When it comes to gender reassignment surgeries, Tucker Carlson didn’t know the half of it. “They can’t even do lip filler in a convincing way in this country,” he exclaimed halfway through his October 4 “Tucker on X” interview with investor consultant and policy expert Chris Moritz.
Throughout Carlson’s conversation with Moritz, however, the economics of transgenderism — or, as Mortiz calls it, “Transgender, Inc.” — revealed the ways that politics and profit motive incentivize harm, not healing.
Big Pharma Profits Without FDA Approval
Moritz explained that sex reassignment surgeries and hormone replacement therapies include a number of different pharmaceutical products, none of which have been approved by the FDA for use in gender transition. Testosterone, estrogen, and GnRH agonists (colloquially known as puberty blockers) are commonly used to facilitate gender therapies. While the FDA has approved them for certain legitimate medical uses — GnRH agonists can be used to treat prostate cancer, for example — doctors prescribe the pharmaceuticals off-label for use in gender transactions, Moritz told Carlson.
Moritz explained that the real money is found in health systems and surgeries. Men who undergo top and bottom surgery face a $142,000 price tag, he reported.
In addition to the lack of FDA approval, he explained, “There are no long-term [peer-reviewed] studies — none — on the long-term efficacy, consequences, and in many cases debilitating lifetime effects of these procedures and pharmaceutical products, especially on children.”
Without FDA approval and lacking knowledge of long-term risks, why have gender transitions exploded across the nation? As it turns out, transgender patients are willing to pay quite a price for their desired bodily modifications, and pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to cater to life-long customers. People who take cross-sex hormones have to set up a regular hormone regimen to maintain the physical characteristics developed by the estrogen or testosterone. So when it comes to transgenderism, cash is king.
As demand has exploded in recent years, so have the profits for pharmaceutical companies. “The combined value [of transgender surgeries and pharmaceuticals] in 2018 was $2.94 billion,” Moritz said. “By 2022, that figure had risen to $4.18 billion. And by 2030, our analysis indicates that it would increase to $7.5 billion.”
Obama Opened the Door for the Gender Reassignment Craze
Moritz pointed to Obama’s presidency as the sea change responsible for mainstreaming transgenderism.
“The biggest single policy catalyst for this explosion is Obamacare,” he told Carlson. “When Obamacare was enacted in 2010, there was a provision written into the law mandating insurance companies to provide medically necessary gender affirming care. Between 2010 and 2015, there was a 50 percent increase in sex reassignment surgeries and a 25 percent increase in coverage for transgender individuals.”
The Democrats didn’t stop there. In 2016, an additional amendment was added to the Affordable Care Act stating that private insurance companies could not legitimately deny coverage based on a person’s gender identity due to prohibitions on discriminating based on sex. The following year, from 2016-2017, saw a 150 percent increase in sex reassignment surgeries in the United States, Mortiz explained.
The Trump administration changed this portion of the Affordable Care Act, relying on a definition of “sex discrimination” dependent on biological sex. This change has been reversed once more, however, with Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services currently interpreting “sex discrimination” to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
The number of patients seeking surgery has increased in step with spiking numbers of people who identify as transgender. In 2011, there were about 700,000 Americans over the age of 13 who identified as transgender, Moritz said. In the past decade, that number has more than doubled, reaching 1.6 million people as of 2022. A similar increase can be see in the number of transgender youth, which doubled in just five years, shooting up from 150,000 kids in 2017 to 300,000 kids today, Moritz said.
And, as the numbers of trans-identifying individuals have increased, so-called “gender affirming” clinics have been created. In the past fifteen years, 100 clinics for children have been created across the nation. No such clinics had existed in the United States previously, said Moritz.
He explained that the largest provider of sex reassignment surgeries is Cedars Sinai Health System in Beverly Hills, CA, which controls about 8 percent of the market share and earned over $200 million through its gender clinic in 2022. Pharmaceutical companies profit from purchases of hormones, but Moritz explained that the real money is found in health systems and surgeries. Men who undergo top and bottom surgery face a $142,000 price tag, he reported.
Moritz expressed his concern at the widespread impact of transgender ideology. “It’s not just health systems, it’s not just pharmaceutical companies — it’s corporate America,” he told Carlson, explaining that corporate America obeys their HR departments, who take their cues from woke universities.
While the institutions — education, corporate America, healthcare, and the media, to name a few — ally themselves with transgenderism, Carlson’s conversation with Moritz is a breath of fresh air and a worthwhile reminder: just follow the money.
Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Northern Michigan in exile in Washington, D.C. You can follow her on X/Twitter @mfmyler.
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