Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means "first, do no harm". It is generally believed to come from the Hippocratic Oath, but this is not accurate. The history of this phrase is not definitively known, but its origins are thought to be from the writings of physicians ranging from the 1600 - 1800s. The earliest printed evidence of the Hippocratic Oath dates from AD 275 and it does express similar concepts to “first, do no harm, reading in part: “Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.”
Modern day doctors still make a Physician’s Oath upon graduation that varies according to which country and which institution they attend, but they nearly all retain four fundamentals from the original Hippocratic Oath — respecting patient confidentiality, avoiding harm, respecting teachers, and upholding the integrity of the profession.
So how does the concept of not creating harm apply for those in the business of “gender affirming care”, especially in relation to children who lack the capacity to give fully informed consent?
Before we go any further, the following section is a brief summary of the elements of postmodernism. Notice I did not mention “facts” of postmodernism because the main hallmark of this belief system is that facts do not exist. There are no facts. Nope, not even one.
Postmodernism: from here to nowhere?
To recap: applied postmodernism is a philosophical belief system that is skeptical of objective standards of truth, reason, logic, rationality, knowledge and morality.
Queer theory, a strand of postmodernism, also rejects the search for objective truth by attempting to implement a radical political agenda specifically concerned with redefining the nature of sex and gender. This is most evident today in the confusion postmodernism promotes about the definition of a woman, for example, or the use of exclusive female spaces by men. By focusing on politics and power and shifting the goals from the investigation of truth to advancing a moral and political viewpoint, facts become irrelevant and unimportant.
By ceasing to seek truth and instead advancing their ideological causes, post modernist proponents create a destructive chaos. The belief then is that out of this chaos, positive change will miraculously arise to solve the social problems of our time.
If you haven’t been captured by this philosophy, then you will also recognise that facts, far from being superfluous, are actually quite important, especially in health care settings and particularly in maternity and child care.
Because mammals can’t change their sex and only biological women can conceive, gestate, labour and feed babies from their own bodies, postmodernism presents a danger to mothers and babies through the denial of the objective truth of biology. How are caregivers able to assist women and children if they are not allowed to use biological terms when discussing the human body? To state that any sex can give birth or breastfeed is prioritising feelings (gender identity) over facts: that breastfeeding and birth are a sexed activities, exclusively available to females of every mammalian species.
But doctors believe in science, don’t they?
Naively, I thought that doctors at least, would understand this better than most because they have had all that education around bodies, how they differ, what can go wrong and how problems can be fixed. The Hippocratic Oath supports the idea that doctors should know their patients and do no harm.
But clearly I was mistaken.
Because doctors who work in what is euphemistically called “gender affirmation medicine” seem to be a law among themselves, with a strong line in obfuscating facts and disregarding the most basic informed consent protocols. They clearly have no problem with mutilating bodies and prescribing drugs that will have harmful effects on the bodies of their patients. In fact, if you wanted to create an oath that was the opposite of what Hippocrates came up with, you can’t go past this lot.
I’m not discussing those men in their 40s who suddenly come out as ‘really women’. Many people (of both sexes; once again there are only two) have some sort of sexual fetish and as long as they are limiting themselves to legal adult activities, then that is their private business.
Children are an inherently vulnerable population
Children, especially girls are a different population than adults. Many studies have demonstrated that girls and boys are socialised differently depending on which sex they are. Gender roles (societal expectations about appropriate behaviours) are linked to sex, even though there are wide variations, dependent on era, society and culture. Gender and Socialization | Introduction to Sociology (lumenlearning.com)
I’m confident that most people can name the stereotypical behaviour expected of boys and girls. In most societies boys and girls will be dressed distinctly, given disparate toys to play with and talked to differently. Boys will be told “you are so strong”, while their sisters will be told “you are so pretty”. Boys may be expected to help by mowing the lawn, while girls will be expected to help in the kitchen. These gender roles, while they may have some basis in sex, are conventional and today many people rightly reject them.
Gender role expectations should not be the basis for encouraging children to take irreversible hormones and surgeries: Children should be who they are without having to change their bodies to reflect their personalities. The gender industrial complex promotes the very stereotypes about women and men that feminists have sought to reject for the past 100 years.
Breaking the “gender binary” is an admirable goal if you are talking about men becoming nurses and women taking up engineering. There are very few adult jobs where sex actually matters and those who may not be gender conforming should not be held back by superficial standards that are imposed on them.
But the surgeons using TikTok touting for business don’t bother with wondering why a truly gargantuan cohort of young girls suddenly deciding that life as a boy is a more attractive future than what they were given when born a girl. The colour of money and fame is clearly obscuring their memories of taking any sort of oath that bound them to “first, do no harm”.
Before I outline some of the many harms that “gender affirming” doctors cause or support, some basic premises must be stated.
It goes far beyond tomboys and ‘girly’ boys
First, the vast majority of young girls who identify as trans have sometimes complicated histories of family abuse, trauma and/or autism. In other words, these are not mentally healthy kids presenting for care. Cutting bits off them or giving them hormone treatment is at best, only going to mask their real problems; kicking that can down the road where it will have to be dealt with at a later date.
“Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter” is a lie presented to worried parents who are wondering what happened to their daughters who were content with their sex and had never as much as hinted as being gender dysphoric. There are no reliable studies that show that suicide rates among “trans” kids are higher than children with other psychiatric problems. In fact, the highest suicide rates are found in adults, years after they have appearance changing surgeries. Suicide Facts and Myths - Transgender Trend
So what does a girl have to do to ‘change sex’ to ‘become’ a boy and what does it do to her body?
Wrecking your body to reach for the unachievable
First, she has to stop any development towards becoming the woman she was meant to be. This will involve taking a drug to halt her normal hormone production; most commonly Lupron LUPRON DEPOT (leuprolide acetate for depot suspension), which prior to the mass contagion of gender dysphoria, was predominantly used for chemically castrating men who were convicted sex offenders or men suffering from prostate cancer. It was also used in a very small cohort of children undergoing precocious puberty (where puberty was commencing many years before it should).
This drug has many expected side effects when taken by anyone, including children. These include, but are not limited to: swelling of the vagina, vaginal bleeding and discharge and mood changes. Additionally, new or worsened mental health problems can manifest. Mental health problems may include emotional symptoms such as crying, irritability, restlessness (impatience), anger, and acting aggressively. Seizures from increased pressure in the fluid around the brain can happen in children taking gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonist medicines, including Lupron so parents need to watch for headaches, eye problems (including blurred vision, double vision, and decreased eyesight), eye pain, ringing in the ears, dizziness, or nausea.
This is clearly not a benign treatment for healthy children undergoing mental distress.
Although this is sold as a method of giving girls a “pause button” while they ‘think about’ who they want to be, in practice it is the second step (social transitioning being the first step), of becoming a lifelong medical patient, leaving these children dependent on a medical system that has much to gain financially from starting children young with surgical procedures and drugs. Vanderbilt Pediatric Transgender Clinic Nukes Website After Matt Walsh Exposes 'Big Money Maker' Motive | ZeroHedge
As nearly 100% of those girls who commence puberty blockers carry on to cross (wrong) sex hormones, they are unwittingly complicit in engineering their own infertility. (tandfonline.com) Puberty blockers – Stats For Gender
It needs to be understood: “gender affirming” doctors are taking the physically healthy bodies of their young, female patients and rendering them infertile and subject to the harms of a way too early menopause.
Early menopause even when it occurs naturally is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and strokes, dementia and osteoporosis, mood disorders and suicide. The damage is compounded when menopause is created in girls who are still teenagers. Lack of oestrogen (because of either natural menopause or the situation that is created by prescribing unnatural hormones) causes vaginal atrophy. So as well as infertility, these girls won’t be able to have an enjoyable sex life. They will remain anorgasmic for the rest of their lives. Another result of these unnecessary interventions is that the urethral meatus increases in size, leading to more leakage. This increases incontinence that leads to more waking at night, resulting in lower mood and greater fatigue. Lifetime changes in the vulva and vagina - PubMed (nih.gov)
My particular ire though, is aimed at those surgeons who advertise via social media sites such as TikTok. Gender Surgeons on TikTok, Instagram: Appropriate or Not? (medscape.com)
Their audience is girls growing up in our patriarchal society who don’t like the sexual attention their bodies bring them that can start even before adolescence. The ‘cure’ for this ‘ailment’ is so called “top surgery”, which is actually the deliberate amputation of healthy breasts for the sake of appearance. As every cell of a natal girl’s body is coded for female, there is nothing anyone can do to help her to ‘change’ her sex. These mutilating surgeries are more and more frequently being done on girls as young as 13 years old.
Prior to the maturation of the brain’s frontal lobe, no one has the capacity to consent to any medical treatment that they cannot understand the implications of undertaking. In paediatric cancer cases, only parents can give consent to treatments that children may well find painful, so may naturally refuse to have. But throw “gender dysphoria” into the conversation and parents’ wishes can be ignored. Minors are not considered competent to make a choice between short term pain (of treatment) and long term gain (staying alive) if they develop a paediatric cancer.
With the affirming care model of gender dysphoria treatment, care that does not investigate the underlying causes of this dysphoria allows for a nine year old girl to make decisions she is not equipped to make including the desire to have children herself someday. By undergoing these procedures she is consenting to denying herself the experience of future sexual pleasure. She will be trading her current good health for a lifetime of expensive and harmful medical treatments. Full article: Puberty Blockers for Children: Can They Consent? (tandfonline.com)
If gender affirmation is a valid concept, then why are anorexic girls forced into treatment for anorexia? It would be medical malpractice to affirm their skewed body images and promote surgical options such as liposuction to affirm girls' anorexic body dysphoria. Their self-perception tells them that they are fat, right through to the point where they die from the effects of starvation. What is the difference between this cohort and the ‘trans’ girls? Both have underlying untreated mental distress, and are controlling their appearance to deal with their issues, but only the girls who claim to be boys will be affirmed in their delusional beliefs.
Yes, you can still have a baby, but…
So what happens to those who come ‘late to the party’ and start taking “cross sex” hormones after puberty has already commenced? They will most likely be able to conceive and carry a pregnancy, but will not escape the harms of an hormonally changed body.
Girls/young women who take abnormal amounts of testosterone undergo permanent changes (such as facial and body hair and a permanently deeper voice); no one seems to be asking what effects may occur to a prematurely menopaused uterus. A confusing element occurs with giving a young girl testosterone: she may feel less depressed due to the hormone itself. But that hormone boost comes with damages that far outweigh the prospect of allowing a minor child to make life altering decisions that cannot be changed when she becomes of age. There are therapies and drugs in place to deal with depression and mental distress. Use of these types of options are preferable to using a drug off label with serious side effects.
Artificially aging a young woman’s body will affect not only her health, it will also impact pregnancy and her baby. The effects of pregnancy in the older mother are already known. Placental insufficiency, smaller, premature babies, preeclampsia and other complications means that extra monitoring will be done for the safety of women and babies. https://vpfw.com/blog/pregnancy-after-age-40-the-odds-the-risks-and-whether-to-try/
It is already known that women who have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) have higher circulating testosterone levels than women who don’t have PCOS. They are also more likely to have miscarriages, stillbirths and similar issues as older women during their pregnancies. What then are the effects of young girls taking testosterone? The fact that we don't have a scientific answer for this specific question sheds light on the fact that medical practitioners need to slow down and investigate exactly what they are doing here. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028298000077
Where are the studies about the effects of (a much higher than normal) testosterone load on female fetuses on their future reproductive capability and their own eggs that they are already carrying? While thalidomide abnormalities were immediately apparent at birth, the generation of female fetuses exposed to another drug had to reach maturity before the damage was discovered. DES daughters - Better Health Channel The baby has not consented to any of this.
And babies are born primed to breastfeed, which they can’t do if women have no breasts.
And no, if you have your breasts surgically removed, you can’t grow them back:
Breastfeeding support groups who have embraced gender neutral language to appease the inclusivity police, please take note: if women have buyer’s regret after undergoing “top surgery” (an elective double mastectomy of healthy breasts), they cannot grow new breasts and breastfeed, should they ever decide to do so. These decisions are never appropriate for children to be making and breastfeeding organisations who are complicit in this ideology by normalising non-scientific language around birth and breastfeeding should take note—when these girls grow up and many attempt to detransition, they are going to have a lot to answer for. Top Surgery/Breastfeeding Regrets : actual_detrans (reddit.com)
Doctors becoming rich and famous by mutilating children and young women is currently acceptable practice
Clearly any doctor advertising via social media that they can remove those pesky breasts in a flash are so separated from any conception of ethics that one wonders if they have any limits at all. Using trendy hashtags like #yeettheteet and #teetusdeletus that totally demean women and our wondrous bodies, infantilising major surgery that, even if it goes ‘well’ can leave women in pain forever, and pretending that surgical intervention is appropriate care for mental health issues borders on criminality.
I can’t wait for the day when mutilation and heavy hormone treatments join the ranks of lobotomies and exorcisms in the treatment of distressed girls (and boys) as outmoded and harmful. The 10 Worst Mental Health Treatments in History - Everyday Health
Hippocrates probably saw his fair share of shady practitioners in his day, but I suspect that even he would be left speechless by the brazen actions of those who have taken his Oath and turned it on its head.