More evidence reveals Boston Children’s Hospital performed gender surgeries on minors, despite hospital’s denial

When Boston Children’s Hospital was accused last year of performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on minors, the hospital denied the claims and scrubbed its website.

Now, the hospital’s own literature and its co-founder’s statements, reported by Fox News, confirms the hospital’s previous and current practices of offering gender-altering treatments to minors.

The hospital called the initial reporting “misinformation,” claimed it never performed “genital surgeries” on minors, and alleged the report prompted threats that put its staff and patients in danger – claims that mainstream media largely failed to question.

However, as reported last year by The Lion, the hospital’s Center for Gender Surgery homepage, which has since been scrubbed, proudly promoted its status as the first of its kind at a major pediatric hospital.

The website also clearly stated the center’s willingness to perform gender surgeries on children as young as 15. 

In some cases, the procedures didn’t even require parental consent, instead merely requiring the following: 

• A letter from a medical doctor or nurse practitioner stating that you have “persistent, well documented, gender dysphoria” and specifying either the length of hormone therapy or reasons for not taking hormone therapy.   

• A letter from a mental health provider stating the patient has the capacity to consent and that any significant mental health issues are being addressed. 

And despite the hospital’s denial of providing operations on minors, new documents confirm The Lion’s original reporting. 

In one digital document, for example, the hospital states it “was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age.” 

It also said the center had already performed “over 300 gender-affirming surgeries” and had a policy allowing vaginoplasties to be performed on teenage boys.  

A vaginoplasty is a gruesome procedure in which male genitalia is refashioned into a “neovagina,” which Boston Children’s even admits “requires a lifetime commitment to aftercare, because women who have a vaginoplasty will have to dilate their vagina regularly to keep it open.” 

Additionally, local media has unearthed an email from Dr. Oren Ganor, the center’s co-founder, in which he said the hospital’s policy was “flexible” regarding the age of biological males seeking a vaginoplasty, citing “the difficulty young women can experience accessing gendered spaces—like dorms and bathrooms—if they still have male genitalia.” 

Ganor also once told Harvard Medical School that Massachusetts law was “unclear on whether parents can consent to procedures that result in sterilization.” 

It was perhaps the lack of legal clarity that prompted the center to create a workaround, offering a “court order” option for families with minors seeking the procedure, just in case parental consent wasn’t actually legal. 

The court order was used by at least one family seeking genital surgery for a child, Ganor confirmed in a 2019 article he co-authored in the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

“The center staff eventually came to the conclusion that it is appropriate to offer vaginoplasties to certain individuals before the age of majority [defined in the article as ‘18 in the United States’] so that they can safely embark on their adult lives,” said the article.  

Finally, Boston Children’s own documents revealed 65 underage girls had their breasts removed by the center between 2017 and 2020. 

Boston Children’s continues to deny any wrongdoing, seeming to claim its genital surgeries, if performed, are not “gender-affirming.” 

“[Boston Children’s] follows all laws and regulations,” the hospital told Fox News in a statement. “We do not, and have not provided genital surgeries on patients under 18-years-old in connection with Gender-Affirming Care.” 

The hospital declined to answer specific questions from Fox about its own clinician’s statements to the contrary.