The breast removal surgery, sometimes called “top surgery,” aims to create a “more masculine-looking chest,” as stated on Cleveland Clinic’s website.
Leor Sapir, PhD, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose areas of research include pediatric gender medicine, shared that anywhere from 5,288 to 6,294 double mastectomies were performed on girls under age 18 between 2017 and 2023 — and that 50 to 179 of those girls were just 12-½ years old or younger.
This was based on analysis of an “all-payer national insurance database,” including patients who were previously diagnosed with gender dysphoria and had the treatment covered by insurance, Sapir wrote in an article revealing the findings.
The actual numbers could be higher, the Manhattan Institute claims, because researchers did not include patients who paid for the procedure themselves without submitting an insurance claim.
“The out-of-pocket costs of ‘top surgery’ can be as low as $3,000, a sum many middle-class families can afford,” Sapir wrote.
If any procedures were entered under different codes for billing, those would also not show up.
An October 2022 study led by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine — published in JAMA Network — found that there were only 489 top surgeries performed on adolescents in 2019.
