You debunked nothing, Shane Raymond

Checking a 'fact checker'

Last year, journalist Shane Raymond published a ‘fact-checking’ piece on Irish site, The Journal, that scrutinised my claim about the extent of young women raising money online to fund double mastectomies. During an interview on Newstalk, I mentioned that I had conducted a search on the crowdfunding site JustGiving using the term 'top surgery' and received 37,788 results. I interpreted this as 'nearly 38,000 girls raising money for breast removal surgery' — a statistic I found alarming.

Raymond’s article revolves around the specific figure I cited being inaccurate, but it missed the larger context crucial to understanding the broader reality.

Raymond’s fact check confirmed that a search for “gender-affirming care” on the British fundraising platform JustGiving does indeed yield “tens of thousands of results.” However, these results did not correlate with the number of individuals actively involved in fundraising for top surgeries on their site.

This is nitpicking. Even one woman undergoing an elective double mastectomy due to a belief that her gendered ‘soul’ has somehow been born into the wrong body is one too many. It is a religious belief, and I believe its global influence has caused more harm than the Catholic Church's historic control over Ireland.

Raymond went on to claim that he could find only three crowdfunder campaigns that were related to people seeking double mastectomies. That figure is outrageously misleading, and it’s a far more egregious error than any claim I made.

There are, unambiguously, thousands of young people currently fundraising online to have their healthy breasts removed in the UK, Ireland and around the world.

On virtually any social media app, it’s incredibly easy to find girls and young women appealing to their followers for money to get double mastectomies, with links to websites like JustGiving and GoFundMe. It must have taken an almost supernatural amount of willful blindness on Raymond's part that he was only able to find three such fundraisers.

A recent analysis of US health insurance data uncovered evidence that from 2017 to 2023, up to 6,300 double mastectomies were performed on girls between the ages of 12 and 17. 6,300! And that’s just girls under 18 in the United States who are covered by insurance. Obviously, the number of girls and young women 18 and over, outside the US, and/or who don’t have private health insurance plans that cover double mastectomies will dwarf that number.

I recently ran a search for the words “top surgery” at GoFundMe, and the results were so numerous they maxed out at a thousand — when the website stops showing results. Here, Shane Raymond, see for yourself. Here are just the first 1000 results for “top surgery” fundraisers that were active last month on just one crowdfunding website. I invite you, Shawn, to take a good look at every single one of these girls' faces.

The essence of my claim—that there is significant online fundraising activity from young people seeking double mastectomies—remains valid. 

You debunked nothing. Mr.Raymond. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to cover up a medical scandal.