Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and this is your weekly rundown. Well, today's

headline, it's one I'm going to call important, but painfully overdue. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons,

the largest U.S. professional group for Plastic Surgeons, has now recommended delaying gender-related surgeries until at least 19.

My first reaction is simple.

Where have you been?

And finally, welcome to reality.

The ASPS position statement, it's pretty direct and to the point.

They cite the low certainty of evidence for not just surgical interventions, but pediatric endocrine

interventions, you know, the medications that they're starting to give kids to stop puberty

altogether and try and give them characteristics of the opposite sex. And the overall just

growing uncertainty really about the benefits and the concerns about the irreversibility

and potential long-term harms. Imagine that. You're going to do a surgical or endocrine

intervention that's completely irreversible. And at the time they were doing it and they were like,

well, let's just do it all in the name of ideology. Of course there's

going to be damage. So the ASPS has now concluded there's insufficient evidence of a favorable

risk-benefit ratio for kids and adolescents, therefore recommending surgeons delay chest,

genital, and facial procedures until the age of 19.

Now let's let's break down the way they worded it.

Insufficient evidence of a favorable risk benefit ratio.

That is the most wordy garbage way of saying, we've been doing something and there's no evidence that this is actually for the good.

And by the way, we're actually causing a lot of harm.

There you go.

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