My great-uncle Paul Sullivan, an outspoken, self-educated World War I veteran, ranted for years about his spineless, weak-willed father who allowed his mother to be railroaded into a mental institution so that relatives could raise her baby girl as their own.

The phrase “first do no harm” isn’t in either the ancient Greek version of the Hippocratic Oath or the widely accepted current version, but perhaps it should be. The issue of harm swirls around the topic of gender dysphoria, the sense of discomfort that a person may have due to a perceived mismatch of biological sex and gender identity. As a medical term, gender dysphoria is modern and first appeared in medical literature in the 1960s or ‘70s. But since then, the medical and political debate surrounding gender dysphoria has grown. Are the doctors providing care or operating a transgender money making-machine?