Light may be breaking through the darkness of gender ideology, as revealed by a recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on “due process violations and gender-affirming care.”
During the hearing, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., showed part of a video interview with Dr. Blair Peters, who performs transgender surgeries on minors and adults at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. That interview proved just how experimental and unstudied “gender-affirming” medical care is.
The video interview with Peters, conducted about a year ago, received too much unwanted attention after its release and later was privatized on YouTube. After the Judiciary Committee’s July 27 hearing, the entire video resurfaced on the social media app X, formerly Twitter.
Pink-haired Portland surgeon who performs sex-change surgery on trans CHILDREN admits they face lifetime of infertility, incontinence and sexual dissatisfaction, in now-deleted video
— Richard (@Kearns_Richard_) July 15, 2023
Let’s make this go viral pic.twitter.com/4jluMqv49k
The interview with Peters exposes much more than the barbarism of “gender-affirming” surgery. It also proves that the house that transgender ideology built is constructed on sinking sand.
Peters, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon whose preferred pronouns are “he/they,” specializes in gender-reassignment surgery in the facial, chest, and genital areas. But, he says, genital surgery is “the majority of my practice and sort of where my passion lies.”
A self-described “queer” surgeon, Peters says his goal is “helping you self-actualize how you see yourself internally.”
In short, Peters says he reconstructs a patient’s genitals to “match” what the patient believes to be his or her true gender. A boy who believes he is a girl can obtain vaginoplasty. A girl who believes she is a boy can obtain phalloplasty.
Peters’ reference to self-actualization in gender identity is purposeful. Self-actualization, after all, tops the late psychologist Abraham Maslow’s influential hierarchy of needs and is defined as the full realization of one’s creative, intellectual, and social potential.
In other words, becoming all that one can be. To that end, gender ideology is self-actualization in its most brutal and misguided form. Peters’ surgical offerings prove it.
For most of the interview, Peters speaks about “nonbinary” surgery options, an emerging concept within “gender-affirming” care. Such surgeries rearrange a patient’s genitals and/or chest tissue in a way that aligns with neither sex, supposedly to combat the so-called binary bias of male v. female in society.
Gender-affirming surgeons, for example, may construct one aspect of female genitalia while omitting others, resulting in an unnatural combination of a male patient’s original body construction and his surgically fabricated one. Likewise, Frankensteinian surgical options exist for female patients.
These options can remove the “binary bias” in health care, Peters argues. He says that he hopes such options will cure patients’ gender dysphoria while allowing them more fluidity.
Although gender transitions initially were understood as a “switch” from one presentation of gender to another (from male to female, or vice versa), this binary gender system apparently has become too restrictive for some. These new surgeries, Peters claims, are “less about reinforcing this binary view of genitalia and anatomy, and more so [about] embracing the person’s own unique concept of themselves.”
The desire for radical self-definition has led to a hatred of all forms of imposed categorization.
Breaking down the understanding of one’s individual biology was only the first step; now gender ideology also must break down the reality of the gender binary itself.
Fundamentally, gender identities such as “nonbinary” and “gender fluid” with their corresponding surgical “solutions” are new threats to reality.
An article at Healthline.com claims that “the gender binary is the false idea that there are only two genders and that every single person is one of these two genders.” This argument attacks one of the most fundamental truths of human existence: Every single human person is either male or female.
All human civilization has operated according to this principle from time immemorial. Yet now, this understanding is somehow controversial.
Peters’ flavor of radical self-actualization indicates a preference for something—anything—other than males and females (or those that present that way).
The problem? The binary itself is all that exists.
Peters must account for the fact that the concept of gender identity is rooted in the gender “binary,” or the objective categories of man and woman. Originally a synonym for “sex,” the term “gender” evolved to include the performative and social aspects of one’s sex.
John Money, one of the first to study the concept of gender, for example, defined it as “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.”
The very definition of gender relies on the man/woman binary.
One of the most influential LGBTQ advocacy groups, the Human Rights Campaign, defines gender identity as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither.”
The word “neither” exposes the true emptiness of HRC’s definition. If one can identify as neither gender, what is one identifying as? Gender identity flows from gender. And gender flows from the man/woman binary, or sex.
At its foundation, gender identity relies on the objective categories of sex. If this ideology breaks apart the gender binary system, it breaks apart its own foundation. Suddenly, the notion of “gender-affirming surgery” doesn’t work to “affirm” anything at all.
But gender ideologues don’t really care for facts, reality, or science. And the gender-affirming medical field is ever-evolving to adapt to this nonsensical nonbinary ideology.
All gender-affirming surgeries are riddled with risks and complications, as Peters openly admits. And the long-term effects of these new nonbinary surgeries are completely unknown.
“No one’s published on it yet … we’re kind of learning and figuring out what works,” Peters says casually in the interview.
Most disturbing in the gender debate is the age of the patients who are being experimented on. Although Peters says he tries to find out “what works” and eliminate “binary bias,” minor children subjected to these genital surgeries experience months—or even lifetimes—of painful recovery, sterility, incontinence, and more.
In every other context, the ability of children to make certain choices is limited. They can’t enter into contracts, drink alcohol, or vote. They can’t be drafted, get a tattoo, or own property.
Children don’t possess the same emotional and mental capacity of adults. All states have an age of majority law that separates adults from children and dictates when individuals are old enough, for example, to file a lawsuit or consent to general medical treatment.
Permitting experimental surgeries that permanently mutilate the healthy bodies of children is simply inconsistent with such state laws.
In the wake of the House Judiciary Committee hearing, careful observers should recognize that the house of gender indeed is built on sinking sand.
By:
Sarah Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Edith Harold is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.
Original here. Reproduced with permission.