How ‘Rare’ Are Sex-Trait Modification Surgeries on Children?
Jay Greene /
As recently as two years ago, only three states banned surgeries on children to address gender dysphoria, up from just one a year earlier.
Today, exactly half the states have such bans, and more are considering them. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a Tennessee case challenging those bans on Dec. 4.
These procedures, advocates insist, almost never happen and are largely a myth concocted by the Right to scare people.
As the LGBTQ+ magazine Them put it, “Contrary to modern conservative propaganda, gender-affirming surgeries for minors are exceptionally rare.”
Similarly, the Human Rights Campaign rebuts what it alleges is a “concerted disinformation campaign” by declaring that with “rare exceptions,” “transgender and nonbinary people typically do not have gender-affirming surgeries before the age of 18.”
The Association of American Medical Colleges echoes that theme, asserting that this type of “surgery among youth is rare.”
But just how rare are these surgeries on children?
According to a new study by the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, 5,747 sex-change surgeries were performed on children in the U.S. between 2019 and 2023.
Given that there are about 12.5 million children between the ages of 15 and 17—the ages of minors who receive these surgeries—the annual rate of surgeries to remove and modify sex traits and organs on children works out to be 9.2 per 100,000.
That rate might sound very rare until you compare it to other rates involving children. For example, drowning kills about 0.8 per 100,000 young people between the ages of 14 and 17 each year. That means such deaths are about 1/11th as common as gender surgeries among children of roughly the same ages.
But we don’t act as if drowning deaths among children are so rare as to be inconsequential. Instead, we devote significant resources to ensuring that lifeguards are present at beaches and pools. We push families to enroll their children in swimming lessons.
Indeed, the AAMC is so concerned about drowning deaths that it joined other organizations in crafting a letter earlier this year urging Congress to avoid cuts in funding to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control that would “eliminate several key programs,” including “drowning prevention.”
The AAMC even cited increased drowning deaths as a reason to fight climate change, listing drowning as one of “the particular health risks that climate change poses to people in coastal areas.”
Yet that same organization wants you to believe that major surgeries that often destroy the sexual functions of children—a procedure 11 times more common among teenagers than drowning deaths—are “rare.”
The Do No Harm study identifies a “Dirty Dozen” set of hospitals that it considers the biggest promoters of sex-change procedures for children.
You might expect that most of the Dirty Dozen would be located in deep-blue liberal states, where there was the most interest from potential patients and the strongest support from state politicians. But both the No. 1 and No. 11 hospitals on Do No Harm’s Dirty Dozen list are located in the decidedly purple state of Pennsylvania.
The Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania—ironically known by the acronym CHOP—is identified as the dirtiest of the Dirty Dozen and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh comes in 11th. Pennsylvania policymakers considered legislation to restrict insurance payment for these procedures, but officials at these two hospitals successfully opposed those efforts.
You can’t fool people forever. Eventually people realize that sex trait-modifying surgeries are happening on children in alarming numbers. And eventually people in purple states realize that their leading medical institutions are promoting procedures that run counter to their state’s values.
Pennsylvania may be among the dirtiest of the Dirty Dozen performing these ghoulish procedures on children, but that cannot last. Eventually, policymakers there and in the rest of the states will end these barbaric practices, and it can go from allegedly “rare” to truly nonexistent.