Image Source: Wikipedia
“My breasts were taken away from me (and) the tissue was incinerated.” Every word of detransitioner Chloe Cole’s testimony to Congress last month was harrowing. But it was her calm, frank description of a doctor’s destruction of her breasts when she was just fifteen years old that haunts the mind. Such a sinister violation of the bodily integrity of a teenage girl should rankle the conscience of modern America.
“Before I was able to legally drive,” she said, they “amputated” my breasts. They were “perfectly healthy,” she told a panel of shocked politicians, but still they were cut off and burned, like trash: “I had a huge part of my future womanhood taken from me.”
She gave her testimony on her nineteenth birthday, three weeks ago. Her “treatment” for gender dysphoria started when she was twelve. First she was put on puberty-blocking drugs, then she was given testosterone injections. It was at the ripe age of fifteen that she was subjected to a double mastectomy.
All of these extreme infringements were carried out before she had reached the age of majority. Six years before she was legally allowed to buy alcohol. In twenty-first century America a teen cannot purchase a six-pack of beer but she can apparently agree to be mutilated on the operating table.
Most will agree. But not all. Some cry not tears of anguish over these unnecessary amputations, but tears of joy. “Gender-affirming care,” they call it, which is surely one of the most grotesque euphemisms of our time, as if cutting up a healthy kid’s body could ever be “care.”
So this is one of the great divides of our time, then — between those of us who believe teenage girls should be left alone to experience all the flourishing and challenges that come with coming of age, and those who believe that if a girl doesn’t like her breasts, then a man in a white coat should surgically remove them.
And, of course, it is our side, the ones who want teens to be shame-free and happy, who are branded evil “culture warriors,” while those who pathologize puberty and cheer the binding or removal of breasts are apparently good, decent people.
Chloe Cole refers to the “gender-affirming care” that was carried out on her fifteen-year-old body as “barbaric pseudoscience.” Her apt phrase got me thinking. Trans mastectomies are the lobotomies of our time, aren’t they? Just as we look back with horror at the surgical scrubbing of the prefrontal cortexes of mentally unwell people, so future generations will surely balk at today’s removal of body parts from gender-worried people.
The lobotomy was once touted as “a miracle cure for anything from schizophrenia to postnatal depression”; we now know it induced extreme apathy in patients, often destroying their personalities. “Gender-affirming care” is touted as the miracle cure for feelings of discomfort with one’s body; how long before we admit that it can damage fertility, provoke enormous regret over missing body parts, and require lifelong reliance on the medical establishment for hormonal treatments to maintain one’s “new sex”?
Obey
Article URL : https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fthespectator.com%2Ftopic%2Ftruth-about-gender-affirming-care-transgender%2F