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(LifeSiteNews) — The American Medical Association (AMA) is attempting to walk back admissions it made earlier this year about delaying “gender transition” surgeries to adulthood, insisting its support for so-called “gender-affirming care” is “unchanged.”
In February, the New York Times reported that the AMA made a statement that, while continuing to support overall gender “care” for minors, “In the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with [the American Society of Plastic Surgeons] that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.” The ASPS had just recommended“surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old,” citing “insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio.”
The Times noted the AMA had previously opposed restrictions on “transitioning” minors and that a spokesperson “emphasized that the association rarely issued specific medical recommendations and that it often deferred to groups representing specialists in various fields of medicine.”
In its March newsletter, however, the AMA revisited the matter, framing its statement as language prepared for use “only if the AMA was contacted by the media, and for the AMA President to use in interviews,” if asked for a response to the ASPS’s declaration. “During our Board discussion, we were clear that we were not changing AMA policy,” it said.
“While some media coverage characterized this as agreement with the ASPS statement, that phrasing did not come from the AMA. Unfortunately, how reporters frame their stories is beyond our control,” the group continued, asserting that its response “was intended to preserve—not diminish—access to gender-affirming care, and to clarify and reinforce what our policy has long reflected and standards of care. The AMA supports gender-affirming care as medically necessary per our policy.”
The AMA mentioned requesting a correction from the Times. But on March 27, the Timesissued a statement standing by its reporting, and claiming that it “received no requests to correct, clarify or update our articles” from the AMA. It also published the entirety of AMA spokesman Joshua Zembik’s original quote.
“Our colleagues at ASPS concluded that the evidence supporting gender-related surgery in minors is insufficient and of low certainty,” Zembik originally said. “The American Medical Association respects the expertise and dedication of surgeons who care for patients every day. The AMA supports evidence-based treatment, including gender-affirming care.
“Currently, the evidence for gender-affirming surgical intervention in minors is insufficient for us to make a definitive statement,” he continued. “In the absence of clear evidence, the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”
The dispute illustrates the balancing act elite medical institutions are walking between appeasing LGBT activists and left-wing media establishmentarians and contending with scientific evidence that makes standing for so-called “gender-affirming care” increasingly unsustainable.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate them, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted “transitioning” before regretting it and returning to life as their actual sex, attest to the physical and mental harmof reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
