Ripping Out the Rib: Medicine's Moral Collapse

Imagine for a second: You are a surgeon, and your patient is a young man with long flowing hair, painted with the aggressive use of makeup, balancing poorly on high heels, and dressed in the most suggestive clothes he can muster. He wants surgery because he claims that he is, in fact, a woman. You have two choices:

1. Refuse. This is bad medicine, and it’s lousy for the patient’s long-term outcome. You made an oath to do no harm, and you intend to keep it. You know that your wife and children at home depend on your income, and that you could lose your job and face career reprisals for your refusal, but you stand on principle.

2. You do the surgery. You know it’s bad for him, but you look at the person in front of you and you know that he and plenty of others will attempt to destroy your life if you provide any pushback. It’s easier for you and better for your family to just play along. You’ll even be commended for your bravery and pioneering spirit. So you ask a follow-up question to ease your own conscience, “Are you really sure?” Then you proceed.

A year after choosing the second option, the same man, now emboldened with a new name, balancing a little easier on his heels, and bearing the battle scars from your previous surgery, walks into the room. He wants you to remove six of his ribs. He thinks it will make him look more feminine. Moreover, he wants to keep the ribs that you remove, so he can make them into a crown. What now? This isn’t the “gender-affirming surgery” that doctors get awards for, but what moral argument can one make, that would not also have applied to the first surgery?

And so, this story, not really hypothetical, bore its result:

A young man who calls himself Emily James and who is attempting to be a woman requested that a surgical team remove six of his ribs—and they did. To be clear, there was nothing wrong with those ribs, but he thought he would have a slimmer, more feminine waist if he had them removed. The ribs perform important functions. They protect vulnerable organs, and enable the expansion of the lungs. But if the price is right ($17,000), doctors will remove them, and pretend that they are practicing medicine. They will respond to their oath with a shrug.

The acceptance of gender mutilation surgeries as morally acceptable among medical professionals has led to a widespread normalization of all kinds of ethics breaches. One cannot go through the mental hoops to decide that it’s acceptable to invert a man’s penis without deciding that there are no limits at all. Thus, when we once speculated about why it is permissible to engage in the removal of healthy genitals at a patient’s request, but not also his arm or his leg, the industry responded by agreeing to remove those too.

One can imagine the mental gymnastics that a physician would have to engage in, at the moment a patient asked for such a surgery, if the doctor had previously performed so-called “gender care”. How does one say yes to the former but not the latter? Such is the incrementalism of not just ideology, but of sin more broadly—of evil. Each “yes” makes it harder to say no to the next item, lest we admit that we were wrong last time. Our egos stand in a showdown against our consciences. Now our medical community is on such a descent—a slope wherein they will willingly cut out a man’s ribs so he can make a crown with them.

A reform of medicine will require so many to surrender their personal pride, in an industry that inflates egos. There’s an old joke that asks what the difference is between God and a cardiologist, to which the answer is, “God doesn’t walk around thinking he’s a cardiologist.” Since medical personnel are heralded as the high priests of our age, soaking in adulation from the masses, admitting to such gross moral lapses will not come easily. It will not merely require the industry or simply a corporation—some faceless body—to make new policy decisions. It requires individuals to admit the depravity they were party to, to be confronted with what they did to other people’s lives, all because it became easier, more convenient, and more profitable than saying no.

When asked about his choices, the young man said, “It is my money, my body and I’m going to do what I want with it.” It’s popular nowadays to parrot the morality of pagan Rome, which championed only consent, but in doing so, we undermine the nature of man and eliminate his worth. An ethics based exclusively on the sufficiency of consent permits most acts of degeneracy and every type of bodily mutilation, all the way down to suicide. Yet it ignores that there is something worth protecting and defending about each human life. It is a worldview that strips man’s dignity and causes only acts of self-aggrandizement in an ironic search to matter. There is something symbolic about how scripture describes woman being made out of man’s rib, and this man ripped out his own to make into an object of self-worship.

This man and the doctors who willingly abused him co-operated together in an alliance against his nature, his dignity, and his value. They all reduced him to a sum of parts, and to a paycheck. This is not medicine and those who ‘practice’ it are not doctors. This is barbarism, practiced by the depraved, and it is a barbarism that endangers us all.