Should clinicians make chest surgery available to transgender male adolescents?

Bioethicists are increasingly engaged in considering the ethical issues associated with the care of transgender people. One such issue facing paediatric clinicians is requests for chest surgery from transgender male adolescents. For transgender young people who identify as male but have already progressed through the mid to late stages of puberty, hormone treatment will not reverse breast development. Some of these young people are distressed by their chest, and request surgery to remove this tissue. Demand for this surgery during adolescence is increasing. However, few paediatric hospitals make this intervention available to adolescents. This paper focuses on the following ethical question: Should clinicians make chest surgery available to transgender male adolescents? We argue that making chest surgery available to transgender male adolescents under some circumstances is ethically justifiable for three reasons, based on the concepts of beneficence, privacy, and non-discrimination. Firstly, the limited evidence to date suggests that chest surgery is beneficial to transgender male adolescents who seek this intervention. Secondly, chest surgery protects transgender adolescents' privacy by enabling them to better control disclosure of their transgender identity. Thirdly, chest surgery is already performed on other adolescent males for psychosocial reasons, such as in the case of gynaecomastia; non-discrimination thus provides a further reason for making chest surgery available to transgender male adolescents whose male gender identity is consistent. We suggest that the ethical justifiability of chest surgery in any specific transgender adolescent's case will depend on the individual patient's circumstances.