Health care professionals appear to be securing uninformed or ill-informed consent to damage the bodies of vulnerable Americans.

Informed consent is both an ethical and a legal requirement for medical treatment. It can largely be traced back to the Nuremberg Code — a set of post-World War II principles concerning human experimentation that appear to be lost on a growing class of American health care professionals.

While the legal particulars vary from state to state, informed consent universally requires that health care providers educate their patients with relevant and accurate information about all risks, burdens, expected benefits, and alternatives pertaining to a given procedure or intervention.

This ethical guideline is especially true of elective medical interventions that pose significant risks, have life-changing impacts, and are irreversible, such as those that fall under the umbrella of so-called "gender-affirming care."