Vanderbilt University announces end to transgender surgeries for adults

Fox 17 reports that VUMC issued a statement over the weekend announcing, “[d]ue to operational limitations and lack of surgical coverage, Vanderbilt Health will cease providing [so-called] gender-affirming plastic surgeries for adults. Vanderbilt Health continues to provide nonsurgical [so-called] gender-affirming care for adults 19 years and older.”

Those limitations may be related to legislation currently pending in the Tennessee legislature, which would ban the state’s TennCare medicaid program from covering “transition” surgeries at any age.

Local LGBT activists bitterly denounced the move, with Metro Council Member At-Large Olivia Hill calling it “kind of a gut punch” that “felt like a betrayal from an old friend,” given the medical center’s history of LGBT activism.

It was VUMC’s “Clinic for Transgender Health” that was caught on video in a 2022 exposé in which Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money,” shedding light on many hospitals’ financial incentive for pushing “gender transitions” at the expense of patient welfare.

Vanderbilt stopped “transitioning” minors in 2023, getting ahead of a then-impending Tennessee law banning the practice. Last year, conservative group Consumers’ Research put out a report on “Woke Hospitals,” which noted that VUMC had not given up on woke ideology, finding various Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) websites that appeared to still be up, just hidden behind passwords so the outside world could not corroborate what they really say, as well as its purported framing of “climate care” as a health issue.

A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”