In yet another alarming trend demonstrating how social justice movements are trumping science, a new study out from John Hopkins indicates that the number of gender reassignment surgeries is steadily climbing in the United States. Once both rare and controversial (for good reason), the number of such surgeries performed over a fourteen year period climbed into the tens of thousands. (The Independent)

Gender reassignment surgeries are reportedly on the rise in the United States, according to a major study conducted by The John Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The researchers analysed data compiled by the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) from 2000 to 2014, which gave them an indication of the number of patients seeking gender reassignment surgery across the country.

The NIS gathers data from approximately 1,000 hospitals around the US every year, which represents around 95 percent of the nation’s population.

Using the data accumulated by the NIS, the team assessed a total of 37,827 hospital appointments for gender reassignment surgery.

As Bradford Richardson at the Washington Times reports, there are still those who are pushing back against this trend. One study after another has found that such gender-masking surgery (which is a more appropriate name since you can’t actually change your gender) generally doesn’t do anything to alleviate the underlying problem. Rates of depression and even suicide among these patients remain far, far above normal levels for the rest of the general population. And recent studies done by competent medical centers can’t even show that there’s any benefit from the surgery.

In June 2016, the Obama administration’s own Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found there is “not enough evidence to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.”

“There were conflicting (inconsistent) study results — of the best designed studies, some reported benefits while others reported harms,” the agency said in a proposed decision memo.

And in 2004, Birmingham University’s Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility reviewed more than 100 medical studies of post-operative transgender patients and “found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective,” the Guardian reported.

Here’s another factor worth considering. There are increasing numbers of those undergoing such surgery who later express regrets and ask their doctors if it’s possible to change back. Newsweek reports that Urologist Miroslav Djordjevic is just one of the doctors dealing with such patients who are noting an increase in these cases of regret, with the male-to-female surgical patients being the most common in desiring a reversal. And particularly in the cases of men who have their sexual organs removed, there is no way to restore them to complete functionality. In other words, you simply can’t go back after making that sort of radical decision.

As long as we’re talking about adults, this is a complicated subject which blurs the line between professional responsibility in the medical field and personal responsibility on the part of the patient. (I still maintain that any doctor performing any sort of “transgender” procedures on children should be in jail along with the kid’s parents.) Since we’re all responsible for our own decisions, a part of me still insists that any adult who wants to have portions of their body surgically mutilated should probably be able to do it, much the same as if they decide to get a tattoo or a body piercing. But given the dire consequences in some of these cases, I have to wonder if the doctors performing the operations aren’t violating some sort of professional code of conduct dictating that they first do no harm.

As I said, this is one area were social trends have created a demand which the medical profession seems to be willing to supply. This is happening despite the fact that there is still not a single test where a doctor can examine an unconscious patient and determine if they are “transgender” without waking them up and asking them. That’s not science. And it doesn’t seem like medicine, at least outside of the need for psychiatric help.