How is it possible that a 19-year-old woman posts a fundraiser to pay a portion of her $60,000 health care costs to remove healthy breasts, and this is considered normal — even heroic? Why does GoFundMe allow someone to put up a plea like this? Why do “friends and family” salute this — rooting for this young person, who is not fully an adult, to make such a life-altering decision?
Why do therapists, doctors, surgeons, and insurance companies think this is justifiable? There is not enough medical evidence to support the path this nation is on with so-called “gender dysphoria” diagnoses. Still, girls across the nation are having double mastectomies, which the movement euphemistically refers to as “top surgery.”
This example I cite is not hypothetical or a composite.
This is a young woman, still in college, barely stumbling toward becoming an adult who is making a decision that will remove vital tissue, alter her body, and scar her for life — both physically and likely emotionally. This is a young woman who started down the trans rabbit hole at 13 when she reached puberty and felt confused and uncomfortable with — not in — her body. This is a young woman who had yet to deal with a raft of complex psychological issues stemming from her earliest days. This is a young woman who joined a group of “alternative” kids in middle school — the first clique that ever accepted her — and they suggested she was trans. She embraced the concept and narrowed her life to become a “trans man,” a term for a woman who claims to be a man.
Along the way, she abandoned her family and replaced it with an enabling glitter family. She gave up just about everything that was at one time meaningful to her. She had a single focus: to become trans. She used the word with pride — like someone might say I’m a nurse or a fighter pilot. Her face would light up when she’d say “I’m trans” — as though this alone could define her and erase all that she was before. It was the prescription she needed to escape a lifetime of unresolved psychological pain stemming from post-birth trauma.
Even as early as eight years ago, she found the “support” she needed beyond her skeptical parents. The local psychologist who’d hung an LBGTQ plaque on her door was only too happy to suggest this child break from her “non-affirming parents.” She had no problem swiftly agreeing the child was “trans.” Writing a prescription for testosterone — not a problem. Zip, there you go! Here’s that piece of paper you came here for — rather than actually wanting to dig deep and take the painful journey to explore what lies beneath.
No, that’s not how this works. The child says she’s trans, the so-called professional adheres to the diagnosis, the insurance company reimburses the sessions, and the industrial medical complex awaits a lifelong patient who will have her breasts removed and be medicated for the rest of her life, not to mention all the post-care once things start to become complicated or go wrong when this medical experiment is at full tilt.
But for now, let’s return to the normalization of a young woman raising funds to lop off her healthy breasts. Should platforms like GoFundMe think twice about allowing this — or do they have no moral obligation to vet who uses the fundraising platform and how? If there is even a vetting department, their perspective is probably that this kind of fundraiser is helping a distressed gender-dysphoric patient raise the money she needs for the urgent care she requires.
It’s unlikely the average platform “vetter” might stop and think about how bizarre or even ridiculous this really is. They’re not likely to understand this practice is experimental (why would they?) and that too many medical questions linger. People raise money for things all the time – maybe this doesn’t jump out and scream: Wait! This is irrational! It should.
The fundraiser tells her community that health care will cover over $60,000 for this “needed” surgery. But who has decided this is necessary and not an elective surgery based on a runaway social contagion? She has.
Then there are the enablers — people who likely mean well when they donate $5 or $20 or $500 and hurl words of encouragement about the courageous thing this young woman is doing to her body. Objectively, it’s difficult to understand how people hit that “pay” button before asking themselves whether this really makes sense. Most, maybe many of those sending donations, would never in a million years remove a healthy body part by choice but they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that this is a healthy and informed choice.
Ultimately the folks at GoFundMe, everyone who enables this young woman along the way, the monetary and emotional contributors, will not be there when this woman navigates the world, carved up, a woman without breasts, a “trans man” with female genitalia. When the glitter fades and the obsession dulls, all those that stood like fans lined up along the parade route waving metaphorical rainbow flags will be living their lives with intact bodies and likely a general sense of normalcy.
Participating in the glory of that child’s moment will be irrelevant and way in the past. They won’t be there for the potential fallout. Watching this young woman reckon with what she has done will not be their burden. This she will do alone.
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