How will history judge the ideologically motivated doctors who are surgically mutilating their gender-confused, often mentally disturbed juvenile patients, as well as feeding them hormones and other drugs with dangerous, long-term, deleterious effects?
Frankly, they deserve to go down in history with the doctors who implemented the infamous Tuskegee Experiment. Or the ones who “treated” mental illness and other medical problems with lobotomies, purveyors of what ultimately became “one of the most criticized medical procedures in history.”
History seems to be repeating itself within the medical profession, which — when it comes to gender politics — is being driven by political correctness and critical gender theory, instead of biology and science. Doctors are using harmful, experimental, and permanently disfiguring “medical” procedures instead of trying to treat the underlying mental health conditions of their patients, something that leads to an increased risk of suicide and medical complications.
Why? Perhaps because they’re earning a fortune doing it: $2.1 billion in 2022.
These physicians need a remedial American history lesson in some of the most shameful and damaging episodes of misdiagnosis and mistreatment by their profession’s ethically challenged predecessors.
The Tuskegee Experiment, officially known as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” was a heinous medical project started in 1932 at the Tuskegee Institute by the U.S. Public Health Service that didn’t end until 1972. It involved 600 black men, 399 of whom had syphilis, a progressive, deadly disease. In order to “study” the long-term effects of the disease, these men were enticed to participate with free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance.
But the patients were deliberately and intentionally not treated for syphilis. Instead, they were unknowingly given placebos instead of the effective treatment developed for the disease by the early 1940s – penicillin. As a result, the subjects “experienced severe health problems including blindness, mental impairment – or death,” as did many of their infected wives and children.
And then there were lobotomies, which involve severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain, resulting in significant changes in personality and occasionally in severe and permanent brain damage. They became popular “starting in the mid-1930s and throughout the ’40s to treat everything from schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety to ulcerative colitis and intractable pain.” Not only were there no long-term medical studies to justify such radical surgery before physicians started using this surgical mutilation to treat patients, but it often caused “epilepsy, personality defects, chronic headaches, seizures, permanent disability, or even death.”
The gruesomeness of this surgical intervention was graphically illustrated by Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in the Academy Award-winning 1975 film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and by Jessica Lange in “Frances” (based on the real-life story of actress Frances Farmer).
In our gender-obsessed age, the new Tuskegee and lobotomy victims are the indoctrinated, social media-obsessed, gender-confused children who increasingly find themselves subjected to what amounts to a grand medical experiment. So little is known about “gender affirming” medical interventions — from removing sex organs, to fashioning faux organs, to chemical castration and more — that Dr. Blair Peters, a self-described “queer surgeon” in Oregon, acknowledged on video the significant complications associated with these procedures. He admitted that doctors like him were “figuring out what works” as they went along.
The revealing video was later taken down.
“Gender affirming” surgery involves the creation of false “neo-vaginas” from penis and scrotum tissue, the creation of faux “penises” from the forearm and inner thigh skin of young women, and even the complete removal of a “non-binary” minor’s genitals, an increasingly popular procedure known as “nullification.” Complications include incontinence, bleeding, infection, tissue necrosis, loss of sexual function, and more. Critically, these procedures provide no actual mental health or medical benefit — thereby debunking the prevailing narrative that “gender confirmation” procedures are “lifesaving care.”
Gender “medicine,” like the Tuskegee experiments and surgical lobotomies, is Frankensteinian. They are experimental. They solve nothing. And they displace better and safer medical practices to suit current cultural fashions.
What’s more, minors are particularly vulnerable to the social manipulation and contagion of the gender medicine industrial complex. Children don’t reach full cognitive maturity until around age 25. So, a manufactured gender identity “crisis” targeting minors under the age of 18 for gender “affirming” procedures is particularly suspect considering their inability to meaningfully consent and understand the long-term consequences of their decisions.
Several European countries that once uncritically embraced “gender-affirming care” for minors have backed off their previous positions as the lack of evidence supporting the safety of these procedures is revealed, and the evidence of negative long-term health consequences accumulates. In the United States, the FDA is being sued for allegedly concealing records regarding the off-label use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on minors. Nearly two dozen states have enacted laws prohibiting “gender-affirming” interventions for minors and medical malpractice claims by victims are multiplying.
The writing is on the wall. If we refuse to face it, this will be our Tuskegee, our Cuckoo’s Nest, and the blame will be ours.
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Hans von Spakovsky and Sarah Parshall Perry are senior legal fellows in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.