Dr. Michael Egnor: 'Trans surgeries' for minors are 'criminal'
At a time when much of the public and medical community are falling over themselves to support the gender disorientation movement, there are those who are not afraid to add a voice of opposition to the fray. Meet one such brave professional: Dr. Michael Egnor.
Dr. Egnor is a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon and professor at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York. In a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast (available on iTunes), he expressed his strong views against “sex reassignment” procedures for minors. This includes surgical removal of healthy organs and administration of cross-sex hormones and puberty blocking drugs.
Egnor remarked, “I’ve come to realize, with the growth of gender-affirming surgery and gender-affirming medical care, that we’re right in the middle of an extraordinary medical atrocity.”
“There’s been this enormous growth, this explosion of transgender ideology in the press and in the medical community [and] some of my pediatric neurosurgical patients have been involved in the transgender process,” Egnor explained. “I’ve had parents come to me in panic asking if there’s anything I can do to help on that.”
He observed that these practices are all endorsed by the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and American Psychological Association. "I really have come to feel over the past year or two that we are in a very dark episode of medical ethics and medical history.”
In a September 2022 article authored by Dr. Egnor on The Federalist website, he stressed the fact that gender dysphoria is a mental illness - which can be understood as a variant of Body Image Integrity Disorder - rather than a physical one. As such, it must be addressed with psychiatric care, not the physical procedures we see in abundance today. “Surgical mutilation is not a treatment for psychiatric illness.” He continued:
Patients presenting to a physician for gender dysphoria are certainly ill, in that they are seeking medical help. If they were not ill, they wouldn’t be going to a doctor. And gender dysphoria is a mental, rather than physical illness, because the sexual organs of people with gender dysphoria are functioning normally. There is nothing physically wrong with the penis and testicles of a man who claims to be a woman, or with the uterus and ovaries of a woman who purports to be a man. The illness is mental — the patient does not feel like his or her sex and does not want to be his or her sex. This of course can cause great suffering — it is a real illness — but the suffering is mental, not physical.
Dr. Egnor advocates for providing people suffering from gender dysphoria with quality psychiatric care and social support to help heal the root cause of their struggle. He commented:
We don’t do what mentally ill people want us to do just to satisfy their mental illness. We try to help them, and the fundamental goal of treating mental illness is to help [the patients] with reality testing. The reality is that trans men are women, and trans women are men, and we should help them try to deal with that.
Dr. Egnor encourages his medical colleagues to join him in speaking out against genital mutilation of minors, believing that there are many who feel as he does. He hopes this will help parents realize that treatments like these are “malpractice” and “basically criminal”.
Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, the director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council applauded Dr. Egnor for taking a stand, especially in the liberal state of New York. She commented on the fear present in the medical community around speaking out against “sex reassignment” surgeries:
There is suppression on many conservative issues in the academic and clinical fields. I think there is fear of losing your license, losing your ability to practice or to even be hired in an academic institution, but this is a great example of courage. Thank God we have people who are willing to put their careers on the line.
