Boston Children's "Gender-Affirming Chest Surgeries"

The unmooring of the medical mind at Boston Children's Hospital

When I went to college in Boston back in 1989-1993, I was fascinated by what I thought of as the Yankee Enlightenment — that is, the 19th century advancement of medicine in Boston by guys such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and William T.G. Morton.

In 1843, Holmes published his essay “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” Like Professor Ignaz Semmelweis in Vienna—who made the same observation around the same time (I am not sure if he read Holmes’s paper)—Dr. Holmes was initially ridiculed, but later vindicated, for his findings.

William T.G. Morton made history on October 16, 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital when he successfully anesthetized a patient to undergo a surgery without feeling any pain.

I used to stop before the Ether Monument, erected in the Boston Public Garden in 1868, and marvel at how much pain and suffering had been spared by the development of anesthesiology.

I imagined that T. S. Eliot—as an undergraduate at Harvard in the years 1906-1914—had also visited the Ether Monument, which he might have been thinking about when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911, with its vivid opening lines:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

I thought of this strange and somewhat disturbing image this morning when I read a paper titled A Single Center Case Series of Gender-Affirming Surgeries and the Evolution of a Specialty Anesthesia Team. The authors are all apparently true believers that it’s a good thing to treat so-called “gender dysphoria” in minors by surgically removing their healthy body parts.

Their paper boasts the following:

The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.

I found the paper’s second author—Elizabeth R. Boskey—to have an especially conspicuous profile.

Short Biography

Elizabeth Boskey (she/her). PhD, MPH, MSSW is currently the research lead for the Center for Gender Surgery. She received her PhD in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and her MPH from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2001. Dr. Boskey also holds a Masters of Science in Social Work from the University of Louisville (2015). Dr. Boskey is a licensed independent clinical social worker, an AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator, a Certified Health Education Specialist, and is WPATH GEI SOC 7 Certified. Her research interests are focused on ethical and access issues in transgender care as well as more general sexual and reproductive health issues for sexual and gender minority populations. She is currently a member of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health; American Public Health Association; and the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.

How does one get to be “the research lead for the Center for Gender Surgery” at one of the most prestigious Children’s Hospitals in the world? Given Dr. Boskey’s strong interest in sexuality—and given the strong role that physical appearance plays in sexuality—I wondered what she looks like.

I hasten to add that my curiosity was NOT about whether she possesses what we might loosely call conventional good looks, but whether her appearance might raise concerns about her mental health. The following image from her LinkedIn profile suggests that she herself probably went through a period of confusion about her sexuality during her adolescent years and may still be a bit puzzled.

Here I would like to INSIST that my readers refrain from making disparaging comments about Dr. Boskey’s appearance. DON’T do it. To repeat: my point is not to pick on her appearance, but strictly to point out that her appearance is incongruous with her profile as an expert “sexuality educator.”

I expressed a similar opinion about the American novelist Tom Wolfe when he published his book I am Charlotte Simmons about sexuality on America’s college campuses in the earlier 2000s. Given that Wolfe was 72 when he began researching the book, I wondered about his suitability for writing about the sexual experiences and feelings of an 18-year-old college girl in 2002.

On the subject of female sexuality, I often think of Freud’s famous confession in a letter to a colleague:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?’

Freud—who was not noted for his humility—nevertheless had the humility to admit that he didn’t really understand what women long for.

As in all matters pertaining to the education and counseling of children and adolescents, it’s important to understand the character, mental health, and motives of educators. This is especially important when one is contemplating making irreversible changes such as “gender-affirming chest surgeries”—i.e., double mastectomies—”for individuals over 15 years old.”

Why should anyone believe that Dr. Elizabeth Boskey is qualified in the matter of counseling young girls that their “gender dysphoria” will be resolved if they get a double mastectomy?