CV NEWS FEED // An excerpt video of an Oregon-based “queer” surgeon bragging about subjecting children to “gender-affirming” procedures was played during a recent House subcommittee hearing.
The approximately one-year-old video was played during the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government’s July 27 “Hearing on Gender-Affirming Care for Minors.”
The surgeon in question is Dr. Blair Peters of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, whom critics have dubbed “Dr. Frankenstein.” According to Varnika Srivastava of Media, Entertainment, Arts, WorldWide, Peters “was one of the first two fellows in gender-affirming surgery” at OHSU.
“The way Dr. Peters, who works at one of America’s most cutting-edge institutions, describes his procedures—some of which include robotics—as experimental may be more worrisome,” wrote Srivastava. “According to him, he is ‘figuring out what works’ and his team will have more information in the upcoming ‘five to 10 years.’”
According to the OHSU website, Peters says
their [sic] love of plastic surgery helped to steer them [sic] towards plastic and reconstructive surgery as a discipline. As Peters progressed through medical school, they [sic] also explored and openly embraced their queerness, citing this as a catalyst for pursuing a career in gender-affirming medical practice.
In the 37-minute video, of which a part was shown to Congress, a woman interviewed Peters from a room with a visible “Progress Pride” flag. “Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me,” she said. “I really, really appreciate it.”
Peters introduced himself as a “gender-affirming surgeon” who “use[s] he and they pronouns.”
The interviewer then asked him if he had a “subspecialty” or “examples of the most common procedures” he performs.
Peters said the majority of his practice, and where his “passion lies, is genital surgery cases.”
“I do a lot of vaginoplasty and a lot of phalloplasty,” he boasted, nodding and grinning.
“That is amazing,” the interviewer replied.
Peters continued by explaining what the woman interviewing him referred to as “nonbinary procedures.”
“I hope the field is changing,” he said, claiming that medical training enforces a so-called “binary bias.”
On one end, you have a vaginoplasty, and on the other end, you have a phalloplasty. And every surgery has an inherent level of risk to it. And everyone’s dysphoria comes from completely different places, especially with regards to their anatomy.
So, my whole approach to gender-affirming [sic] surgery is not putting my own bias of what a binary genitalia should be onto someone. It’s listening to them and figuring out where is their dysphoria coming from, what can we fix with surgery and what is the appropriate level of risk for you.
He said that some of his patients request a “nonbinary type of appearance” to their genitalia. “There’s a lot more of like a spectrum of procedures now that are available, and a lot of them kind of falling [sic] maybe between the two, or outside of the two.”
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-LA, who chairs the subcommittee, played a couple of minutes of the video where Peters discussed the types of surgeries he performed in depth.
“I’m going to speak the truth here plainly,” Johnson stated after airing the clip:
And, I think the vast majority of the American people understand and agree with what I’m going to say.
What you’ve just heard is a little sample of barbarism. This is the mutilation of children, and it should be prohibited by our law. The so-called “gender-affirming care” is anything but affirming and caring, and the language matters.
This is adults deciding to permanently alter [the lives] of children who do not have the capacity to make life-altering decisions on their own.
And here’s some more plain truth that everybody acknowledged until about 15 minutes ago. It’s been plainly observed and fully respected by every culture for all of recorded history. Sex is not something that you are assigned at birth. It is a natural prenatal development that occurs when every unborn child is in the mother’s womb.
This, Johnson explained, is an “obvious fact of life” that no one can “surgically free themselves from… or free anyone else from it.”
Writing for The Daily Signal, Sarah Parshall Parry and Edith Harold argued that Johnson showing the video in the halls of Congress is a sign that “light may be breaking through the darkness of gender ideology.”
The same Congressional hearing also included testimony from Chloe Cole, a now-19-year-old woman who received “gender-affirming care” starting at the age of 12, including both puberty blockers and surgery. She made the decision to de-transition at the age of 17.
