Free Republic

Tennessee can move forward with a ban on gender-transition treatment for minors, according to a federal court ruling from September 28. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected an appeal from families of transgender children, stating that the laws do not discriminate based on age or sex. The ruling, which prohibits treatments such as puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries, applies to both Tennessee and Kentucky.

A Minnesota woman who has decided to detransition from a transgender male is suing the doctors who performed a double mastectomy on her when she was just 16. Luka Hein, now 21, claims she was going through a tough time emotionally as a teenager, when her parents were getting divorced and when she was being groomed online by a man from another state. As she struggled with her mental health during this time, she said she found influencers online who extolled the virtues of breast surgery and hormones. Hein then met with staff members at the University of Nebraska Medical...

A North Carolina surgical clinic has allegedly removed the breasts of girls as young as 14 years old in double mastectomy procedures. Pictures of results from the operations recently began circulating on Twitter. The patients’ ages are also listed under the images, with some of the girls being as young as 14 and 16. The children appear to have visited the Cosmetic Concierge, a plastic surgery clinic located in Charlotte, North Carolina. Double mastectomies, in which patients have their breasts removed, are used as part of the “gender-affirming care” regimen. The procedure is often referred to as “top surgery.” Under...

The Gender and Sexuality Development Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) offers drastic medical interventions as part of the gender transition process to children as young as eight, according to statements and documents reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.CHOP’s youth gender clinic, one of the first in the U.S., is a major trans medical provider in Pennsylvania and has strong ties to Rachel Levine, a former trans activist who currently serves as the U.S. assistant secretary for health. The clinic recently came under fire for holding seminars where teachers were instructed to hide students’ trans identities from...

“Sometimes in the shower, I realize they’re gone. I just have these scars.” Camille Kiefel, 32, had her healthy breasts removed in 2020 to align with her nonbinary gender identity. She says her doctors approved the surgery after two Zoom meetings, breezing past a whole host of mental health issues. Now that Camille is in a better place mentally, she realizes her surgery was a mistake. So, two and a half years later, she’s suing her social worker, therapist, and the gender clinics they work for — Brave Space Oregon and Quest Center for Integrative Health — seeking up to...

Numbers of gender-affirming chest surgeries among transgender adolescents jumped 389% from 2016 to 2019, researchers reported. Drawing on data from the Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample, an estimated 1,130 chest reconstructive surgeries were performed on transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) adolescents during these years, Rishub Karan Das, BA, of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, and colleagues found. Nearly all were masculinizing, with only 1.4% feminizing, the group wrote in a research letter appearing in JAMA Pediatrics. Only about 100 of these surgeries were performed in 2016, after which they steadily became more popular, surpassing 200 surgeries in 2017 and 300...

... Michael is part of a very small but growing group of transgender adolescents who have had top surgery, or breast removal, to better align their bodies with their experience of gender. Most of these teenagers have also taken testosterone and changed their name, pronouns or clothing style. Few groups of young people have received as much attention. Republican elected officials across the United States are seeking to ban all so-called gender-affirming care for minors, turning an intensely personal medical decision into a political maelstrom with significant consequences for transgender adolescents and their families. Gender-related surgeries, in particular, have been...