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In “What Is a Doctor?”, Dr. Simone Gold asks a question thatshould be simple and discovers it isn’t anymore. Through conversations withphysicians across specialties and generations—family doctor Scott Jensen,pelvic reconstructive surgeon Dr. Melanie Kreitz-Bachart, surgeon andwhistleblower Dr. Etan Haim, and psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman—the filmargues that the white coat once stood for trainer, educator, healer, andtruth-teller, but that trust has frayed under corporate control, politicized medicine,and the fast-rising industry of “gender-affirming” interventions for minors.

The story starts with memory and history. Mid-centuryAmerica revered doctors as community anchors who paired scientificbreakthroughs with personal responsibility. That relationship, the filmcontends, weakened as insurance, regulators, and hospital systems turned mostphysicians from independent professionals into employees who answer to metricsand messaging. COVID is presented as the breaking point: masks and distancingmandates, hospital visitation bans, the sidelining of early treatmentdebates—events the film characterizes as propaganda that taught people to doubttheir own eyes and doctors to obey.

From there the question “What is a doctor?” turns practical.Dr. Jensen frames a physician as a cornerman in a boxing match—someone whopatches you up and sends you back out stronger without imposing their values.Dr. Kreitz-Bachart stresses informed consent as a sacred conversation, not asignature on a form. Dr. Haim describes a healer’s duty to return sick kids tonormal life, then recounts the moment he concluded that duty was beingbetrayed: after Texas Children’s Hospital publicly paused pediatric genderinterventions, he says internal lectures and staff meetings showed the programcontinuing; when he shared records with a journalist, he was visited by federalagents and warned he was a target of investigation. He ultimately went public,even as he and his pregnant wife braced for the personal consequences.

The centerpiece is a hard look at pediatric gender medicine.The film claims the modern surge is a social contagion, not the same rarecondition once called “gender identity disorder.” Dr. Grossman says today’spatients are mostly adolescent girls with anxiety, autism, trauma, orloneliness, and that schools, screens, and clinicians now funnel distress intoa medical pathway. The film argues true informed consent is impossible forminors contemplating puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries thatcan sterilize or impair sexual function, because teens cannot grasp thepermanence of those tradeoffs. It likens the consent process to existentialblackmail—“do this, or your child will die”—and calls that coercion, not care.

To show how ideas capture institutions, the film revisitspsychologist John Money’s now-discredited “gender identity” theory and theReimer twin case—presented as proof at the time and later exposed as failureand abuse. It then turns to WPATH, the professional group whose “standards ofcare” influence hospitals and insurers, criticizing it for activist capture,eliminating age minimums, and, according to the film, diluting ethicalsafeguards like mental-health evaluations. Alongside these institutional critiques,Dr. Kreitz-Bachart explains the surgeries in plain terms: grafts from theforearm to fashion a phallus that often requires implants and revisions;“neovaginas” that must be dilated to keep a wound from closing; fistulasconnecting urinary and digestive tracts; nerve injury; pain; loss of orgasmreported in many patients. Dr. Haim warns that the drugs can be as radical asthe scalpels—puberty isn’t a switch but a years-long symphony of hormonal“micro-surgeries” that shape the brain and body—and that halting it may carryunseen costs that no one can fully quantify yet.

Threaded through the medicine is law and language. The filmargues minors cannot legally consent to sterilizing procedures, that “gender”has replaced “sex” in policy without public debate, and that professionals whoperform irreversible interventions on children without rigorous, truthfuldisclosure commit not just malpractice but medical battery—a crime the filmsays should be prosecuted. It encourages viewers to treat credentialsskeptically, ask hard questions, and recognize that science is a method, not aslogan. A real doctor, it concludes, faces reality, welcomes debate, and says“there you are,” not “here I am,” upon entering the room.

“What Is a Doctor?” closes with a call to action. It urgesCongress to codify protections for minors, clarify informed consent standards,and hold institutions and individuals accountable where consent is absent ordeceptive. It invites viewers to host free screenings, sign a petition to banwhat the film calls medical mutilation, and join a growing coalition ofclinicians, patients, and parents who want to rebuild medicine around truth,prudence, and first doing no harm. Whether you agree with every premise or not,the film puts a simple challenge back on the table: if a doctor is a trainer,educator, healer, and truth-teller—are our systems letting doctors be doctors?