It's never circumcision or intersex surgery on infants
I'm going to add to this.
Surgery on intersexed children still happens in the United States. It is less common than it used to be, but is still very common for doctors to refer the parents of intersexed children to a surgeon, who will naturally "recommended" that they pay large sums of money for unnecessary and highly risky surgical procedures in order to avoid social and psychological problems later. These can include procedures like clitoral reduction, in which part of the clitoris is surgically removed and which can potentially lead to chronic pain, nerve damage or visible scars. In extreme cases it can mean things like gonadectomies, in which the gonads are removed
requiring a child to have lifelong hormone replacement therapy to avoid the serious medical complications associated with hypogonadism (bolding that one for emphasis)
. There's also hypospadias surgery, where the surgeon closes up a child's original urethra and creates a new one using skin grafts. This is very important because it allows a child assigned as male to pee while standing up, and thus avoid the psychological devastation of not being able to use a urinal.
There are adults living in the US right now who are intersexed, and who have had genital altering surgery performed on them as infants without their consent, and who do not know about it. Sometimes their doctors are deliberately concealing their medical records, either to avoid responsibility or out of a mistaken belief that this represents best practice. Some of them are taking HRT and have never been given an honest answer as to why.
Children born with atypical sex characteristics are more common than children showing clear signs of gender dysphoria before or during early puberty, and yet there has barely been any political will to clarify their rights in regard to medical treatment. Lawmakers have been content to leave the decision to the medical profession, leading to an inconsistent and piecemeal standard of care which is often completely out of line with the actual evidence - that outcomes for intersexed children who have surgery are not demonstrably better, and that many adults experience psychological harm upon finding out that these surgeries were performed on them without their consent.
When conservatives are trying to argue against the existence of gender identity, it's pretty likely that someone will bring up David Raimer. David Raimer was not technically born intersexed, but he wasn't part of some experiment to try and force a kid to transition, he was part of a program aimed at treating intersexed children, and which went on to set the standard for the treatment of intersexed children. What happened to him happened to thousands and thousands of other children, and to some extent continues to happen to this day (up to and including many of the more disturbing aspects of that case, such as children having their genitals regularly photographed or examined and facing obvious stigmatization from medical professionals), while conservatives politely ignore it and wring their hands about the fear that some extremely rare child who experiences painful gender dysphoria might not go through puberty in the right way.
But I'm being disingenuous here because there isn't really a contradiction. Conservatives care about trans children because trans children express a will or preference to live in a way that conservatives consider abnormal, and thus need to be punished or denied. Intersexed children are being forced to conform to what conservatives consider normal without their consent and often retrospectively against their own will. What's really important here is the principle that a child should have no rights or control over the functioning of their own body, and should be forced to live in the way conservatives want regardless of the cost to their own happiness.
segm.org
