Beyond Abortion: Planned Parenthood’s role in body-damaging surgeries

Planned Parenthood’s paved ‘gender affirming care pathway’ — from its sex ed and other propaganda to aiding minors in ‘social transition' and medicalized interventions (like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones) — often leads to referrals for body-damaging surgeries, which reject biological sex as reality.

The same dehumanizing ideologies used to justify the mass genocide of preborn children are also used to physically distort and damage the healthy bodies of adolescents and young adults.  

Planned Parenthood seemingly continues to evade scrutiny, despite having received millions in taxpayer subsidies — so the public deserves to know what these surgeries are, along with their risks and possible long-term ramifications. 

The Background:

Planned Parenthood and many of its affiliates boast of being leaders in "gender affirming care" (GAC), claiming to aid gender-distressed individuals, including minors, in social, medical and legal ‘gender affirming transition.’ This vague euphemism, GAC, may include social, medical, and legal interventions.

Read more about social and medical interventions in parts two and three of this series.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

The Details:

Body Damaging Surgeries 

As part of its services in the “medical transitioning” participation, Planned Parenthood and many of its affiliates boast of offering referrals for body-damaging surgeries as part of its medicalized GAC interventions.

However, due to Planned Parenthood's vagueness in reporting its transgender 'services,' it is not known how many referrals, or what type of surgeries, affiliates have been involved with. Research on sex-rejecting surgeries is limited, mostly due to the small percentage of the population undergoing these procedures and the lack of studies where participants are re-evaluated over time.

Nevertheless, the few available credible studies identify the negative ramifications upon health and quality of life following ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries. 

Despite the lack of credible beneficial evidence and the readily available studies illustrating the vast negative impacts and potential risks, Planned Parenthood and many of its affiliates boast of providing referrals for body-damaging surgical procedures, including for minors (allegedly only in states where allowed). 

Types of Sex-Rejecting Surgeries 

Content warning: Graphic descriptions

The multiple types of surgeries Planned Parenthood affiliates may refer for include: 

Mastectomy & Breast Implantation (‘chest’ surgeries) - For the purpose of  ‘gender affirming care, ’ these two types of surgeries, double incision mastectomy or breast implants (also lumped in as a ‘chest surgery’ for GAC), are used to either appear more masculine or more feminine. 

• Double incision mastectomy - the removal of healthy breast tissue for the purpose of appearing more masculine; two large incisions are made to remove large amounts of breast tissue and “[t]he nipples and areolas are removed, reshaped, and then replaced (if desired) to achieve a more masculine appearance.”

• Breast Implantations (as applied to GAC) - The medically unnecessary implantation of faux-breasts on a male for the purpose of appearing feminine; pseudo-breasts are created by “inserting a gel or liquid-filled implant into a pocket formed behind the breast tissue or under the pectoral muscle and centering each implant beneath the two nipples.” 

Metoidioplasty - For the purpose of ‘gender affirming care,’ metoidioplasty is the artificial enlargement of a woman’s clitoris, achieved with the use of hormones such as testosterone. If the clitoris reaches roughly four to six centimeters in length, it is then used to craft together a neophallus, or a surgically constructed faux-penis.

Phalloplasty (Colpectomy) - The medically unnecessary (for the purpose of ‘GAC’) surgical attachment of a man-made appendage aiming to appear like a pseudo-penis for the purpose of mimicking male genitalia.

A standard phalloplasty involves the fashioning of “an appendage made out of a woman’s forearms” that is then sewn “into her groin” and can be done with or without the surgically removing of the vagina—often done in conjunction with a colpectomy.  For the purpose of GAC, a colpectomy is a medically unnecessary surgical procedure where surgeons “remove the vaginal wall and sew the woman up” according to senior fellow at MacDonald-Laurier Institute and Director of Genspect Canada, Mia Hughes. Hughes further referred to the colpectomy procedure as a “ghoulish crime,” particularly when done on young girls with virginity intact, which she stated is a growing population among youth suffering from gender distress.  

Done together, phalloplasty and colpectomy procedures are frequently a “multistaged process” that may include:

• Creating a faux-penis

• Lengthening the urethra 

• Creating the tip (glans) of the faux-penis

• Creating the faux-scrotum

• Removing the vagina, uterus and ovaries (sterilization)

• Placing faux erectile and testicular implants

• Skin grafting from the donor tissue site  

Vaginoplasty - for the use of ‘gender affirming care,’ vaginoplasty is a multi-step sex-rejecting surgical procedure that involves removing the male penis, testicles, and scrotum to construct a pseudo-vulva and pseudo-vagina. The process of vaginoplasty involves rearranging existing genital tissue to create a vaginal opening and external female-appearing genitalia, including the labia. According to John Hopkins Medicine, a variation of this procedure, called vulvoplasty, achieves a feminine-appearing outer genital area but with a shallow pseudo-vaginal canal that cannot be used for sexual intercourse.

Risks Associated with Sex-Rejecting Surgeries 

Males who undergo medically unnecessary surgeries attempting to mimic the female anatomy through vaginoplasty or similar procedures frequently experience significant complications, primarily because the constructed pseudo-vagina creates a surgically induced wound that the body naturally attempts to heal. Some studies and reviews report adverse outcomes, including:

• Neovaginal stricture (the body's attempt to close the wound).

• Infections, hemorrhaging, and neovaginal prolapse (where the faux vagina falls out of place).

• Pervasive urogenital malfunctions (complications that may impact the urinary tract and associated reproductive organs), including incontinence, urinary obstruction and sexual dysfunction.

• Other severe issues can include: tissue death, and fistulas (where two body parts abnormally connect), which can require additional correcting and risky operations.

Females undergoing medically unnecessary surgeries of phalloplasty and colpectomy and metoidioplasty procedures — for the purpose of attempting to mimic the male body — also reportedly face extraordinary risks and complications. Procedures such as phalloplasty and metoidioplasty present a high risk of adverse outcomes, particularly involving the artificial construction of a man-made urethra, and include similar complications or damage to urinary tract and associated organs with some reports citing a complication rate exceeding 75% in some patient populations.

Some studies report the common necessity for multiple follow-up surgeries to address surgical failures or complications. Both male and female sex-rejecting procedures are commonly associated with permanent sterilization. 

Some research suggests that undergoing sex-rejecting procedures does not alleviate the primary psychological distress. In fact, some studies and follow-up analyses report mental health struggles that endure or worsen, as surgical alterations to the body cannot resolve deep-seated psychological trauma and distress.

It is important to note that much of the credible research and analysis conducted on this issue tends to focus on adults rather than children. It is logical to wonder how much more severe the long-term impacts may be on minors and youth, whose minds and bodies are still developing. 

A recent Finnish register study published by Acta Paediatrica aimed to “examine the prevalence of severe psychiatric morbidity among gender-referred adolescents.” It provides grim insight of what the long-term consequences for youth undergoing medicalized GAC might look like. The study reported to examine the Finnish nationwide cohort, whose participants were all under 23 years of age while receiving medicalized interventions between 1996-2019. The results were “sobering,” according to Mia Hughes. 

“For more than a decade, supporters of these interventions have argued that they reliably improve mental health and can even be “life-saving” for trans-identified youth. Yet this Finnish study – one of the largest and most robust to date – found no such benefit. Instead, it linked the treatments to a marked worsening of mental health,” stated Hughes.  

In her National Post op-ed, Hughes went on to explain (emphasis added): 

The study found that those referred after 2010 showed significantly higher psychiatric needs overall, leading the authors to conclude that for some young people, ‘mental health challenges may manifest as concerns related to gender identity.’...The researchers also compared those who received medical interventions (38.2 per cent) with those who did not. The non-medicalized group had high psychiatric needs at referral — unsurprising, given Finland’s strict criteria that reserved treatment for the most stable adolescents — and showed little change in mental health status at the follow-up point two or more years later.

Yet in the medicalized group — those selected precisely because they initially presented with relatively stable mental health — specialist psychiatric care use rose sharply after commencing medical treatment: from roughly 10 per cent to 61 per cent among males receiving “feminizing” treatment, and from 22 per cent to 55 per cent among females receiving “masculinizing” treatment.

Human Body Count

As Live Action News has pointed out, due to the vagueness in reporting by Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, it is unknown how many minors Planned Parenthood and its affiliates have referred for body-damaging surgeries. However, there is some information available on the number of minors who have undergone the knife. 

The Stop the Harm database identified and analyzed insurance claim filings between 2019-2023, and reported the following unique individual minor patients who underwentgender-affirming” surgery procedures across the U.S.:

Reality Check:

Each number in the chart is far more than a number on a page. Each represents a human being, a minor still developing, who underwent medically unnecessary surgical procedures based on a lie that goes against the biological reality of who he/she is and who he/she was meant to be, while never addressing the core issue of gender distress.  

How many of these people, if any, received GAC from Planned Parenthood at any point in the ‘pathway’ to ‘transition’? Was any of it done utilizing fungible taxpayer funds? American taxpayers deserve answers. The victims of these predatory procedures deserve justice.  

One thing is clear: neither Planned Parenthood's life-ending abortions nor its ‘gender-affirming care’ is healthcare. And Americans shouldn’t be forced to pay for any of it.