Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, went on CBS News last year to reassure viewers that gender transition surgery on minors “really is not done under the age of 18, except in severe cases,” further suggesting the number of minors who have received such surgeries is less than 60. Well, we just found out that the narrative that minors almost never get surgery is, at best, an ignorant falsehood and, at worst, a dishonest lie. 

Data recently highlighted by the Manhattan Institute’s Leo Sapir show that thousands upon thousands of such surgeries have been performed on female minors in just the last few years. 

“A new analysis by the Manhattan Institute, using a more up-to-date all-payer national insurance database from 2017 to 2023, found evidence of 5,288 to 6,294 ‘gender-affirming’ double mastectomies for girls under age 18,” Sapir reports for City Journal. “This includes 50 to 179 girls who were 12.5 or younger at the time of their procedure.”

That’s right: Thousands of young females have had their breasts surgically removed as part of a gender transition just since 2017, including some as young as 12! This alone is alarming enough, but the story actually gets crazier. 

Some of these surgeries were done not as part of a gender transition from one gender to the other, a phenomenon which has at least been studied, but as part of a new “gender nullification” approach to affirming a teenager’s “non-binary” identity, identifying as neither male nor female. 

“A growing trend in gender medicine is ‘nonbinary’ mastectomies, a procedure that some patients seek in order to appear neither male nor female,” Sapir finds. “According to our data, a minimum of 1,873 such procedures (conservative estimate) were performed on girls under age 18 in the U.S. between 2017 and 2023. The number of procedures grew from 70 in 2017 to 470 in 2023 — an almost seven-fold rise.” 

If anything, Sapir’s figures are underestimates because they only capture surgeries that were paid for using insurance, and some may have occurred but been paid for out-of-pocket. So, that thing that “never happens” is actually happening quite a lot, and it’s nothing short of appalling. 

A 12-year-old cannot have a firm enough understanding of her own identity to consent to life-altering, irreversible mutilation of her healthy body parts. And the evidence behind such treatments is incredibly shoddy and weak, constituting nowhere near the mountain of high-quality research you’d need even to come close to justifying ethically offering such drastic interventions to minors. 

If these teenagers reach the age of adulthood and still want to pursue this surgical path, they should be free to do so. It’s their life and their body, after all. But in part, because a teenager’s brain is not fully developed, we categorically protect minors from making permanent decisions in all sorts of ways far less severe than these gender surgeries, from driving cars to getting tattoos. 

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Allowing teenage girls to chop off healthy body parts in pursuit of hypothetical, unproven alleviation of potentially temporary identity issues is both morally grotesque and politically toxic for the LGBT community. 

If LGBT activists and Democratic politicians continue to conflate gay rights and gay acceptance with support for minors accessing life-altering gender transition treatments, they won’t convince normal Americans to get on board with chopping female minors’ breasts off. But they may well convince people that supporting LGBT acceptance was a mistake in the first place, jeopardizing all the hard-fought progress that has been made. 

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.