In a tweet about the project, Do No Harm’s External Relations Manager Beth Serio, who is also a nurse, said the database disproves the notion that children “do not receive gender surgeries.”
“We know that is false and today we are providing the receipts,” Serio tweeted. “5,747 children received a sex-change surgery between 2019 and 2023. And this is only the beginning of what we have uncovered.”
The Endocrine Society says that adolescents typically have the mental capacity to participate in making an informed decision about gender-affirming hormone therapy by age 16.
A previous version of the WPATH guidelines did not recommend genital surgery until adulthood, but the most recent version, published in September 2022, is less specific about an age limit. Rather, it explains various criteria to determine whether someone who desires surgery should be offered it, including a person’s emotional and cognitive maturity level and whether they have been on hormone therapy for at least a year.
The Endocrine Society similarly offers criteria for when someone might be ready for genital surgery, but specifies that surgeries involving removing the testicles, ovaries or uterus should not happen before age 18.
“Typically any sort of genital-affirming surgeries still are happening at 18 or later,” Olezeski said.
There are no comprehensive statistics on the number of gender-affirming surgeries performed in the U.S., but according to an insurance claims analysis from Reuters and Komodo Health Inc., 776 minors with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria had breast removal surgeries and 56 had genital surgeries from 2019 to 2021.
It sounds like most surgeries that are happening to “children” are likely minors that are 16 years or older?
I just assume the anti-trans activists use “children” only to mean “minor” (a bit like how anti-abortion activists refer to zygotes and fetuses as “babies”).
Also, the numbers aren’t adding up, how likely is it that the 4,000+ surgeries the anti-trans activists are claiming happened to “children” all happened between 2022 and 2023 (when the numbers from other insurance claims analysis show less than a thousand from 2019 to 2021)? (Maybe the Reuters analysis didn’t have as much data as the anti-trans activists have, but the anti-trans activists play it loose with facts and science all the time, so I admit skepticism about the veracity of their data, esp. when it contradicts other reports.)
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/05/scicheck-young-children-do-not-receive-medical-gender-transition-treatment/
It sounds like most surgeries that are happening to “children” are likely minors that are 16 years or older?
I just assume the anti-trans activists use “children” only to mean “minor” (a bit like how anti-abortion activists refer to zygotes and fetuses as “babies”).
Also, the numbers aren’t adding up, how likely is it that the 4,000+ surgeries the anti-trans activists are claiming happened to “children” all happened between 2022 and 2023 (when the numbers from other insurance claims analysis show less than a thousand from 2019 to 2021)? (Maybe the Reuters analysis didn’t have as much data as the anti-trans activists have, but the anti-trans activists play it loose with facts and science all the time, so I admit skepticism about the veracity of their data, esp. when it contradicts other reports.)