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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28120 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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a lot of trans-skeptical people have been pointed to this lawsuit as the first pebble in an avalanche.

To my eyes, far bigger than this case itself was the announcement that came a few days later, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended against carrying out gender-affirming procedures on people under the age of 19.

With the exception of hormone therapy which falls under the domain of endocrinology, almost everything we call "gender-affirming care" falls under plastic surgery. When the body in charge of that discipline is recommending against gender-affirming care for minors, that does indeed suggest we've hit an inflection point. And it's not just the US, with the UK and several Scandinavian countries also hitting pause on this prolonged experiment.

I'll caveat that the Position Statement specifically constrained to:

ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.

This would still leave some 'surgeries' (like laser hair removal) or surgeries on the table, and the median 16-18-year-old trans person is afaict going to be focused more on them. And there's definitely a lot of the endocrinology stuff that's Controversial. But it might not stop there, and yes, that's likely to have a larger impact in the short term.

I mean, I don't think even the TERFiest TERFs really have any objection to 16-year-olds undergoing laser hair removal, even if it's nominally under the auspices of "gender-affirming care".

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