Doctors have admitted to performing “non-standard” gender-affirming procedures on minors, sometimes focusing primarily on cosmetic outcomes, amid a reported increase in patients seeking “nonbinary” surgeries.
Newly obtained videos from The Free Press reveal medical professionals discussing cases in which procedures were carried out with little to no assessment of a patient’s mental health or gender identity. The recordings, captured at closed-door medical conferences in the U.S. over the past few years, show clinicians openly debating ways to meet patient desires even when deviating from established guidelines.
At a 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at Oregon Health & Science University, described an 18-year-old patient known only as Sky. Sky identified as asexual, had no interest in future sexual activity, and requested surgery to remove “all erogenous tissue,” expressing a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Penkin noted that requests for “nonbinary” procedures were “growing in number.” The outcome of this particular case was not immediately clear.
In a separate 2022 World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference, a clinician from Utah discussed seeing a “dramatically increased” number of nonbinary interventions. The clinician mentioned the idea of providing patients with a “Pinterest board” of available procedures and candidly admitted that medical professionals were often improvising: “I feel like we’re all just winging it, you know? And which is okay, you’re winging it too. But maybe we can just, like, wing it together.”
These videos have emerged amid a nationwide debate over gender-affirming care. Since 2021, 28 states with Republican-led legislatures have passed laws banning or restricting such care for minors.