Last week, uproar over Boston Children’s Hospital’s “first of its kind” programme to enable child sex changes via hormone treatments and irreversible procedures exploded after word of the hospital’s gender clinic for children swept social media.
The Boston Children’s Center for Gender Surgery, which offers double mastectomies for kids as young as 15 and sterilising genital surgeries for teens, offers a “full suite of treatment options” for kids and teens to “transfer seamlessly” into transition surgeries, according to the hospital’s website. More than 1,000 patients, some as young as 3, have been visited by the programme.
Pediatricians are criticising the initiative, which comes shortly after reports that juvenile gender clinics all around the globe are shutting and altering their recommendations because there is evidence that transition operations are harmful to youngsters with gender dysphoria rather than beneficial.
Boston’s gender programme was denounced by Dr. Michelle Cretella, a Catholic paediatrician and member of the Catholic Medical Association (CMA), the biggest organisation of Catholic doctors in the United States.
In a statement, Cretella said that although “these procedures do not heal mental illness or prevent suicide, [they] do mutilate and irreversibly sterilise youngsters who have no ability to evaluate, much less agree to such life-changing treatments.”
Breast augmentation, chest reconstruction, “facial harmonisation,” a surgical procedure that alters the face to appear more feminine or masculine, and surgical methods to raise or lower a child’s voice to match how they identify are among the procedures Boston Children’s Hospital performs on transgender children and teens.
Additionally, the facility offers genital procedures, which are known to have a significant risk of problems for teenagers. Following the publication of the news, Boston revised its original recommendation to change the age limit for these operations to 18 years old.
These include vaginoplasty, which involves the surgical production of a vagina, and metoidioplasty and phalloplasty, which include the surgical manufacture of a penis using preexisting genital tissue or skin flaps.
In a series of YouTube films that Boston Children’s Hospital released to promote the operations they provide, surgeons and medical professionals there detail these procedures.
According to the facility, phalloplasty is a 12-hour procedure done on females who want to change into guys. A hysterectomy is required prior to phalloplasty in female patients. The skin is then “harvested” from another area of her body, such the forearm or thigh, to create a penis. The surgeon then grafts the new “penis” into place after “the vagina may also be removed.” A phalloplasty typically requires a patient 12 to 18 months to recover from.
In the same way, vaginoplasty—which involves flipping the penis into a vagina—is done on males who want to transition into girls. Boston Children’s understands that this procedure needs a lengthy recovery period and “lifetime” of maintenance. According to the website, boys who receive vaginoplasties must first use a catheter to pee and must dilate their “vagina numerous times a day to keep it open” for the rest of their lives.
These operations, in Cretella’s words, are “horrors.”
“It is just a matter of time until the hospitals that employ the doctors who execute these child-mutilating procedures are deluged with patient and whistleblower lawsuits. This is ultimately what exposed the atrocities of Tavistock and resulted in its closure, she said.
Following complaints from patients, patients’ families, and whistleblowers, including 25-year-old Keira Bell, who filed a high court lawsuit against the clinic for providing her with cross-sex hormones and facilitating her sex-transition, the Tavistock clinic in the UK was shut down earlier this year as a result of an independent review.
The news from Boston Children’s Hospital coming at this time is ironic. The biggest children’s gender clinic in the world, Tavistock Clinic in the UK, was recently forced to close owing to the dangers of transgender procedures, she said.
When CNA contacted Tavistock, a spokeswoman said that the clinic was unaware of Boston Hospital’s new programme and had no more comment, but added that Tavistock clinic was closing due to the need for a new, more “holistic” approach of gender treatment.
Boston Children’s Hospital’s public relations person repeatedly informed CNA over the phone that the hospital had “no comment” about Tavistock’s closure, its gender programme, or opponents who raise concerns about the risks of surgical sex alterations on children.