It’s time we got very specific and very blunt about what “affirmation” really means.
If you don’t know what I am referring to it’s this, from Ellie Gardey:
The story of Jazz Jennings, whose parents began their attempts to transition him to female when he was just 5 years old, had a major impact on the acceptance of transgenderism in America. As a child who made TV appearances with Barbara Walters, Jennings was the example par excellence for the perspective that some people innately belong to the opposite gender — an argument that was made more convincing because Jennings’ parents had treated him as a girl since early childhood.
In recent years, however, Jennings has repeatedly made headlines for health problems that offer counter-evidence to the narrative that medicine can seamlessly transition adults or children from one sex to the one they supposedly truly belong to.
A botched penile inversion vaginoplasty that Jennings underwent at the age of 17 required multiple corrective surgeries and left him with greatly diminished sexual function.
One of Jennings’ surgeons, Marci Bowers, later went public with hesitancy toward the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s standards of care for children, arguing that the practice of giving 11-year-olds testosterone blockers and 13-year-olds estrogen treatments has made it impossible for doctors to later perform a traditional penile inversion vaginoplasty on them, as doctors are required to take skin grafts in order to have enough tissue, often leaving patients with poor outcomes.
This is exactly what happened with Jennings. His surgery was performed with stomach lining material to make up for the lack of available tissue. Soon after the surgery, his “neovagina” split apart. Three corrective surgeries over a period of years were subsequently performed.
“I think there was naivete on the part of pediatric endocrinologists who were proponents of early [puberty] blockade thinking that just this magic can happen, that surgeons can do anything,” said Bowers in an interview with Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
If you can bare it, you can watch the clip of the mother threaten her child with a dilator here.
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