(OPINION) The United States is the most permissive country when it comes to pushing gender ideology and prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children, compared to nearly a dozen European countries that have implemented more strenuous barriers for youth seeking to obtain drugs and body-mutilating surgeries to look more like the opposite sex.
Do No Harm, which describes itself as “a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers” determined to “protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology,” released research titled “Reassigned” Monday that explained, “extreme gender ideology drives the United States to provide transgender medical care to younger children, while Europe goes a safer and more scientific route.”
The report concluded that while the U.S. continues to defer to “gender-affirming care,” which views the refusal to “affirm” a trans-identified youth’s self-professed sexual identity as “harmful and unethical,” European countries have begun to follow a different approach.
The report attributes the embrace of so-called gender-affirming care in the U.S. to the fact that “the belief that biological sex and gender are socially constructed has made its way into American classrooms, courtrooms, bathrooms, and boardrooms.”
The research compared the policies of the U.S. with those of 11 western and northern European countries. The U.S. differs from most other countries because of its 50 states, which each have different policies. However, the policies of some states make the U.S. the most lenient among the nations studied.
For example, the research found that while “some states restrict minors’ access to sex reassignment surgery,” double mastectomies have been “performed on [girls] as young as 12.”
Sex reassignment surgeries include the removal of both testicles (orchiectomy), chopping off a penis (penectomy) in an attempt to create a vagina (vaginoplasty) — a procedure that leads to frequent infections — or the removal of tissue from a patient’s arms or legs to create a fake penis (phalloplasty) that doesn’t look natural, is flaccid and cannot function.
By contrast, more than half of the European countries examined in the research have set the minimum age for sex change surgeries at 18: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Iceland and Ireland have a minimum age of 16 for sex change surgeries. While Norway and the Netherlands permit trans-identified girls to have double mastectomies at 16, all other procedures are only available to adults.
The research states that in France, gender reassignment surgery is “theoretically possible from age 14, but researchers say that, to their knowledge, torsoplasties (the removal of back fat) are the only surgeries that have been performed on trans youth.” In all other cases, patients seeking sex change procedures must be at least 18.
The U.S. also has much looser age restrictions for the prescribing of cross-sex hormones than the European countries. As the report explains, cross-sex hormones are “administered to alter a person’s secondary sex characteristics to better align with their gender identity.” (SOURCE)
