The issue in the transgender “care” case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, before the Supreme Court is whether the State of Tennessee may prohibit the use of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical mutilation and castration on mentally ill children with gender dysphoria.

The most widely used puberty-blocker for children with gender dysphoria is Lupron, which is a powerful drug developed to treat certain kinds of cancer and to suppress sex drive in convicted sex offenders.  It is given to kids beginning at age 12 to stop puberty and to give them time to think about their gender (most go on with more procedures), with the expectation of starting cross-sex hormones (testosterone for girls and estrogen for boys, which causes medical castration) at age 15–16, with the option to follow with “gender surgery” — i.e., mastectomy, removal of the uterus and ovaries, and construction of a fake penis from the clitoris for girls, and removal of the penis and testicles and construction of a fake vagina for boys — a few years later.  It’s the transgender assembly line.

My description of these treatments may sound harsh, but it’s the truth.  It is this ghoulish process of mutilating the bodies of mentally ill children that the Tennessee Legislature overwhelmingly rejected and banned under law. 

The arguments in favor of radical gender medicine are bizarre.  Proponents of these radical treatments for mentally ill children claim that they are life-saving, but that is not true.  The Cass Review, a review by British experts of the quality of the medical science used to justify radical “gender care,” found that medical and surgical gender procedures did not reduce suicide in children or adults and that there is little or no scientific basis to claim that any of these procedures offers benefits of any kind to mentally ill kids.  Based on the Cass review, many nations, including England, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, have sharply curbed the use of radical gender procedures for children.  Transgender “care” is a crude but lucrative experiment, done on tens of thousands of mentally disturbed and highly vulnerable children and adults, without substantial basis in medical science.

Proponents of radical gender procedures also claim that laws protecting children from hormonal and surgical castration discriminate against these children, but the opposite is the case.  There is no other medical specialty in which doctors are permitted to destroy normal body parts of physically healthy children or adults.  Gender “care” creates illness — sterility, deformity, inhibition of sexual pleasure, and major side-effects caused by puberty-blockers and unnatural cross-sex hormones: osteoporosis, bone fractures, sterility, cardiovascular disease, increased risk of cancer, and new mental disorders.

No state allows cardiac surgeons to deliberately damage the hearts of physically healthy but mentally ill patients or neurosurgeons to deliberately damage the brains of physically healthy but mentally ill patients.  Why are children with gender dysphoria excluded from the ethical protections given to all other patients — the right to be protected from radical, destructive, and scientifically unjustified drug protocols and surgery that damage, rather than heal, their normal bodies?

Children with gender dysphoria are seriously psychologically ill.  They are physically healthy — healthy, that is, until gender doctors get to work on them.

It would be a travesty of law and of medical ethics for the Supreme Court to rule that doctors have a constitutional right to damage the normal bodies of mentally ill children, in defiance of Tennessee state law, which is consistent with centuries of widely accepted medical ethics and with the opinions of a solid majority of Americans.  On trial in the U.S. v. Skrmetti case is the right of citizens to regulate medical practice in their own state, and the authority of health officials to provide children with gender dysphoria with the medical care they really need — effective psychiatric treatment — and to protect them from the destructive pseudoscience of “gender-affirming care.”

Michael Egnor, M.D. is professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and is program director of the neurosurgery residency training program.

Image via Pxfuel.