Gender Medicine’s Cult of Pathology and Dr. Bovary Syndrome (DBS)

Medical progress—or regress?

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

‘There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves cure!’ The finger came down on the desk with a smart rap. The case which he had made to look so simple before became if possible still simpler — and altogether hopeless. There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.’

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Gender medicine” conjures images of nineteenth-century medicine and its medical negligence in the search for any cure. Most typically, analogies use the Nazi medicine of the twentieth century, but issues of experimentation and cruelty predate Nazi doctors like Josef Mengele. A survivor of the Holocaust, Eva Mozes Kor has written of his experiments, which are certainly worth researching. She was among the twins whom Mengele subjected to his fantasies. In Echoes from Auschwitz, first published in 1995, Kor writes:

Even today, none of us really knows what was done to us. Among the twins with whom I have talked, three cannot speak because they became so ill from diphtheria germs which were injected into their bodies. They have no vocal cords, and no amount of surgery or care has been able to restore their vocal cords. The older girls told of being taken to a lab where blood from some boys was transfused into their bodies and their blood was transfused into the bodies of the young boys. Some of the doctors who were working on this project told the young girls that they were going to make them into young men. One twin had his sex organs removed in an attempt to turn him into a girl. Some girls had their uteruses burned. One twin had so many injections of some kind of drug into his spine, all in an effort to change the color of his eyes, that now he is in constant pain from the deterioration of his spinal column. (pp. 106-107)

Mengele’s practices included, as Kor writes, attempts to change the appearance cosmetically, with complete disregard for long-term harm. For “scientific knowledge,” Nazi doctors attempted to change the sex of the young people. Advocates of “gender-affirming care” argue that, while Nazis like Mengele performed the precursors to modern-day “gender medicine,” patients these days, including children, all provide “informed consent” for the procedures. Of course, there remains the issue of negligence—and whether or not children placed on puberty blockers can fully understand not only the loss of fertility but also stunted brain and bone development. Advocates for “gender-affirming care” effectively support a moral mandate for subjecting children and young people to hormonal and surgical interventions. Even when patients cannot know the long-term outcomes, or the negative effects on their health, we hear they can provide “informed consent.”