Surgeon Reported to FTC for Promoting Breast Removal Surgery to Minors

A surgeon who performs bilateral mastectomies on healthy teenage girls and who markets her services via TikTok and Instagram has been reported to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for alleged false promotion of services to minors, reports the Irish Independent.

Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher runs the Gallagher Plastic Surgery clinic in Miami, Florida, where she removes the healthy breasts of girls as young as thirteen who believe themselves to be boys. She regularly promotes this service on social media using the hashtags Yeet the Teets or Teetus Deleetus to appeal to her large, mostly adolescent, following. She has said that most of her patients, both teenage and adult, found her via TikTok.

Gallagher frequently posts photographs and memes on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram as a way to connect with hundreds of thousands of followers, and her satisfied customers respond with photographs of their newly unbandaged chests bearing fresh mastectomy scars. A disturbingly high number of them bear the scars of past self-harm. 

The complaint to the FTC was filed by five organizations and is led by Genspect, an international alliance seeking better care for those who suffer from gender dysphoria.

It alleges that Gallagher and her firm have “engaged in unfair, false, and deceptive practices in the aggressive advertising and marketing to minors of their plastic surgery services, namely mastectomies of healthy female breasts, as proven safe, effective, and medically necessary.”

It goes on to allege that Gallagher’s videos are “part of a brand marketing scheme designed to create an online media persona for Gallagher as an entertaining celebrity surgeon in order to appeal to hundreds of thousands of underage social media users, advertise Gallagher’s ‘gender affirming’ plastic surgery services, and sell them to a vulnerable and impressionable population of children and youth experiencing distress with their gender identity and developing bodies”. 

One of Gallagher’s former patients is Grace Lidinsky-Smith, a detransitioned young woman who is one of the founding members of Detrans United. Earlier this year, she told Medscape medical news website she found some of Gallagher’s social media posts paint a “falsely rosy picture” such as one in which Gallagher, who calls herself “Dr Teetus Deleetus,” is wearing a red dress and flipping her long blond hair while informing her patients that the sadness they feel post-surgery is normal and “temporary.”

Lidinsky-Smith describes her experience of having her breasts removed at age 23 in the documentary Detransition Diaries. She tells of the anxiety that she felt leading up to the surgery, and how she obsessively ruminated over it and sought reassurance from reading happy testimonials online.

She recounts with poignant honesty how she was hit immediately after surgery, while looking down at the gashes on her chest, by an awful feeling that she’d made a huge mistake. For her, these feelings weren’t temporary, and she detransitioned shortly afterwards, describing feeling not like a man, but like a woman who has had her breasts cut off.

Gallagher reportedly claimed that not one of her patients had experienced regret, and when The New York Times asked her about Lidinsky-Smith, who had contacted the surgeon to inform her about her detransition, Gallagher recalled thinking perhaps it was a hoax. 

Bilateral mastectomies for teenage girls and young women are often touted as “life-saving” medical care by so-called “gender affirming” surgeons who believe in the existence of innate gender identities. But this transition or suicide myth has been thoroughly debunked.

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