Medical treatment is provided on a basis of best practices established by an entire healthcare community including medical practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and institutions. Studies rely on statistical risk models. That’s why before you go through any medical treatment, a doctor will tell you that no treatment is without risk.

As a result, every treatment includes a percentage of recipients who experience regret. Gender affirmation surgeries have an exceptionally low regret rate.

Compared to, say, pain medication, there is not really a profit motive for doctors to over-prescribe or over-treat gender affirmation treatments.

The suggestion that a minor should not go through any medically necessary “body modification” procedure, is cruel and untenable. That would mean:

• Sexually active teens be categorically denied birth control
• Dangerously overweight teens be denied surgeries or other treatment that could add years or decades to their life, as well as prevent knee, hip, and back problems in adulthood (that having the surgery later would not repair)
• Student athletes be denied surgical joint repairs that could restore movement and prevent future injury (that could not be performed with the same success rate in adulthood)
• Children with congenital heart problems be denied care which could both add years to their life and improve the quality of their childhood
• Children who could benefit from ear tubes be forced to face risk of incurable hearing loss -Children who could benefit from cochlear implants be denied the possibility of hearing until they are 18
• Children with juvenile glaucoma be forced to go through childhood with partial blindness, which may become irreversible
• Children at risk of lifelong trauma or suicide due to gender dysphoria be denied gender affirming care that can add decades to their life and improve the quality of their childhood

Please stop with the dismissive name-calling and try to think these things through more completely. In all of these cases, medical providers work with a family to assess the risks and needs of a child, make recommendations, and carry out the treatment most likely to have the greatest positive medical impact. The suggestion that anyone outside a child, their family, and their medical providers should have a say in the decision strikes me as arrogant, cruel, and offensive.