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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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There's a lot of birthmark removals done for teenagers, often early teenagers. I think the current standard of care is 'anything larger than a quarter', and middle school ages are pretty typical. There's a lot of overlap between the technologies behind laser hair removal and birthmark pulsed laser dye procedures, and those usually target six months to one year. Some of this is about cancer risk, but then a lot of the trans emphasis is about health risks (eg, hysterectomy is strongly recommended for trans men due to elevated ovarian cancer risk from hormone therapy and probably from puberty blockers). And most of the limits on traditional cosmetic surgery for teenagers are focused on parental consent.

I think there's something of a parallel from social conservative perspectives, but I think they're more separating things not on the basis of surgery or cosmetic surgery as a class, but more because of the invasiveness of the procedure, the higher (although still low in absolute numbers) chances of complications, and lower opinions about the efficacy or even relevance of the procedures (and lack of trust in publicly-presented numbers for the efficacy).