This story never seems to end. There are, apparently, doctors accepting cases of underage female children who “identify” as males and performing double mastectomies on them to avoid the trauma of developing breasts. The Federalist has the details.

Some physicians in the United States are performing double mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls. The justification is gender dysphoria (“transgenderism”)—the girls now identify as boys and therefore want to look like boys.

Sometimes this dysphoria doesn’t appear until adolescence, and often little or no psychological evaluation is done to determine the underlying cause of the teenager’s desire to mutilate her body. But these doctors are willing to give her what she thinks she wants. And your federal tax money is paying for research to validate this gruesome treatment (see here and here).

Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.

It’s hard to even wrap your mind around this and consider how far our society has fallen. As I’ve stated here repeatedly, what adults do with their own bodies is up to them. If you want to have experimental surgery or modify yourself in some fashion that’s up to you. You can change your name through the normal channels and I’ll be fine with calling you by that name. (See: Chelsea Manning.) You can dress how you like and refer to yourself by whatever pronoun you wish as part of your right to free speech. (Provided you are polite enough to recognize my right to free speech and not agree with the description.) It’s still a relatively free country.

But we’re talking about children here. We’ve seen this trend growing over the past few years. There are doctors administering foreign hormones and chemicals to stave off the arrival of puberty in children who have been convinced they were born with “the wrong gender.” In states such as Oregon, children as young as 15 were offered the chance to have sex “transition” surgery without the informed consent of their parents.

Now we’re going to allow young girls to have their nascent breasts lopped off because they’ve become convinced that they were actually supposed to be boys?

A recent university study showied that social media and peer pressure increased the number of incidents where teens claimed to be transgender in social groups, but it was suppressed. One university in England canceled a study on transgender individuals who “detransition” because they specifically said it would be politically divisive to publish it.

This is insanity. We’re talking about children. If adults wish to pay to have their bodies altered to fit whatever social justice profile they identify with, that’s up to them and I wish you the best. But these are children. If their parents have failed them, the government and the medical community should not. What happens to young Sally when she “transitions” and has her breasts removed, only to realize in a year or so that she’d actually like to kiss a boy?

The doctors performing these procedures shouldn’t just have their licences questioned. They should be in jail. And our legal system is failing them.