirate! IN HIS MIND HE WAS A PIRATE! “Thank goodness my parents didn’t cut my leg off and give me a peg leg then pop my eye out to wear a patch so I could complete my transformation!” His words! This trans stuff on kids is nothing short of child abuse!

      1. Bill Maher also added… you can’t drive until you’re 16, can’t vote until you’re 18, or drink until you’re 21 yet at age 10 you can decide to cut your penis off or your breasts? In what world does this make sense???

  4. Good morning. Happy New Year John. I pray that our God will save this Country it is really on the brink of extinction since Obama went into office. The Devil is charming says the Bible. Our young are lost, they have no strong Parents to guide them. Schools and Universities have brained washed our kids, and the Parents have no clue as to what is happening. Sex changes for children? Protesters coming to America to destroy it while Sotos pays them? Parents want to be Buddies to their kids, they do not know how to Parent and the kids tell the Parents what to do and take their money. Sad that Adults have children but they do not take the responsibility of Parenting. What Country allows over 30,000 immigrants a day to walk in and take over and with the purpose of destroying it and the Government wants this because Voting for them is more important then America. We have inflation, and yet that awful Press Secretary tells people we are strong.
    Is she kidding? Who tells her what to do and say. I do not watch TV any more, I see some news on my phone and are disgusted the love idiots have for Biden that has no clue as to what is going on and the old Obama team works for him and they are doing what they are told. Life in America is over as we grew up to know, and the White Race allows this, while they become a Minority, and when they do realize what has happened they will not be in a position to change it. Obama said that he would change the Face of America, he is doing just that, and most people are asleep at the switch. The Devil runs our Country and big money is in charge and willing to destroy it for greed. I am so tired of hearing these uneducated dumb people recite the Liberal though without feeling responsible for their kids or the Country that gave them what they work hard for. I am afraid we are doomed, and we are becoming a Socialist Country, and most of the Illegals walking into our Country will bomb us soon. We are afraid to go anywhere, lock our doors, and our Streets are full of mobs of thieves, and rapist, and the Mayors blame the White man. Are we nuts or WHAT FOLKS. Our young do not know if they are a man or a woman and allow the schools to tell them, while we work hard to give our hard earned money to the Government to give to Iran. Persia will Rise again folks and soon. If you do not know what is Persia please google it and learn HISTORY. WE ARE FOOLS TO ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY.

      1. Yes. I agree with you. This guy is not a holy man. And I have been writing that the Pope was the one who kicked Covid pandemic off the ground into the world in the fall of 2019 that took millions of lives when he said the governments of the nations around the world should protect the homosexuals by approving gay unions! And while looking up Argentina in the books for my Intermediate Spanish class term paper at COD 10 years ago, I found this guy, as cardinal Jorge brokered Gay Unions into law with the ruling Military Junta while refusing to investigate or plead to save thousands of disappearing youths from the nation. And the only reason the lazy cardinals selected him as their pontiff later in 2013 was because he placed 2nd behind to Pope in the previous election some 10 years ago.

        And being a politician, he started his political appointments starting with Archbishop Supic, a fellow South Dakotan only several years junior to me. And he didn’t disappoint his boss. Couple years ago when a remodeled school try to rename the school and came up with 3 names for the finalist, Politician Supic “threw in a 4th name in the hat”. You guessed it. The school was renamed after Pope Francis! Couple months later, the politician appointed politician became Chicago Cardinal Supic!

        And now, when the Pope announced his church should start blessing the same-sex “Couple”, our Chicago Politician,Cardinal Supic became the first to agree with his mentor! While the Pope was encouraged in his decision by Lady Elton John with the prospects of a Sainthood, could you guess what was behind Cardinal Supic’s praise and approval? May an important posting at the Vatican, I guess!
        -Nambi

  6. An important column. Thank you for posting it. For a thorough analysis of the issue and lots of data to back it up I recommend Lost in TransNation by Miriam Grossman, M.D. an excellent book by a child psychiatrist.

  8. It’s become hard to sort out the new tyrannies of insane public policy by magnitude, to decide which one is greatest.

    There’s internationalized entitlement, Democrats inviting the world’s population to “surge” into America to provide them millions more indentured voters. There’s a multi-billionaire who sponsors evil district attorneys to set repeat criminals free, with the obvious motivation of neo-Marxist ideology and a less obvious one that’s worse.

    But the transgender medical industry that Dr. Ganske expertly describes strikes me as the worst of these three tyrannies. It mutilates and ruins children for pseudo-scientific reasons. And it implements a Nazi-style policy with a horrific twist: There is no real goal other than the financial one.

  9. I used to be an independently licensed mental health clinician (LCSW). I provided psychotherapy in a variety of settings.

    When I first started out, I thought that I was part of a loving, caring group of professionals, dedicated to assisting people in working through whatever issues and/or traumas were holding them back, counseling, guiding, encouraging, and helping them to find their highest level of function.

    Over the years, I learned of the sinister side of this field. Little things at first, then more demands that were increasingly bizarre and sinful. The national association (which shall be nameless, but I will tell you that they are social workers and that it is a national association of them), an association that traditionally heralded the individual right to self-determination, started hinting that people who believed in the God of the Bible might have some issues with reality. Then, the association started telling its members how to vote, assuming all people in the field were progressive leftists. They pushed an agenda that encouraged more drugs, less talk.

    Then the trauma really started hitting the fan. There were more and more parents presenting with their gender dysphoric children, wanting me to refer the children to a medical clinic to start the process to change their sons to daughters and their daughters to sons. Some of the parent-accepted (if not wholeheartedly approved) sexual perversions shared in the confines of my office were appalling, and state-sanctioned as “protected” activities. Many of the clients were actively involved in the occult.

    I refused to send children to specialty clinics to be mutilated and sacrificed to Molech. I outlined appropriate, gender-specific treatment plans. Not one family accepted the challenge of the work to help their children overcome the lie, opting to feed and abet the delusion visited on the child by the enemy of our families and souls. They did not question the “better a live, sexually mutilated child than a dead child” lie, and frankly, they are so indoctrinated that they wanted the “easy”
    medical fix.

    The final straw for me was when the state required Continuing Education Units that teach how to validate and facilitate the sexual delusions promulgated by the powers that be. I resigned my clinic position, and eventually phased out my private practice.

    I still receive brochures for CEUs in the mail and electronically. The one I received 2 days ago nauseated me to my core. It offered a seminar to assist clinicians in becoming comfortable and fluent in the terminology to use with transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) clients; how to become comfortable talking about clients’ “intersecting identities;” and how to “analyze transition readiness” and write letters of support to acquire surgeries.

    In other words, this is a seminar to teach you how to participate in the soul-destroying cultural delusion of normalizing the mental illness of gender dysphoria.

    All those years learning about life stages, human development, human interaction, sexuality, abnormal and normal psychology, healing trauma, and it comes down to this: The diabolical enemy of our souls owns the State, and is using the State to destroy families and children.

    We are a nation under the judgment of the one, righteous, holy, almighty God. I am astounded at how long He has stayed His hand. Sodom, Gomorrah, and the unrepentant Israelites were not as apostate as the current culture. A nation that was formed by His hand to spread the Gospel, to provide help and hope to the world, is now a nation of greed and idolatry.

    There is no stopping the coming, deserved judgment. We need to turn to the Lord God, repent, and accept what we receive from Him.

    Maranatha!

    1. I hope you find a way to participate in helping people again. While it’s true that our society has systemic problems that render even moral/proven treatment ineffective, there are still people who make the effort to live outside of this who would benefit from folks such as yourself.

      1. I do help people, I can’t not help people. It’s part of who I am…. I am just no longer a paid State Approved State Sanctioned Entity.

        I make no bones about the fact that I am no longer a part of that system.

  10. Twenty years ago the cause celebre amongst the left was the abolishment of “genital mutilation”. This was predominantly practiced by Muslim countries in Africa. The genitalia of pubescent girls were surgically altered with the twisted logic that this would make for more obedient wives. It was called a human right violation, barbaric and inhumane by human right activists, feminists and medical professionals. ONLY IN AMERICA could the same people now advocate for American children to receive the same treatment. Calling genital mutilation by another name still has the same result. GENITAL MUTILATION.

  11. Progressives are in this for the long game as well. Ruining a generation of procreation destroys any chance of a family, and all the ” privileges” that come with that stable environment. The nucleus of our Judeo-Christian country is destroyed. Mission accomplished.

  12. Marxism seeks to destroy the typical family in lieu of the state.
    And create lots of “oppressed” victims to gather to itself.
    The Medical/Industrial Complex seeks well-heeled victim-patients. The mentally ill have no friends in either camp sadly.

  13. Thank you for a very brave column.
    I have felt and believed for some time this is child abuse.
    I also know doctors are just practicing medicine. Which is why many in a medical crisis may seek out a second, third or many opinions.
    I also can’t help but wonder and have expressed this verbally what next?
    Ten year old child had a bad day, failed a test, or got bullied comes home and parents crack open a few beers and hands kid a joint. Is this the next thing? We don’t want unhappy or suicidal kids right?
    Sadly we live in ideologically society. We have news organizations who don’t establish, and speak facts but sprout agendas. If one goes against said agenda the outpouring of names and condemnations is ridiculous.
    Some days I simply say I’m too old for this shit.
    Thank you again.

  14. For the child, it is done because they believe it will be the cure-all for all of the peer pressure and bullying.
    It will be done because they hate their parents for the strict rules that they must follow.
    It will be done for the shock value and be the big ole F%$K U to their class mates and teachers.
    It will be done, because the parents are tired and frustrated that nothing else has “worked”.
    It will be done, because a white paper was written, influcncers descended and people who didn’t go through genital mutilation will tell kids that it’s the only way to find “peace”.
    The negatives will far out-weigh the positives. In fact; there will only be ONE positive; the child will believe that they are “better”…but it won’t be.
    It will be done, because the doctor went to a couple of conferences and seminars and saw the $$$$ for their ailing general practice.
    And that completes the circle.
    It always about the $$$$.
    And the kids are still committing suicide.

  16. Seems all the studies focus on the psychological profile of the patient. There are three key parties involved in this; the child, the parents and the physician. The latter two deserve the same analytic attention as they too have been molded by their pasts.

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