Boston Children’s Hospital director calls for med schools to 'increase training efforts' for teen sex changes

The co-director of the Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital is calling for an increase in capacity for clinics providing experimental medical sex changes for minors in response to numerous Republican states outlawing the interventions, reports Fox News.

Oren Ganor, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon specialising in sex change surgeries, co-authored an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on March 14, in which he calls for the capacity to perform sex change surgeries on minors to be increased.

"Physicians who provide GAC will face a greater burden due to constraints in certain states… work to criminalize GAC for adolescents,” reads the article. “Especially as certain states work to criminalize GAC for adolescents, there will be an increased flux of patients traveling to seek care in states with more open legislation.”

GAC stands for “gender-affirming care,” a euphemism for the experimental medical pathway of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and major surgeries such as bilateral mastectomies and genital surgeries onto which many young people are being ushered. There is no solid scientific base for this treatment protocol and several nations have reverted back to providing psychotherapeutic support for this vulnerable cohort of young people after systematic reviews of the existing evidence found it to be of very poor quality.

In order to meet the increased demand, Ganor calls for more clinics to be opened that have specialised knowledge of so-called gender-affirming care, and recommends that medical school residency programs “increase training efforts” for “gender-affirming surgeries.”

“[P]lastic surgery residencies currently do not have a recommended number of gender-affirming surgery cases that plastic surgery trainees see during training,” said the authors.

A number of Republican states, including Tennessee, Georgia, and Utah, have passed legislation banning experimental sex changes for minors, arguing that children are too young to consent to such invasive and irreversible procedures.

However, proponents of child sex changes argue that the interventions are medically necessary life-saving care, citing overblown suicide statistics to justify their support of children being placed upon a pathway as brutal as cancer treatment.

“It is important to recognize that for many gender-diverse young people, the decision to engage in gender-affirming care can be lifesaving and life-changing. Without this care, gender-diverse youth can experience severe distress, anxiety, and depression,” the Children's hospital told Fox News Digital. “[A]ny decisions about gender-affirming care should be made after a rigorous evaluation process that involves a psychologist or social worker, a patient's doctor and their parents or guardians.”

One of Finland’s leading experts in the field of gender medicine recently called out activists who push the “transition or suicide” discourse, stating that it is “purposeful disinformation” and “irresponsible.” 

Dr. Riitta Kaltiala, chief psychiatrist at Finland's Tampere U gender clinic, made the comments during an interview with one of the country’s top newspapers. Suggesting that children and adolescents will commit suicide if not given access to experimental sex-change procedures “is purposeful disinformation, the dissemination of which is irresponsible," said Kaltiala. 

Last summer, Boston Children’s Hospital faced huge backlash after videos surfaced on social media featuring doctors explaining various sex change surgeries, such as vaginoplasty and phalloplasty, to children.

Vaginoplasty involves amputating the penis and using the skin to create a cavity supposedly resembling a vagina. Phalloplasty involves stripping the skin and flesh of a woman’s forearm and using the tissue to create a non-functional appendage resembling a penis. In 2017, Ganor succeeded in bringing phalloplasty surgery to Boston Children's, making it the first pediatric hospital in the US to offer the exceptionally risky procedure.

Another video on the Boston Children's website featured a psychologist explaining that “a good portion” of the children she sees at the hospital’s Gender Multidisciplinary Service (GeMS) know their gender identity “from the womb.”

The Center for Gender Surgery performs bilateral mastectomies on gender-confused teenage girls as young as 15, and came under fire last summer for stating on its website that teens as young as 17 could get vaginoplasties.

The website has since been updated to state that a young person must be at least 18 years old before undergoing vaginoplasty. Double mastectomies of healthy breasts are still permitted below the age of majority.