Canada court fight continues to bar doctor from performing mastectomy on 17-y-o suffering gender dysphoria
The case of a British Columbia trans-identifying teenage girl who wanted her breasts removed against the objections of her mother is back in court today after a judge prohibited a doctor from performing the surgery. That surgeon and another doctor, who prescribed the girl high dose testosterone, are now attempting to anonymize their names.
Last Tuesday, a Vancouver Supreme Court judge issued a Without Notice injunction ordering cosmetic surgeon Dr. Daniel Mckee against moving forward with a double mastectomy for a 17-year-old girl, who wishes to be seen as a male. The mother of the girl sued the general practitioner [name redacted] for prescribing her daughter testosterone without seeking her permission.
The Nov. 3 injunction is believed to be the first order of its kind in Canada.
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“I am appalled by the lack of any clinical standards and medical protocols that permit doctors to give gender-changing steroids and mastectomies to traumatized teenage girls caught up in a fad who wish they were boys," said the mother, known as A.M., in a statement sent to The Christian Post Thursday.
“I am shocked the government through TransCare BC supports such unscientific and very risky experimentation. There is little evidence the irreversible treatment lessens gender dysphoria or reduces the 19 times normal suicide rate."
The Vancouver court is forbidding that the mother's or child's name be mentioned.
Both doctors involved in the attempted gender-transitioning of the girl are applying to have their names anonymized so that their identities are not public.
The mother added that she finds it "outrageous" that Canadian school curricula, SOGI 123 (sexual orientation and gender identity), pushes troubled girls into gender clinics when proper psychiatric care is what is needed.
“Worst of all, the law lets it all be kept secret from parents," she said.
Carey Linde, the attorney for the mother, is demanding that she be allowed to review all the protocols that led the physicians, neither of whom are specialists, to arrive at the conclusions they have to proceed as they intend with a medicalized gender-transition.
The mother came to Linde after she was informed that her daughter had been on testosterone for a few months and was scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy in 10 days. A law in British Columbia permits doctors to do certain surgeries on minors if the doctors consider the child sufficiently "mature."
Reached Friday by phone, Linde told CP that when he found out who the doctors were, he was able to obtain the injunction against the doctor who was going to do the surgery. The injunction expires on Nov 27.
Linde is arguing before the court Friday that the doctors' names should not be anonymized.
"The argument the doctors are putting forward is that they have heard, that they expect maybe perhaps, who knows, they might receive some insulting tweets," Linde said.
"It's outrageous. The idea that the doctors in the trans world somehow should get special privileges is absurd."
The anonymization of the names is reserved for cases where people are under threat, which is not the case here.
"The network in the trans advocacy world is that they don't want anybody to know anything so they're shutting down media every single chance they get. And they're shutting down the names," Linde said, adding that they all "want to be in the dark."
The 17-year-old's trans activist lawyers are trying to get the injunction scrapped.
The teen girl has reportedly been prescribed Androgel 1%, which delivers physiologic amounts of testosterone, producing circulating testosterone concentrations that approximate normal concentrations seen in physically healthy men, according to an endocrinologist from California with whom Linde has been consulting.
"If we consider that the normal female testosterone level is between 10-50 ng/dL, then this dose of androgel will raise the female testosterone level to between 6 to 100 times normal. Possibly even higher based on her body size. This is why it is so dangerous," the endocrinologist told Linde in email correspondence forwarded to CP.
The endocrinologist added that she should be taken off of testosterone in tapered fashion under medical and psychological supervision as she is presently being "severely overdosed."
