Does transgender surgery really improve lives?

The other day I learned a stunning fact: 97% of Americans who have had sex-change surgery "report an increase in life satisfaction." Ninety-seven percent!

And here I'd thought carving up perfectly healthy sex organs in the name of gender ideology was a bad idea.

At best, these interventions offer a cosmetic approximation of the opposite gender. But the deeper issues — the feelings of inadequacy, the desire to escape the body’s imperfections — remain unresolved.

But just as I was about to send a hefty reparations check to Dylan Mulvaney's mangina fund, I had a strange urge to do something you're never supposed to do — especially since COVID.

I decided to do my own research. You'll never guess what I found!

Peer-reviewed superstition

Sometimes the truth is elusive, hiding behind layers of complexity, fatigue, and our own impatience. So in the absence of certainty, we improvise. We adopt superstitions.

It’s human nature to crave certainty, even if it’s only through rituals as bizarre as relying on a groundhog in Punxsutawney to predict the weather. But these rituals, in all their absurdity, offer a glimpse into a deeper yearning: our desperation to make sense of an unpredictable world.

In a society increasingly dominated by subjective narratives, we’ve reached a point where “my truth” is wielded as both shield and sword. "My truth" often serves as an escape route for the intellectually lazy — a neat deflection from critical scrutiny. But it’s a slippery slope. Once we accept subjective truth as reality, we risk eroding the very foundations of rational inquiry.

Which brings us to the tension between superstition and academia. While superstition is openly irrational, academic research, for all its claims to rigor, is not always as pristine as we’d like to believe. After all, what distinguishes peer-reviewed nonsense from folklore when it carries an agenda?

The 97%

But let's go back to that miraculous figure for a moment. There it was in Harper's magazine, right near the bottom of its beloved Harper’s Index: “The percentage of Americans who have had gender-affirming surgery who report an increase in life satisfaction: 97%.”

The data, it turns out, comes from the National Center for Transgender Equality, a highly partisan organization whose primary aim is to advance transgender rights.

In the most generous interpretation, the organization's findings here are more of a glossy advertisement than a meaningful contribution to science. Ninety-seven percent? That’s near perfection. It’s a number designed to elicit unquestioning acceptance. Yet it’s also wildly suspicious.

Can 97% of people be satisfied with anything in life, let alone something as complex and life-altering as "gender reassignment" surgery? The answer, of course, is no. The truth, as is often the case, is far messier.

Selling trans

For one thing, that 97% figure seems to suggest that "gender-affirming" surgery is the silver bullet for everything from body dysphoria to depression. Yet it overlooks the many other factors that play a role in these issues — factors like underlying mental health conditions, social support, or the broader cultural climate. It’s not the surgery itself that guarantees happiness; it’s the narrative surrounding it that’s being sold here.

It’s a tactic we’ve seen before, in various political movements. Statistics get massaged, manipulated, or cherry-picked to support a particular agenda. In this case, the survey that produced this miraculous number wasn’t conducted by an independent body, but by activists deeply invested in the outcome. It’s hardly the kind of rigorous, objective research that we should be relying on to make public policy decisions.

The survey itself was distributed online, targeting self-identified transgender individuals, including those as young as 16. The participants were asked a range of questions, but the focus was clearly on affirming the benefits of gender transition. This is not scholarly analysis; it’s activism masquerading as research.

Assigned at birth?

One of the key tenets of transgender ideology and, by extension, this survey is the notion that gender is “assigned at birth.” This phrasing has become ubiquitous, but it’s also deeply misleading. Biological sex isn’t assigned at birth — it’s observed. The idea that a doctor arbitrarily decides a baby’s gender based on genitalia is an absurd distortion of basic biology.

The ideological notion of gender has enough wiggle room for interpretation, partly because activists are shifty with definitions, but the “assigned at birth” notion is patently false. It’s a conspiracy that claims, as Planned Parenthood puts it, “Sex is a label — male or female — that you're assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you're born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate.”

To claim that sex is “assigned” is to deny an objective reality that has existed for millennia. This notion, as argued by figures like Richard Dawkins, turns science into a tool of ideology, distorting facts to fit a social narrative. And while we might tolerate such intellectual contortions in everyday conversation, they become far more dangerous when they underpin public health policies or educational curriculums.

Drowning in data

The survey behind the 97% figure boasts an impressive sample size — over 90,000 respondents. But size alone doesn’t guarantee accuracy. In fact, the larger the sample, the easier it becomes to manipulate the data to fit a predetermined narrative.

For instance, the survey’s demographic breakdown shows a disproportionate number of respondents who are young, white, and nonbinary — a group that is hardly representative of the broader transgender population. Moreover, many of these respondents are still grappling with the initial stages of transition. Their short-term experiences cannot be extrapolated to the entire transgender community, let alone used to justify sweeping claims about life satisfaction post-surgery.

And let’s not overlook the fact that most respondents didn’t claim to have experienced any significant harassment or violence due to their gender identity. Yet this survey is being used to support the narrative that transgender individuals face widespread persecution, fueling the push for ever more extreme measures to "protect" them.

Social contagion

There’s another factor at play here that no one seems willing to talk about: social contagion. The sudden spike in the number of young people identifying as transgender isn’t just a reflection of newfound acceptance. It’s also a product of peer influence, media saturation, and the ever-expanding reach of activist groups.

A few years ago, Psychology Today ran a listicle titled “10 Things Parents of Trans Kids Want to Know.”

The author, Devon Frye, is not a medical expert of any kind, as is often the standard for Psychology Today. Instead, she’s a journalist, an editor.

“But the idea 'that social influence can make a child start a journey that was never going to be theirs — and stay on it — is a myth.' Wald notes: 'The social contagion theory is not supported by scientific evidence.'”

How else to explain the massive increase in minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria — 42,000 last year, up from just 15,000 five years ago? When children are encouraged to question their gender before they even understand what it means, we risk turning a genuine struggle for identity into a passing fad.

The truth, as uncomfortable as it may be to some, is that no surgery or hormone treatment can change a person’s sex. At best, these interventions offer a cosmetic approximation of the opposite gender. But the deeper issues — the feelings of inadequacy, the desire to escape the body’s imperfections — remain unresolved.

In the end, perhaps we all struggle with some form of discontent about our bodies or identities. Maybe that’s what drives the human condition: the search for peace in a world that never quite fits. But the answer to that struggle isn’t to sever ourselves from reality. It’s to face it head-on, to accept that imperfection is part of what makes us human.

And no statistic, no matter how inflated, can change that truth.