Over a recent three-year period, chest reconstruction surgeries, or “top surgeries,” performed on minors surged by nearly 400%.
In a recently published paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers reported that 1,130 top surgeries were performed on young adults and children under the age of 18 in the years 2016 to 2019.
Of these 1,130 surgeries, 1,114 were mastectomies, in which breasts are removed. The remaining 16 surgeries were augmentation mammaplasties, whereby fat is taken from one part of the body and used to create the physical appearance of breasts.
The number of surgeries performed in 2019 was 489, a 389% increase in the number of these procedures compared to the 100 performed in 2016.
“Reconstructive genital surgery is typically not performed in adolescents, but masculinizing chest reconstruction (e.g., mastectomy) and feminizing chest reconstruction (e.g., augmentation mammaplasty) may be performed in outpatient and ambulatory surgery settings,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers claim their paper represents the “largest investigation to date” of so-called “gender-affirming chest reconstruction in a pediatric population.”
The study was conducted by individuals from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), directly affiliated with Vanderbilt University until 2016, recently came under fire when disturbing footage of its pediatric transgender clinic director was released.
In the footage, Dr. Shayne Taylor, the clinic’s director, seemed to be more concerned with the profits that these types of life-changing surgeries could generate for the hospital than questions around appropriateness or patient care.
“[We] put down some costs of how much money we think each patient would bring in, and this is only including top surgery; this isn’t including any bottom surgery, and it’s a lot of money,” Taylor said on the video. “These surgeries make a lot of money.”
Calling the procedures “huge money makers,” Taylor said, “female-to-male chest reconstruction can bring in $40,000.”
After the release of the footage, public and political backlash was strong, causing the pediatric transgender clinic at VUMC to “pause” performing surgeries on minors.
The study revealed that over a third of the minors who underwent top surgery suffered from psychiatric conditions, most typically anxiety and depression, and about 20% of those who were tracked in the study were also using transgender hormones.
Finally, the study found that as the medical diagnoses of gender dysphoria increased, the number of surgeries performed tracked almost in lockstep.
In a previous interview with The Dallas Express on this issue, Jonathan Saenz, executive director of Texas Values, said, “Right now, it’s the wild, wild west on this issue, with no real oversight, and it’s clear we need a state law to ban gender modification and mutilation on children.”
“Children do not have the capacity for these adult decisions that have life-altering, and in some cases, irreversible consequences. The outrage and concern on this issue [are] overwhelming and bipartisan: cutting healthy tissue from minors and providing cross-sex hormones and other treatments without long-term study is egregious and should be stopped immediately,” Saenz concluded.