The predatory industry known as gender affirming care is here and thriving in the State of Maryland. And it is an industry that is about to get bigger. Much bigger. 

Johns Hopkins Hospital, formerly the place of Ben Carson’s life saving miracle work, opened a Center for Transgender Health in 2017. And from then to February of this year, completed more than 600 gender change surgeries while seeing 2800 patients with a staff of 50. 

The Transgender Center’s Medical Director and lead practitioner is a Harvard and Princeton educated chemist turned plastic surgeon, whose professional background is in traumatic reconstruction and microsurgery, who offers an array of gender affirming surgeries to patients, including, for example, phalloplasty, the creation of a penis using skin flaps grafted away from the patient’s forearm. 

It is made clear on the center’s website that children are ineligible for surgery, showing an eligibility criteria message that reads, “Gender affirming surgery is only offered to patients 18+”. But curiously, that message appears to have been added just recently. A look at the same page as it was earlier this year, using a tool called WayBackMachine which logs point-in-time snapshots of websites, reveals no mention of age under the same eligibility heading.   

Surgery aside, the Transgender Center welcomes patients as young as five years old, through a specialized clinic designed for youths called the Emerge Gender and Sexuality Clinic, which helps “gender diverse children” become their “most authentic selves”, by offering treatments including “cross-hormone therapy” and “puberty blockades”, the latter of which it states is a “reversible treatment”. 

On the same page as all of that information, towards the bottom, is a link to an announcement from US News & World Report, naming Hopkins a “Best Children’s Hospital in 2022”, in part because it has a children’s wellness program and offers pediatric psychiatric services. 

The Center’s Clinical Director and most visible spokesperson is a nurse, lawyer, and Navy veteran, who was the first to be officially recognized by the military branch as having switched genders, making for an appearance and a backstory one might reasonably confuse with Rachel Levine, the much meme-ified transgender four star admiral who President Biden elevated when he took office. 

The Clinical Director once told the Baltimore Sun it is a dedication to the Constitution that drives her in the field of transgender work. And during a recorded lecture on Youtube from May of this year, just weeks after the story about transgender swimmer Lia Thomas broke, she confirmed that disallowing trans kids from playing sports aligned with their gender identity has “no basis in fact”. 

And of course, foundationally animating the entire Transgender Center and even Johns Hopkins on the whole, is an unwavering and institution-wide dedication to cultivating Diversity and Inclusion, keywords that are enshrined onto the front page of the center’s website.    

Then in what makes for an eerie multigenerational closed loop, it turns out transgenderism is not just a new practice recently adopted by Hopkins, but is rather an old idea founded and originally materialized by the research university in the 1960s.   

When twin boys were born in 1965 and one’s penis was seared off during a horrifically botched circumcision, it was John Money, a Johns Hopkins University professor specializing in sexual identity, who advised the boy’s parents to just raise him as a girl after also surgically removing his testicles and treating him with therapy and prescriptions indefinitely.   

The boy’s parents listened to the experts. And after a life of confusion and despair, including an attempt to detransition during his teenage years and later a sit down with Oprah, the mutilated boy would shoot himself in the head with a sawed off shotgun at the age of 38 — all part of a story recently popularized by The Daily Wire documentary What is a Woman.

John Money on the other hand, died at the old age of 84 in Towson, after living a long life of personal comfort and high social standing. The Baltimore Sun memorialized his death with an article naming him a “pioneer in gender identity”. But there to revel in the distinction was no one. Money had no wife, no children, and no partner. His entire adult life was lived alone.

As for Hopkins, the Hospital conducted sex change operations from 1966 up until 1979, at which point a halt to the practice was ordered thanks to the work of a dissenting researcher and psychiatrist at the university named Paul McHugh, who concluded that offering sex change operations writ large was “cooperating with mental illness”. 

But times have since changed and the surgeries are back now. And even a cursory glance at the center’s website today shows a big bolded alert message announcing that vaginoplasty consultations are available. Just dial the number on your screen to get started.    

Little of this is unique to Hopkins either. The University of Maryland Medical Center has a Transgender Health Program too, offering everything up to and including surgery. And it was to Franklin Square where one trans man from North Carolina traveled for a vaginoplasty in 2020, making the journey because the doctors in Maryland have more experience with the procedure than the ones down south.     

His name was Ashlee and The Sun did a whole story on him. About how he knew he wanted to be a girl when he was five years old, how surgery was the final stage of his transition, all of it. But mentioned off-hand, with no real follow-up, was that Ashlee, someone who must have spent thousands and thousands of hours switching genders, only sees his ten and twelve year old kids who live in another state like once a month. Never mind that though. The story is about Ashlee. Her lived experience. Her. 

Inbound travelers like Ashlee coupled with an emerging local market have Baltimore becoming what the Sun would call a “destination for transgender surgeries”. And how lucrative becoming a trans-surgery destination could be for Baltimore and her healthcare conglomerates. It was recently reported that Vanderbilt’s Medical Center in Nashville can generate up to $100,000 for doing a bottom surgery, marking just one transaction in what is currently a $1.9 billion dollar industry that is forecasted to eclipse $5 billion by decade’s end.

But where to get the customers to actually realize that expected growth? Enter the Maryland State Department of Education, who appears determined to generate an entire state’s worth of prospects by inceptioning into school kids brains the idea that sex and gender are different and fluid and all the rest, as gets told throughout the woke health curriculum that the state is forcing on even resistant local school systems.   

Bludgeon kids with the message long enough, and soon many will manifest it. Just so, last week it was reported that in only two years time, Montgomery County Schools saw a 582% increase in kids reporting as gender nonconforming, a percentage increase that is uncoincidentally roughly proportionate in scale to the expected growth rate of the gender affirming care industry nationwide. 

All of this is to leave unaccounted for the tens of billions of dollars tied up in Kirwan over the next decade. And what of the likelihood that the General Assembly will have Maryland become legally recognized as a gender affirming sanctuary state? California just did it. And it isn’t hard to imagine Maryland following suit a year or two after, say, finally codifying abortion rights into the state’s constitution. 

In reaction to it all, the word groomer gets thrown around alot now, probably for good reason much of the time. But the real groomer, the final menace, is the entire system of distributed institutions in High Academia and Healthcare and Primary Education and Government and Media, who work in loose but real coordination with one another to impose a worldview that is devastatingly detached from reality onto the rest of us.  

Public link to article available at MarylandMuckraker.com