New data shows U.S. hospitals performed at least 5,747 gender-disfiguring surgeries on minors between 2019 and 2023, according to a database released by Do No Harm, an advocacy group of medical professionals. The data also show 13,994 American children received other transgender treatments, such as puberty-blocking and opposite-sex hormones, in those four years.
Most of the children receiving such procedures were girls between the ages of 12 and 17, the database indicates. Medical practitioners made more than $119 million from the procedures, the data says.
This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) kicked out of its vendor hall four young Americans who returned to affirming their given sex after experiencing transgender medicine. A similar group of “desisters” met a warm welcome last month in Orlando, Florida, at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference. That medical conference hosted 750 medical practitioners from around the nation and featured a panel of detransitioned young adults.
At the CMA event, seven young adults who were permanently injured by sex-transition procedures publicly explained the harm these treatments cause. These young adults were given a voice at a U.S. annual medical conference for the first time, to inform and educate health practitioners about the irreparable harm caused by “gender medicine.”
“CMA’s decision to invite detransitioners to speak at this year’s conference signals a deepening in the divisions in the medical community about how to best address gender distress in young people,” a CMA press release notes. “It also shows the commitment by CMA leaders to recognize and provide care to those harmed by these common practices.”
Particularly in American “gender medicine,” negative and harmful effects have been ignored, and at times suppressed, by some major medical organizations, said Tim Millea, MD, the chairman of CMA’s Conscience Rights Protection Task Force. He said this contradicts the long-held scientific tradition of allowing “ideas to be discussed and debated in an open, honest and transparent manner.”
‘Medicine’s Ability to Harm Is Nearly Limitless’
Pediatrician Patrick Hunter, a Florida Board of Medicine member, organized the panel. He said he was aiming to “bring to light to the harm that is being done, and to improve the overall care for trans-identified youth.”
“No one should want what is happening to these youth and young adults,” Hunter said. “The fact that harm and regret is happening should not be tolerated by our profession. The lack of concern and the unwillingness to acknowledge it should concern everyone in the medical profession.”
One detransitioner, Prisha Mosley, told CMA attendees she was manipulated by activists and therapists into accepting testosterone injections and a double mastectomy as a minor.
“It is important for doctors to learn how to stop the damage and to try and heal what’s been done. It is wrong for the very profession who hurt detransitioners to also routinely turn us away,” she said in the CMA’s press release about the event. “I’m grateful for any medical professional who is willing to listen.”
Hunter said he has heard from nearly 100 youth who regret their transitions, and found the panelists’ stories “very painful.” “Medicine’s ability to harm is nearly limitless, while the ability to cure does have limitations,” Hunter said.
“This is why the principle of ‘First, do not harm’ is sound and universally accepted,” he said. “It acknowledges our need for humility, our need to know where our limits lie, and when we should and should not act.”
Refusing to Acknowledge Detransitioners
Hunter said he proposed the panel to multiple medical organizations, encouraging more groups to hear detransitioners speak. Both the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) rejected the proposal, he said, matching the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) stance of ignoring detransitioners. WPATH’s leadership has said that recognizing these patients is “considered off limits for many in our community.”
“Patients are being harmed by sex transition. That cannot be disputed,” Hunter said. “Medical evidence fails to show that patients will reliably benefit. If the medical profession will not recognize and learn from those that are being harmed, we are failing as professionals, but more importantly we are failing the patients that are being harmed. The medical profession has lost its way.”
The Stop the Harm Database highlights a “dirty dozen” of the U.S. hospitals that perform the most sex-disfigurement surgeries on minors. They are:
- The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
- Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
- Children’s Minnesota
- Seattle Children’s
- Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
- Boston Children’s Hospital
- Rady Children’s Hospital
- Children’s National Medical Center
- UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland
- Children’s Hospital Colorado
- UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
- Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
The database also lists the employers of the U.S. doctors who billed the most for performing child mutilation surgeries from 2019 to 2023. The top-billing doctor for child sex surgeries in that timeframe worked at Boston Children’s hospital, and charged more than $5 million for the procedures.
“California, one of the first states to declare itself a ‘sanctuary state’ for transgender procedures, also had the most irreversible surgeries, with 1,359 minors undergoing surgical procedures, followed by Oregon with 357, Washington with 330, Pennsylvania with 316 and Massachusetts with 300,” Fox News reported on the Do No Harm data.
Warring Medical Organizations
Many European countries have curtailed or halted gender medicine interventions in approximately the last year, based on experience and research demonstrating its serious damage to children. Yet most American medical organizations have remained staunch advocates, dismissing well-documented risks and complications associated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.
The United Kingdom’s release of the Cass Review in April and leaked WPATH files indicating that organization pushes medicine without informed consent sent clear messages about transgender medicine that American medical organizations such as the AMA and the AAP have largely dismissed or ignored. They are ignoring “objective and evidence-based data,” Millea said.
Still, some U.S. medical organizations do oppose gender mutilation, including the American College of Pediatricians, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, American College of Family Medicine, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration,” published by ACPEDS, represents thousands of health care workers who want such practices ended.
“A number of cases have been and will continue to be filed in courts around the country, challenging the federal and state mandates for transgender interventions and the freedom of medical professionals to challenge these methods and refuse to participate in them,” Millea said.
The CMA will support court cases to halt this harm in medicine, joining other organizations’ challenges in the form of amicus briefs, and if necessary, serving as plaintiffs, Millea said.
Last month, state attorneys general sent a letter to the AAP president demanding the AAP defend its support of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria. The attorney generals requested a thorough explanation of this non-evidence-based policy by October 8.
“I heard from many attendees that the panel discussion was the most important thing they heard all week, and maybe at any conference,” Hunter said. “The medical profession cannot remain silent any longer. We must take action and speak out. We must seek regulation of the profession so that evidence-based, ethical, and effective care is provided for trans-identified youth. We must return medicine to its roots where we care for the individual, and not use the patient to make money, or forward social or political agendas.”
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.
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