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Why is breast surgery available at 15 when bottom surgery is only available at 18? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was watching this video by second thought and when he talked about the bomb threat towards the children's hospital, he mentioned that breast surgery is available for 15 and older while genital surgery is available for 18 and older. My question is, why? Is breast surgery less risky/more reversible/something else than bottom surgery? Please, I really am not writing this with transphobic intentions, I'm just tryinf to understand. Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is purely my own speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is partly to do with the reasons that cis people get the same operations. If a cis teen gets breast cancer (which is rare but does happen), there needs to be a legal and medical process to authorize a mastectomy as soon as possible, since waiting will allow the cancer to spread. A cis teen with a genital injury won't be physically harmed by waiting until adulthood to get reconstructive cosmetic surgery. Whatever authorization process that exists for these purposes is probably the baseline that processes for transition surgeries are built on.

Edit: typos

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

This why my immediate thought but for what purposes are breast/genital surgeries allowed?

I was circumcised long before 15 years old.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's worth noting that the surgeons who do top surgery and the surgeons who do mastectomies or reconstruction for breast cancer often aren't the same people (on top of that, I believe it's common for the person doing the actual "cutting out cancer" part and the person doing the reconstruction to be separate people)--they're fairly distinct medical communities. This may be changing a bit in the US now that there's insurance coverage for top surgery, but they're still pretty different worlds, afaik. (I actually knew someone who had discovered he had breast cancer as he was preparing for top surgery. It did upend the plan somewhat, but he happened to be seeing a surgeon who actually saw cancer patients, so it was less disruptive than it could have been. I suspect the surgeon I saw would have said "yeah, sorry, can't help you".)