Alexander Bezdek

Cosmetic surgeries aimed at alleviating the pain of those suffering from gender dysphoria are predicated on the notion that this dysphoria is a medical condition, one that is not measurable in a physical manner and is thus solely dependent on the stated convictions of the patient. Setting aside any concerns that this premise is definitionally spiritual in nature and unfalsifiable, any surgeries that have been performed to scope should be met with no regret on any timeframe, because these spiritual, unfalsifiable, unmeasurable convictions transcend the need for physical evidence or any duty to consider that the dysphoria’s premise is itself impossible (i.e. humans cannot change biological sex through any amount of surgical or medicinal intervention). Diagnosing physicians must have an ability to discern which patients really have been born in the wrong body and which patients are insincere. This is exactly equivalent to an orthopedic surgeon accurately demonstrating that a ligament in a patient’s knee was torn and thus providing adequate grounds for surgery. Just as someone whose knee turned out not to have a torn ligament must have standing to hold their erring physician accountable, those suffering from gender dysphoria should have the opportunity to express regret and seek damages. Given that this is treated as a medical condition, being diagnosed as born in the wrong body should not be something limited to two years. A ten year horizon or even a lifetime is an entirely reasonable timeframe. It is imperative to remain focused on the fact that the guiding logic underpinning these procedures is that they are in service of a medical condition (rather than an elective cosmetic surgery). If the operating surgeon performs their work to scope, the regret of a patient must be an indication that the diagnosing physician had erred in assessing that the child had been born in the wrong body. If the procedure were strictly cosmetic, then there would be no basis for a regret window, since the patient is a willing participant in an elective surgery. In sum, given that these surgeries are administered in service of a medical treatment, it is vital that patients have an extended window in which to express their regret, particularly if it indicates that the diagnosing physician had misinterpreted the will of a child, a class of humans we protect otherwise based on the assumption that they lack the agency of adults. [It is worth noting as an aside that this is itself a novel approach to dysphoria; other examples like anorexia offer the opposite prescription, working to convince the patient to reject their spiritual sense of reality (i.e. that they are obese, when they are demonstrably underweight) and to embrace physical reality for their own health benefit.]