From a fascination with goth clothing to an obsession with a boy band to an intended future career as a NASCAR driver, 13-year-olds, who are for the most part still very much children, can hardly be relied upon to make any long-term decisions about their future, let alone something as impactful as plastic surgery.
Any good parent would think twice before allowing their 13-year-old girl to get breast augmentation or a nose job, for many obvious reasons.
The primary one being she’s thirteen.
So why do things change when the girl identifies as a boy?
Yes, there is a real mental illness correctly labeled gender dysphoria and yes, certainly at least some 13-year-olds genuinely suffer from it.
But the science is still flawed and conflicting as to just how helpful a) gender “confirmation” surgery can be and b) if it is even remotely ethical or effective to allow a preteen to go through this surgery.
After all, studies have found that many individuals who identify as a member of the opposite sex as teenagers often end up outgrowing this as they age. There was also a recent study that was censored by the very university that sponsored it that gave a very compelling argument that children are quick to identify as transgender when members of their peer group do.
Still, American doctors have no problem permanently altering the bodies of otherwise perfectly healthy 13-year-old girls, based on questionable scientific findings, and–naturally–employing your tax dollars to do so.
The Federalist’s Jane Robbins explains:
Some physicians in the United States are performing double mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls. The justification is gender dysphoria (“transgenderism”)—the girls now identify as boys and therefore want to look like boys.
Sometimes this dysphoria doesn’t appear until adolescence, and often little or no psychological evaluation is done to determine the underlying cause of the teenager’s desire to mutilate her body. But these doctors are willing to give her what she thinks she wants. And your federal tax money is paying for research to validate this gruesome treatment (see here and here).
Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.
As I’ve written with a coauthor, however, the study is fundamentally skewed toward the conclusions transgender activists desire: it contains no control group of subjects who will be spared these drugs, and will expire after five years, long before many negative effects may surface.
These design flaws aren’t surprising. Olson dismisses the possibility that gender dysphoria could be caused by psychological disturbance, claiming the only “mental health issue” related to gender dysphoria “comes from the way that the outside world responds” to the confused youth. She states, as though from a medical basis, that gender-dysphoric youth will go through the “wrong puberty” unless she and her cohorts can medicate them early enough in their lives to “put them through the right puberty.”
This is the pervasive attitude towards gender dysphoria: that any mental disturbances related to it have to do with the way transgender people are treated, not because there is anything wrong with a person who belives they are a member of the opposite sex.
In what other instance would we so emphatically validate someone’s belief that they are something they aren’t without also admitting to ourselves that they are mentally ill?
And when have we ever allowed preteens to undergo life-altering plastic surgery to accommodate such beliefs?
Pray for these children, saints, and pray for parents across the nation and world who are being seduced by this highly questionable “science,” and pray for our society, that truth and reason will overpower this highly irresponsible, senseless, and troubling trend.
