Mick Hartley

Eliza Mondegreen at UnHerd on the new American gender surgeons, and their mission to match the body to the patient's fantasy:

In the world of gender, evidence disappears from the public realm all the time. Social media giants ban upstart accounts and censor uncomfortable conversations. Videos proudly shared on the website of a children’s hospital one day vanish the next, replaced by carefully crafted denials. This week, a revealing interview with a prominent American gender surgeon named Blair Peters (he/they) suddenly went private.

I can understand why. In the video, Peters demonstrates just how far his field has strayed from the most basic tenets of medical care (the distinctly old-fashioned oath to “first, do no harm”) into the wild frontier of helping patients realise their “embodiment goals” through life-altering, function-destroying surgical procedures.

“As a surgeon, my whole goal is helping you self-actualise how you see yourself internally,” Peters says at one point. “I really love that,” the interviewer gushes. “The collaborative vision-making, as opposed to, like, ‘this is what we’re doing and that’s all you have to choose from.’” Peters chides his fellow surgeons for clinging to a “binary” mindset when it comes to gender surgery, turning away from the wider world of “non-binary” surgeries, which encompasses procedures like phallus-preserving vaginoplasty (this is exactly what it sounds like) or gender nullification surgery (“removing all external genitalia to create a smooth transition from the abdomen to the groin”).

Under the pretence of “following the patient’s lead”, gender clinicians like Peters dabble ever more boldly in body horror. All along the way, training targeting clinicians reminds doctors not to judge their patients’ desires. Under the framework of “gender-affirming” care, doctors become facilitators or customer service specialists, freed from the responsibilities that ought to accompany the power they wield.

Here he is – "Special focus: Gender Affirming Surgery".

Here's a section of the removed "revealing interview".

We've left any conception of responsible medical care way behind. This is a doctor, hyped up on righteous crusading trans fervour, performing life-changing experiments on troubled young people.

Well, it'll all be evidence a few years down the line, when his patients realise what he's done to them.