A surgeon and medical school professor has said we are right in the middle of an extraordinary medical atrocity and likened “gender-affirming” hormones and surgeries to lobotomies and eugenics.
In an interview with The Federalist, Dr. Michael Egnor, a pediatric neurosurgeon and professor at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York, called the advice parents are being given regarding so-called gender-affirming treatments “basically criminal.”
“Then watching the news, knowing that the American Medical Association has endorsed this stuff. The American Academy of Pediatrics has endorsed this stuff. The American Psychological Association has endorsed this stuff. I really have come to feel over the past year or two that we are in a very dark episode of medical ethics and medical history,” he said.
Egnor wants to encourage others in the medical community to speak out about this, claiming that there are many who agree with him. He also hopes members of the public will start to speak out against this and that parents will “realize that the medical advice they’re getting regarding these treatments is malpractice,” and in his view “basically criminal.”
He also said he believes that something can still be malpractice even if everyone’s doing it, and compared ‘gender-affirming” care to performing a gastric bypass surgery on an anorexic, or severing the spinal cord of a healthy but mentally ill person who feels they should be paralysed.
Egnor believes those who suffer from gender dysphoria should get the best psychiatric care because it is an extraordinarily difficult condition to live with, but that puberty blockers are “very, very powerful drugs that have a lot of side effects” and little is known about their long-term effects. More and more research is now showing that the experimental drugs are extremely harmful and the risks far outweigh any suggested benefit.
Systematic reviews of the evidence for pediatric medical transition have been carried out in Sweden, Finland, and England and have led to each nation pivoting away from the affirmative model of care and back to a more cautious psychotherapeutic approach for the treatment of minors, and in the case of Finland, young adults as well.
“We don’t do what mentally ill people want us to do just to satisfy their mental illness. We try to help them, and the fundamental goal of treating mental illness is to help [the patients] with reality testing,” said Egnor. “The reality is that trans men are women, and trans women are men, and we should help them try to deal with that.”