LOS ANGELES (NewsNation) — The president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) says his practice does not provide gender-affirming surgeries for adolescents, saying its long-term efficacy is questionable.
Despite some support in the medical community for providing gender-affirming surgeries to minors, Dr. Steven Williams tells NewsNation it is not something he provides at his practice.
“I don’t perform gender-affirming care in adolescents and the reason why is because I don’t think the data supports it,” Williams said. “So at my practice, we don’t even entertain that.”
The outcome of other plastic surgeries tends to be positive, a conclusion supported by data, he said.
“Also,” he said, “I think that navigating some of the parental-child interactions and trying to figure out motivations for care and that overall social milieu that affects adolescents — I find it incredibly complicated.”
Williams believes, as a physician, it’s necessary to only perform care in which he’s “confident.”
“Personally, for adolescents, I don’t think I’m capable of unwinding all of that,” he said. “I know that I’m not comfortable with the level of evidence there is yet — and it’s a particularly vulnerable population — which is why I think it’s important to proceed with caution.
Dr. Sheila Nazarian says cultural politics are also at play
“I think some physicians and some medical associations have been overtaken by a vocal minority and they are politicized,” she said. “This is 100% an American political issue. If we look at Europe, very progressive governments have backed off of these procedures in minors because they’re just analyzing the data — as we should with every procedure. Why is it that for this procedure, in this patient population, we just have to shut up?”
One hurdle to productive research, she says, is the partisan divide over youth and gender medicine in the U.S.
Both vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and former President Donald Trump have weighed in on the issue.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed an executive order shielding people from prosecution in other states for seeking and undergoing gender surgery.
Trump, on the other hand, likened it to a crime.
“The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse,” he has said.
Trump has recently said that if he is again elected, he would make it a felony for any surgeon to provide such surgeries without parental consent.
“If Donald Trump came out and said, ‘I’m going to make it a crime for women to get breast reconstruction,’ then we would have very good evidence to support that statements like that are harmful to patients,” Williams said. “Currently we don’t have the data. My guess is, if (gender-affirming surgeries for minors) were to be criminalized, it would be something that would spur additional research to potentially support the benefits — or maybe prove that there aren’t benefits for this.”
Williams said he “loses sleep” over the issue.
“The one part that’s definitely not quite there yet is we need better data when it comes to adolescent gender-affirming care. It’s not clear that we fully understand the consequences.”
