Gender medicine isn’t quite dead yet

spiked’s Brendan O’Neill has characterised the current status of the war on wokeness as one step forward, two steps back. That’s an apt description of two developments that occurred in the past month in the US regarding gender transition.

The one step forward was a $2million New York jury verdict in favour of a 22-year-old woman against her therapist and her surgeon, after she underwent a double mastectomy at age 16, in her attempt to transition from girl to boy at the time. The plaintiff has subsequently decided to remain female. As she testified in her trial: ‘It’s so hard to face that you are disfigured for life… No amount of reconstruction is ever going to bring back what I lost.’

The verdict wasn’t about gender theory as such. Instead it was based on the legal technicality that the caregivers failed to follow the correct medical standards of care. Nevertheless, this was America’s first verdict against gender-affirming surgery in a minor, and some believe it to be a precedent for a number of similar civil cases scheduled for trial this year. Tellingly, the mainstream American media, outside the right-leaning New York Post, have provided minimal coverage of the trial and verdict.

But if that jury decision was one step forward, two steps were taken back during a high-profile US senate hearing in January. Dr Nisha Verma, a specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology (O&G), who was called as a Democratic witness, was asked by Republican senator Josh Hawley whether men can get pregnant. This question would have seemed absurd only a decade ago, and yet she refused to give a yes or no answer. She could have proffered a more nuanced answer – that biological males cannot get pregnant, but biological females from birth who consider themselves men have the ability to get pregnant – but she did not deign to do that, opting to sidestep the question completely.

That was a demonstration of the progressive move to blur the distinction between ‘sex’ – relating to biological and physical characteristics determined at birth – and ‘gender’ – the social construct of how a person decides to live his or her life. Exhibiting an ironic lack of self-awareness, Verma deemed the question ‘political’, failing to appreciate that her evasion was more political than Hawley’s question.

This was not the first time a question of this nature has been raised on the senate floor. In 2022, Hawley again got into a contentious debate with Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges over whether only women could get pregnant. The same year, during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Ketanji Brown Jackson deferred when she was asked by a Republican senator to define the word ‘woman’, answering ‘I’m not a biologist’. The Supreme Court that Jackson now sits on is currently assessing whether states can ban transgender women from female sports, with a decision due this spring.

But those were attorneys. The significance of Verma’s testimony is that she appeared in front of congress as a medical professional and was asked to answer the question in that role, without lawyerly machinations to fall back on as lawyers Jackson and Bridges did. The Democrats who called Verma to testify obviously consider her a mainstream expert, and she is currently senior adviser for reproductive-health policy and advocacy at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Her CV is impressive. It is reasonable to assume she came by her opinions as she rose through the ranks while attending a leading university, a respected medical school, and doing a training residency at one of America’s leading hospitals. Her senate testimony suggests that these prestigious medical institutions and others like them, including the specialty of obstetrics and gynaecology, may be marinating in and promulgating a gender theory that is loath to concede men cannot get pregnant.

The paradigm of medical practice can change remarkably in a lifetime. The field of obstetrics and gynaecology has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past two generations. In 1950, female gynaecologists were virtually unknown in the United States. Until 1973, abortion was illegal in the US and there was no training for performing abortions in medical schools and hospitals. Today, 85 per cent of all O&G doctors are women, and abortion training is routine – an illustration of how dramatic and rapid the status quo shift in medicine can be.

This is not to suggest the entire medical profession has bought in to today’s gender theory. Less than a week after the $2million gender transition verdict, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a new position opposing ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries in patients under the age of 19. The American Medical Association (AMA), the nation’s largest organisation representing doctors, on Wednesday said these procedures generally should be deferred until patients reach adulthood. The AMA said that while it continues to support treatment for minors seeking gender-related care, given the sparse research on the risks and benefits of surgical procedures, it concurred with the plastic surgeons. ‘In the absence of clear evidence, the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood’, the statement said.

Conservatives in the US are hailing the New York verdict and are confident, perhaps overconfident, that the dominoes will now fall and signal an end to gender surgery for minors and a reappraisal of gender theory. Maybe. But attention should be paid to Brendan O’Neill’s opinion on the war on wokeness, and there should be no surprise if a significant pushback is forthcoming from influential corners of the medical community on gender theory.

Cory Franklin’s The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.