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What if it's a surgery that doesn't solve a life-threatening problem, but holds the possibility of significantly improving quality of life? There are no end of heart conditions that won't kill you, but will make you miserable and make a normal life hard.
Why did we decide to stop (most) further study of lobotomies? The inventors of the procedure won a Nobel Prize for it! At some point it seems we decided that it wasn't actually worth it, as far as I can tell.
I think it's a hard question, honestly, even before the pediatric ethics complications. How do we decide what experiments are reasonable to run on people? Definitionally, sometimes experiments find negative outcomes, and if we never run such experiments, we never find ways to make things better. To me, at least, there needs to be some level of reasonable confidence on the theory for why a potentially-harmful, irreversible experiment would be likely to succeed, and clear consent to participate.
Medicine isn't my wheelhouse, but the repeated failure to turn what should be lots of test data into verifiable claims of strong evidence suggests that the evidence isn't as glowing as the rhetoric would require. Which colors me cynical about much of the whole movement, but that's just my opinion.
The main reason is that we invented neuroleptic drugs that worked. It's cheaper and easier to treat a raving, flagrantly psychotic schizophrenic with antipsychotics instead of surgery, and you don't have to cause nearly as much collateral damage.
They made violently mad lunatics docile. While risking destroying higher cognition, being dangerous surgery, and so on. The drugs sometimes suck donkey cock, but they're better than that. Lobotomies were also often used for people who weren't violent lunatics, just to make them easier to handle, which certainly didn't help their reputation.
These days, in rare cases, we perform surgeries like stereotactic cingulotomy, which is a far more targeted technique of cutting or destroying aberrant parts of the brain. Same theory as lobotomy, if you squint, but nowhere near as messy. Works okay, if nothing else does.
I happen to share that opinion, presuming you're talking about gender affirming/reassignment care.
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To make the analogy work, the heart would have to be perfectly healthy, and the benefits of the surgery would have to be purely psychological*. "Oh no, your girlfriend broke up with you? You must be brokenhearted! Here, have a heart transplant!". This is about as much sense as gender affirming care makes.
*) If you want the analogy to be even more accurate, the surgery would have to have fairly massive, well-known, and acknowledged by everyone downsides, it's just that they are deemed to be a price worth paying for the psychological benefits.
Looking back, I didn't even mean it as an analogy. I sought to show that the standard he was advancing ruled out something considered benign or noble. It's the equivalent of someone pointing out that a No Parking prohibition on a street should make allowances for emergencies or an ambulance.
Hence that if you want to condemn such a procedure, you need different considerations. Which there are, which I haven't denied.
Posts get pretty bloated if you want to say something snappy but then also have to put in every single thing wrong with gender changing operations. I see this as a point where pretty much everyone knew what hydroacetylene was getting at, but more... analytical? minded people could want to demonstrate that that argument alone is bad. I suppose he should have written it better. I've always gotten annoyed at the "I know what you meant but let's argue out the phrasing" types.
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