The state of Texas has recognized the reality, as identified in the Washington Examiner’s July 31 editorial, that sex reassignment surgery on minors is an act of mutilation that should not be countenanced.
The Cultural Left will howl, but Texas is right. As it was put by Jaime Masters, the commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, “genital mutilation of a child for purposes of gender transitioning through reassignment surgery constitutes child abuse.”
As Masters explained, “This surgical procedure physically alters a child’s genitalia for non-medical purposes, potentially inflicting irreversible harm to children’s bodies.”
The finding allowed for relevant exceptions for children already affected by certain physical traumas, or who have genetic disorders affecting ordinary sex development, or who have unusual chromosomal features. In sum, Texas sticks to the science, recognizing that sometimes rare anomalies exist but not allowing them to become a justification for unconscionable procedures on children who don’t need them.
The key recognition is that adolescents’ outlooks, moods, and cognitive development are extremely malleable, whereas completed sex reassignment procedures tend to be either irreversible or extremely difficult to undo. It takes no deep scientific inquiry, but merely quotidian observation, to know that children and teenagers go through “phases” and that they are prone to “trying out” new experiences and ideas that don’t last.
Science, of course, confirms this. As one peer-reviewed study put it, in agreement with virtually every study on the topic, “a fundamental reorganization of the brain takes place in adolescence … Subcortical brain areas, especially the limbic system and the reward system, develop earlier, so that there is an imbalance during adolescence between the more mature subcortical areas and less mature prefrontal areas. This may account for typical adolescent behavior patterns, including risk-taking” involving “sometimes putting their health at serious risk.”
For adults to indulge such risk-taking, placing the authority of medicine behind it, is disgusting.
To perform an effectively permanent change in physiology upon someone because of their temporary state of mind would be monstrously abusive. As it is, a quick internet search readily shows that large numbers of people, even adults, who undergo sex reassignment procedures seriously regret having done so. And while the scientific findings on that score are subject to fierce ideological debate, it cannot be denied that at least a significant subset of sex “transitioners” experience severe depression or, worse, become suicidal. Indeed, a respected study from Sweden, where the culture is quite supportive of “gender fluidity,” found that the suicide rate among people who underwent sex reassignment surgery approached 20 times that of the general population.
For all these reasons, Texas is entirely justified, in every ethical and legal sense, in outlawing sex reassignment surgery for minors. The Lone Star State will treat such procedures (other than the rare exceptions described above) as legally prosecutable “child abuse” and also will prosecute professionals, including doctors, teachers, and day-care employees, who “fail to report” such abuse.
Consenting adults are always free to do what they want to their own bodies. But when abuse is involved, what they do to children and adolescents incapable of valid consent becomes the business of the state. Anyone who abets what for these minors may be a life-ruining procedure richly deserves to go to prison.
