Of Lobotomies, Anorexia, and ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
Someday — soon — society is going to view so-called “gender affirming care” in the same way we now view forced lobotomies from the last century. Society will be appalled. The recent $2 million medical malpractice jury verdict against doctors who removed the healthy breasts of a 16-year-old girl may indicate that that day is arriving. Similarly, just this week, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons came out against irreversible “gender affirming care” surgeries on those under 19, and the American Medical Association appeared to reverse its support for such surgeries on children. (RELATED: The Med-Mal Floodgates Are Open Thanks to the Fox Varian Case, and Thank God for That)
Lobotomies were once widely accepted by the “experts” in the medical community. Perhaps 50,000 people were lobotomized in the United States between 1940 and 1960. Doctors performed lobotomies by poking a metal implement through the skull — often through the eye socket — and scrambling an area of the patient’s brain in order to change the patient’s behavior — often rendering the patient semi-vegetative. The procedure was dramatized in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
An ordinary person recoils just to hear the process described, but lobotomies were an accepted medical practice. The experts knew best. Heck, a United States president’s sister was lobotomized. In 1949, the doctor who invented lobotomy, Dr. Egas Moniz, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association published learned articles promoting lobotomy. (All this close on the heels of the medical community’s early 20th century acceptance of the theory of eugenics, holding that some races and ethnic groups are genetically inferior to others.)
Thankfully, lobotomy eventually fell out of favor. But there appears to have been no punishment for the doctors who visited this horror on trusting patients and their families, and no recompense for their victims.
Arrogance is at play where doctors refuse to admit they do not know how effectively to treat certain conditions and so employ crazy “cures.”
“Gender affirming care” is an anodyne phrase used to mask many gruesome procedures, including castration, double mastectomy, hysterectomy, cutting off/out penises and vaginas, sterilization, and somewhat less damaging hormone treatments. “Gender affirming care” includes irreversible procedures only an “expert” could love. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 189: Doctors Performing Trans Surgeries Are in Huge Trouble)
With intractable mental health conditions, common sense sometimes is lost. Arrogance is at play where doctors refuse to admit they do not know how effectively to treat certain conditions and so employ crazy “cures.” Society trusts unaccountable “experts” who, with the best intentions, destroy lives and waltz off to perform the next good deed.
Compare the medical community’s approach to “gender affirming care” with its approach to eating disorders. When an 80-pound anorexic girl says, “I am fat, I am going to stop eating,” we do not say, “You are right, you should starve yourself.” Instead, we get her help. If a gender dysphoric girl says, “I am a boy,” why on earth would we say, “You are right, we should cut off your breasts and cut out your uterus”?
“Gender affirming care” seems premised in part on an unspoken ideology that men and women must act a certain way — that only women can like flowers or only men can like power tools. Some of those with gender dysphoria are simply gay. For most, gender dysphoria is a temporary condition that they outgrow. “Gender affirming care” is a permanent and often irreversible “solution” to this temporary condition. Unfortunately, today, gender dysphoria is treated as a political cause erroneously conflated with civil rights issues rather than a mental health condition.
People suffering from gender dysphoria need love, compassion, and non-political mental healthcare. They do not need to be mutilated and sterilized.
Mr. Daukas served as principal deputy and acting U.S. assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, 2020-21, and as Chief Counsel for Civil Issues on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023.
READ MORE:
The Med-Mal Floodgates Are Open Thanks to the Fox Varian Case, and Thank God for That
The Spectator P.M. Ep. 189: Doctors Performing Trans Surgeries Are in Huge Trouble