The nation’s top medical school is billing gender transition surgeries as “essential” for future doctors to learn. Harvard Medical School is offering a fall 2023 and spring 2024 elective course entitled “Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery,” which will offer students “an opportunity to participate in procedures that span the entire specialty including hand surgery, breast reconstruction, microsurgery, craniofacial surgery, lymphatic surgery, orthoplastic surgery, gender affirming surgery, and cosmetic surgery,” according to a course description. The course allows medical students to practice gender transition surgeries on adult patients at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston.
Harvard Medical School told reporters, “This training also includes teaching the basics of gender-affirming surgery for consenting adult patients seeking such procedures.” The school’s media team clarified, “This education is an essential part of the fundamental knowledge and expertise needed to deliver optimal care for patients who undergo various surgical procedures, including gender-affirming surgery for consenting adults who seek such care.”
Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “Harvard University Medical School’s willingness to indulge this nonsense is very dangerous because so many people in academia and the general public believe Harvard is ‘the best’ and an example to be emulated. In this case, nothing could be further from the truth.” She continued, “Believing that it’s possible to change the body from male to female is one kind of problem; educating future doctors that such treatments are beneficial to patients and necessary for vulnerable patients and the medical students’ formation is taking that problem to a very different level.”
Gender transition surgeries offered by BIDMC include “hysterectomies and robotic total laparoscopic hysterectomy with partial vaginectomy, colpectomy,” which is the removal of the uterus and vaginal tissue. BIDMC also offers multiple forms of mastectomies (breast removal procedures) for biological women and “breast augmentation” for biological men — these procedures are billed as “top surgeries” by the medical center. “Bottom surgery” includes “vaginoplasty,” which is the creation of a fake vagina for biological men, “orchiectomy,” which is the removal of testicles, and “phalloplasty,” which is the creation of a fake penis for biological women, often using tissue from the arm, thigh, or rear end.
This is not Harvard Medical School’s first foray into the field of transgender “medicine.” In 2018, the Ivy League med school launched a “Sexual and Gender Minorities Health Equity Initiative” to reshape “the core MD curriculum so that all students and faculty clinicians can become exceptionally well equipped to provide high-quality, holistic health care for sexual and gender minority patients of all ages.” Harvard Medical School George Q. Daley said at the time, “We firmly believe that Harvard Medical School must lead this widespread change in medicine.” The school’s teaching hospital also opened a “Gender-Affirming Services” department in 2020, led by Harvard Medical Professor Michael Irwig.
Over the past few years, the school has also hosted lectures, conferences, and courses on transgenderism. One such lecture, hosted in 2022 and entitled “The Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Patients in Primary Care,” taught students that “transgender health is a fundamental component of primary care.” A January 2023 conference entitled “Advancing Excellence in Transgender Health: A Course for the Whole Care Team” invited practicing physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and psychologists to attend to learn about “providing high-quality care for adults, adolescents and children who are transgender or gender diverse” and how to “update standards of care and programs for transgender and gender diverse adults, adolescents and children, including care focused on both routine primary care needs and care specific to affirming the gender identity of patients.”
Harvard Medical School also offered a controversial course earlier this year on medical care for “infants” who identify as LGBT; the course was conducted in cooperation with the Boston Children’s Hospital, which infamously opened the first pediatric and adolescent transgender “health” program in the U.S.
Both Harvard Medical School and the BIDMC are affiliated with the pro-LGBT group Fenway Health, which offers a “LGBTQIA+ Health Fellowship Program” at Harvard. BIDMC is also a founding member of the “New England Gender C.A.R.E. (Collaboration, Access, Research, and Education) consortium, a group of healthcare professionals dedicated to improving access to gender-affirming care.”
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
