A 'medical scandal' happening under our noses
'Warringah political candidate Katherine Deves is right: transgender-identifying children are being mutilated by surgery and sterilised by hormonal interventions'
Note: This is a lightly edited excerpt from an open letter to Australia’s doctors published by paediatrician Dr Dylan Wilson, who has been following the gender clinic debate. BL
Dylan Wilson
There is a simple reason why Ms. Deves tweeted about children being surgically mutilated and sterilised.
It’s because children are being surgically mutilated and sterilised.
Around the world, there are girls as young as 13 who have had a bilateral mastectomy because of dysphoria about their bodies. This has been done in [U.S.] gender clinics, and also by private surgeons ... Ms. Deves probably knows this. There was nothing in her tweet that was specific to genital surgery in Australia. That’s something her critics inferred. Ms. Deves thinks girls this age having completely healthy breast tissue removed because of their mental health struggles is mutilation. So do I.
And the backlash that focused on the “surgically mutilated” part [of the Deves tweet], conveniently failed to address the part about children being sterilised.
If a child has their body arrested [by puberty blocker drugs in early puberty, at Tanner stage 2], how does that child develop fertility? The simple answer is, they can’t. We all need the later stages of puberty to fully develop sperm and eggs. They have been sterilised by medical means. They have been sterilised by doctors at our children’s hospitals.
We are in the midst of a medical scandal. This is happening under our noses. We are all somewhat complicit; we have failed to support our colleagues who have raised concerns before, we have blindly assumed that a children’s hospital must be doing the right thing simply because it’s the children’s hospital. We haven’t asked questions. Or we’ve been too afraid to.
Click here for the full text of Dr Wilson’s open letter.
This Twitter thread gives some more context. Here’s another relevant thread.
This Quillette article covers the international shift towards caution on gender medicine. BL