One of the most well-known surgeons who operates on children under the guise of "gender affirming care" is Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher. She is recognized as both a renegade in her field and a human rights disaster in the making.
Dr. Gallagher is infamous for her social media content, which misguides children into thinking that their bodies are wrong and should consider surgical interventions. Dr. Gallagher recruits adolescent customers by glamorizing the surgical experience. By telling these children that they are born in the wrong body and therefore a member of a marginalized demographic, she is able to convince these kids that they have a gender identity misalignment (that did not exist until they gained access to social media).
The way that activists like Dr. Gallagher talk about "transgender kids'' is similar to how one may talk about racial groups, sexual orientation, populations defined by immutable characteristics, using both quantitative and qualitative data in order to measure characteristics in these populations. "Transgender" does not work the same way. Since gender is socially constructed, the way it manifests in our culture is completely dependent on the way that society views gender norms. Unlike the gay/lesbian population, which is measurable and cross-culturally remains consistent over time, gender-diverse populations manifest based on the sociocultural norms that change over time. It is impossible to define a group of people based on a philosophical belief that has no basis in material reality. Similar to being straight, being LGB is something that you
are. "Trans" is something that you
do, whether that entails pursuing medical intervention or simply going off of self-identification. Two people may undergo medical interventions for
completely unrelated reasons and barely have anything in common. A middle-aged male who pursues this treatment due to autogynephilic transvestism has a completely different reality and experience than a teenage girl on the autism spectrum who is unsure of their identity. In Iran, gay men are forced to undergo these procedures as a way to "convert" them, turning gay men into a transsexually-constructed medical victims, whose culture could not stand the fact that some men are more feminine and not interested in women. What we refer to as "transgender" takes different forms depending on societal context - it is currently being forced upon children. In actuality, "transgender" is a sociopolitical/ideological term that is attributed to various groups of people, based on the notion that their biological sex is irrelevant to their human existence. This creates a lot of confusion,
especially when it comes to children. Perhaps the first mistake was turning a clinically-defined population into an identity group in the first place.
Because of the way gender and gender roles operate, the "transgender" demographic is bound to change over time. Transgenderism in 2023 is nothing like it was back in the 1990s or 2000s. We have seen a recent, intense change in the types of people who seek hormones and surgeries. In just a few years, a clinical population of mostly adult males has switched to being mostly young females.
There has been a recent 5,337% rise in adolescent girls identifying as trans over the last decade. Over the past three years, 1,130 procedures have been done on minors, nearly 800 of them being chest surgeries.Interestingly, Dr. Gallagher's primary focus has been appealing to adolescent girls on social media. A plastic surgeon who once specialized in operating on adult males has adjusted to this demographic switch and is advertising accordingly.
Reports from former (male) patients all show severe complications and the disastrous results are attributed to medical maltreatment. In 2020, she started focusing on young females and is getting more business than ever. She often gets questions about patients possibly regretting the surgery or being unsure as to whether or not the operation will benefit them. The answers she provides are misleading, to say the least. She claims that regretting these surgeries is extremely rare, since they are medically necessary procedures. However, she is basing her assertions on data collected before this recent explosion, citing data taken from adults (instead of children), and cannot honestly draw concrete conclusions about the current state of transsexualism because the data on this cohort has yet to be collected.
Performing these procedures on minors is experimental. Guinea pigs are recruited through social media apps for children. She uses playful language to describe dangerous operations like double mastectomies on minors, referring to it as "yeeting the teets" or "teetus deletus." She has proudly claimed that she has "yeeted hundreds of teets."According to the
New York Times, most of her patients are found through TikTok. There is evidence that she has surgically operated on thirteen-year-olds. Gender dysphoria causes a lot of discomfort and must be handled properly, with the patients' health in mind. But her advertising method makes the whole process seem like a simple cosmetic procedure. She even advertises that
nonbinary patients can have top surgery without re-attaching the nipples, in order to give a more "ambiguous look," depending on how they want the results to appear. If these procedures are life-saving and medically necessary, then why is aesthetic and outward appearance being prioritized over the patients' health?
Nowadays, instead of getting professionally diagnosed and treated,
one can obtain letters of support for "gender-affirming care" from services like Plume, which only require a virtual appointment and a $150.00 payment. A professional who actually cares about the health and well-being of gender dysphoric youth should probably consider the ramifications of such negligence. In 2017, Gallagher co-authored a study about online "gender confirmation resources," which encouraged institutions to put out information about these procedures using simpler language so that a
sixth grader could understand it:
Increasing transgender health care coverage has resulted in easier access to gender confirmation surgery. Patients considering surgery consistently access medical information online to improve knowledge regarding surgical options, complications, recovery, and life after transitioning. As a result, national health institutes recommend that patient educational materials be written at a sixth-grade-reading level. The purpose of this study is to assess the complexity of online gender confirmation surgery information.
A recent study conveys that Dr. Gallagher had performed over 300 (n = 306) mastectomies at the time of the study.
Surgical complications included hematoma, infection, necrosis, and pneumothorax (collapsed lung). One patient decided to come forward and go public about their nightmarish experience with Dr. Gallagher. The patient received a $20,000 mastectomy and wound up with a hematoma and broken incision that was splitting open and had blood clots falling out of it. Upon informing Dr. Gallagher, she swept it off and said that it was not an emergency, not infected, and just needs some ointment. After weeks of being unable to move because of the pain, the patient went to the emergency room and needed corrective surgery, nearly going into septic shock.
They are unable to sue the surgeon for performing a life-threatening surgery that nearly resulted in death, and it now costs an additional $102,547.According to WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), female patients are anywhere between 2.5 to 7.1 times more likely to initiate transgender care. WPATH has started to acknowledge the possibility of a social contagion among teenage girls, some sources citing social media and pornography as contributing factors. Dr. Marci Bowers, the president of WPATH,
has warned against videos like Gallagher's, claiming that this content might be grooming children into a psychic epidemic without proper understanding of how medicalization will affect their bodies for the rest of their lives. The "trans kid" phenomenon is not healthcare and stories like this are just the tip of the iceberg. It stems from a dangerous, sadistic, and abusive belief system that is fueling a health crisis, prioritizing profit and indoctrination over the physical and psychosocial well-being of boys and girls. We are going to keep exposing the truth until this issue is properly dealt with and
everybody is held accountable.
She belongs in a mental institution. Or a jail.