On February 14, a doctor from Intermountain Healthcare in Utah gave a presentation in which he said, “I have done top surgery on minors… In the world of plastic surgery, we’re quite comfortable with breast surgery on minors because breast reductions are well, you know, that literature has been around for a long time.”
Although the literature for breast reduction has been around for a while, that is not the same thing as complete breast removal. The reduction of breast tissue in order to help a young woman with back pain is much different than the removal of a healthy woman’s body parts. One treats the patient and the other is an irreversible action which many girls later regret.
The doctor in question, Nicholas Kim, received his training in Belgium as he shared in his personal introduction. In addition, as shown in the photos he presented to the audience, he worked with Stan Monstrey. Monstrey is "one of the world’s foremost Gender Surgeons” in Belgium. He has also “served as the president of WPATH,” according to his bio on transhealth.org.
Kim is part of Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare system, which is affiliated with Primary Children’s Hospital (PCH). Although Kim is not part of PCH, there is a Gender Management and Support Clinic located at the Primary Children’s Eccles Outpatient Services building. Also associated with University of Utah Health, the adolescent gender clinic bears the acronym GeMS for its name on the PCH website.
There is little info about GeMS on the website or its director, Nicole Mihalopoulos. Mihalopoulos even has a bio which makes no mention of her work with gender treatments on adolescents on the PCH website. It only reads, “My clinical research is focused on preventing cardiovascular disease risk factors in adolescents and young adults.” The PCH website does its best to hide the fact that they are actively treating adolescents with experimental practices.
And when I say experimental, it is because they are. The surgeries and hormones for “gender affirmation” in adolescents, or adults for that matter, were not going on at this scale just 10 years ago. The science isn’t settled by any stretch of the imagination on their long-term effects, as the long-term effects are still being determined. For this reason, young people are the guinea pigs at clinics such as GeMS.
However, PCH is not the only instance where GeMS is used as an acronym for a gender clinic or gender equity organization. The first report to suggest this acronym was a trend that came from The Cougar Chronicle, a small conservative newspaper at BYU.
GeMS is also the acronym used by Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) for their “Gender Multispecialty Service (GeMS)” clinic. BCH was reported on by Libs of TikTok in 2022 for performing “gender affirming” surgeries on minors.
However, it doesn’t stop at BCH. There is an annual GeMS Conference each year. Although the site is no longer in use, digital archives show that the GeMS Conference has been going on since 2017. It's peculiar that the text on the page is white, blending in with the background. It can only be read if highlighted.
Under the “GeMS Description” section from January of 2017, it reads that “[s]ymposium attendees will be given an opportunity to hear from the nation's leading experts and attend break-out sessions covering a wide range of topics focused on assisting transgender children, adolescents and young adults.”
A GeMS conference spokesman commented on the Chronicle’s report that the “GeMS conference does not have any connections with the GeMS clinic” at Primary Children’s Hospital. However, there is still a general and large trend of its usage by organizations related to transgender issues and gender equity advocacy.
For example, the Gender Education in Medicine for Switzerland organization, a network of Swiss medical schools dedicated to sex and gender in medicine, uses GeMS for their acronym.
The “Gender-Affirming Medicine & Sexual Health Clinic” of San Ysidro Health in San Diego also has it.
There are hundreds of examples of similar uses of GeMS which can be found with a simple Google search. It seems to be becoming another woke acronym that signals transgender health treatment or gender equity (such as with DEI), but it has not been publicized.
The language on the far left is in flux and deliberately evasive, such as conflating equality and equity. DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and ESG (environmental social governance) are just two concepts amid a constellation of confusing terms that conservatives and moderates have to decipher. GeMS may have just been added to the list.
