Another Steps Up For Us.

Banning care does not give us the opportunity to answer important questions.

My heart always cheers up when I see an ally step up for us. This is from the medical website STAT:

Banning gender-affirming care doesn’t protect children — it makes it harder to help them

Here’s what happens when political pressure overrides scientific standards

By Kavitha RanganathanJune 29, 2026

Ranganathan is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and plastic surgeon at Mass General Brigham.

I am a plastic surgeon who rebuilds faces after car accidents, helps cancer patients breathe, and restores infants’ ability to eat and smile. Yet what draws the most notice is my work transforming masculine features into feminine ones, and vice versa.

I am an outsider to the LGBTQIA+ community. I grew up in a conservative household in which discussions on sex and gender were taboo. But in residency, I saw patients in clinic every Monday with my attending, a cisgender, white, heterosexual male at least 60 years old, who had been providing surgical gender-affirming care for over 25 years. I saw how vulnerable the patients were, trapped in their bodies. I felt the weight they woke up with every day, trying to blend into the surrounding world of instantaneous judgements. And I saw the life-changing impact that surgery had.

When we speak up, people think we have an axe to grind, but when allies speak up, they speak from the heart.

Recently, however, there has been a fork in the road. While organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Association have staunchly and vocally supported transgender patients and their right to health care, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) has chosen a different path. In February, ASPS, a society for which I previously served on the Board of Directors, issued a “Position Statement on Gender Surgery for Children and Adolescents,” which argued against providing gender-affirming surgical care to anyone under the age of 19. The statement helped support the Trump administration’s continuing fight against gender-affirming care for adults and teenagers.

Their recommendations are wrong too! Limiting surgeries to only a "few" hospitals just creates more hoops to jump through.

Instead of calling for an outright ban, ASPS could propose ways to promote research that can genuinely protect trans youth, who are indeed vulnerable.

For instance, ASPS could have recommended that gender-affirming care to adolescents is provided only at regional centers of excellence to standardize care using strict selection criteria.

Another approach is to recommend providing gender-affirming care under research protocols that prioritize long-term data collection.

This is a knee-jerk reaction to political pressure! So we can't have surgery until 19? But the age of legal adulthood is 18!

The reality of my job today is that I can see a young girl in my clinic for breast augmentation in preparation for her sweet 16 and be prosecuted for doing the same operation on a 19-year-old with gender dysphoria. My personal opinion is that any elective operation done on a child requires absolute care, multidisciplinary collaboration, and honest conversations with families. The government’s opinion shouldn’t infringe on autonomy.

For those framing this issue in the context of patient safety, the ASPS has not banned one of plastic surgery’s highest mortality procedures. For the Brazilian butt lift, the operation with the highest mortality rate of any aesthetic procedure in plastic surgery, the ASPS put together a task force that came up with recommendations to improve safety. The operation was never banned.

Don't forget that there is absolutely no problem with doing gender-conforming surgery on week-old intersex babies! There have only been a few surgeries on minors, and most were breast reduction surgeries for cisgender youth, which just get lumped in with us.

Banning care does not give us the opportunity to answer important questions.

Even worse, physician groups betraying the public’s trust out of fear of government retaliation has permanent consequences, especially when the government’s actions have since been deemed unconstitutional. Individual plastic surgeons like me have united to demand answers from the ASPS in an effort to uphold our responsibility to all patients. When we stray from standards on one issue, our patients won’t be able to trust us on any issue.

But this is a politcial "gotcha" the Republicans think that we can offset Trump... that they think that in the 2026 and the 2028 elections we can sway enough votes away form the Democrats, The Republicans don't realy care about us one way or another... we are just a wedge issue for them.