Pumping the brakes on teen sex change

Three days before a 17-year-old girl was scheduled to receive a double mastectomy, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge blocked the surgery. The teen’s mother sought the court order, saying doctors pushed her daughter into cross-sex hormones and breast removal surgery.

“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, identified in court documents as A.M. WORLD spoke with her but is withholding her name to protect her child’s privacy.

Justice Shelley C. Fitzpatrick issued an injunction preventing cosmetic surgeon Daniel McKee and general practitioner Andrea Szewchuk from providing counsel, advice, or any kind of preparation for a double mastectomy on the girl until Nov. 27.

The mother contacted attorney Carey Linde in October when her daughter, who does not live with either of her parents, disclosed that she began taking testosterone two months prior and scheduled a double mastectomy.

The 17-year-old told her mother she met with Szewchuk over Zoom before she was prescribed testosterone. A.M. also said her daughter suffers from depression and has been taking antidepressants. She said she tried contacting the doctors, but neither Szewchuk, who is transgender, nor McKee would return her or Linde’s calls.

A.M. believes the Canadian province’s government-approved Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) 123 curriculum pushes depressed and anxiety-ridden girls into gender clinics––when they actually need psychiatric care.

“Worst of all, the law lets it all be kept secret from parents,” she said.

British Columbia law does not set an age when a child becomes capable of consenting to medical procedures. It states the child must be capable of understanding the “reasonably foreseeable” risks and benefits of the procedure in order to consent. Doctors must have made reasonable efforts to determine whether the healthcare is in the child’s best interests.

A.M. noticed some of her daughter’s friends had begun using breast binders around the time she told her mother she was “gender fluid.” “It’s almost as though it’s become a fashion, a way of being different,” she said. “As a parent, I feel that I have no right to even give advice.”