(Daily Caller) As many as 300 new pediatric gender clinics have opened in the U.S. over the past few decades amid soaring rates of transgender identity among adolescents, according to the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine.
As transgender identity has become more common, pediatric gender clinics have popped up all over the country offering various cross-sex medical services to minors. Individuals seeking to medically transition to the opposite sex can undergo a host of procedures including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies for females and mammoplasty for males, facial surgeries and numerous other procedures on the genitals and reproductive system.
The Human Rights Campaign lists 60 pediatric gender clinics on its mapping project, which only includes “comprehensive multidisciplinary programs,” while the Gender Mapper puts the number over 200 and the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) estimates over 300. The number of clinics has exploded in recent years, with some estimates placing the first pediatric gender clinic in the U.S. to have opened as recently as 2007.
There are child gender clinics all over the country, including in Republican-led cities and states that have been vocal about cracking down on gender transitions for minors: Florida, Wyoming, Kansas, Montana and many southern states have multiple pediatric gender clinics, according to Gender Mapper.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, performed double mastectomies on minors, according to a video unearthed by the Daily Wire in which a woman identified as physician’s assistant Shalyn Vanderbloemen said the procedure was available to 16 and 17 year olds. The clinic also offers cross-sex hormones, which can permanently sterilize patients, to children as young as 13, according to the DW.
Dr. Sidhbh Gallager, a Miami-based plastic surgeon, performs 40 “top surgeries” per month, and one or two of those is on a minor, according to The New York Times. She said most underage patients were at least 15, but that she has performed the procedure on children aged 13 and 14.
Kaiser Permanente Oakland, a California hospital, performed 70 “top surgeries” in 2019 on teenagers age 13 to 18; it had only done five in 2013, according to a study.
“The number of pediatric gender clinics has risen dramatically during the last two decades just as the number of trans-identifying youth has increased by more than 4,000% over the same time period,” Joseph Burgo, a California based clinical psychologist and advisor to Genspect, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s natural to assume that the medical profession has increased supply in response to demand for its services. Like most professionals, physicians and surgeons also seek to maximize their income and, as Dr. Shayne Taylor informed her Vanderbilt University Medical Center audience, gender medicine is highly profitable.”
Burgo was referring to a recently unearthed video of Taylor boasting of the profit opportunity cross-sex medical treatments presented to the Vanderbilt Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“It’s a lot of money. These surgeries make a lot of money,” she said. “So a female to male chest reconstruction could bring in $40,000. A patient just on routine hormone treatment who I’m only seeing a few times a year can bring in several thousand dollars without requiring a lot of visits and labs. It actually makes money for the hospital.”
