How Young Is Too Young for Sterilization?
To calm this strife, WPATH could have produced an evidence-based, apolitical document for physicians and others desperately seeking guidance. That s not what happened.
The new guidelines are a weird amalgam of pseudo-medical speech, and political statements, and fetishistic practices, said Julia Mason, a pediatrician in Oregon and a clinical advisor to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Dr. Mason added that she was dismayed that WPATH rejected the chapter on ethics that had been in an earlier draft, but retained the chapter on eunuchs. (These guidelines see eunuchs not as a deeply tragic part of history but as a gender identity which health care professionals should support.)
The rollout of these new Standards of Care has been marred with confusion. Last December, WPATH released draft guidelines, which included minimum age recommendations for life-changing treatment, including age 14 for receiving estrogen or testosterone (the previous WPATH standards had been age 16), and allowing minors to have mastectomies (which the guidance often calls chest-masculinization surgery ) beginning at age 15, and vaginoplasty and hysterectomy at 17.