Trump wildly claims hospitals are performing ‘reverse surgery’ on trans patients ’at my order'

President Donald Trump falsely claimed Friday that American hospitals are performing “reverse surgery” on transgender people because he ordered them to do so.“In fact, hospitals now are doing reverse surgery at my order,” Trump told supporters at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in South Carolina. “They’re doing reverse surgery. Nobody ever heard about it.”Trump made the claim while campaigning for U.S. Sen. Darline Graham ahead of Tuesday’s Republican primary runoff against Rep. Ralph Norman. Graham was appointed to the seat after her brother, Lindsey Graham, died in July. The winner will face Democratic nominee Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in November.Adrian Shanker, who served in the Biden administration as deputy assistant secretary for health policy and senior adviser on LGBTQI+ health equity at the Department of Health and Human Services, tells The Advocate that Trump’s confusion demonstrates why politicians should not make personal medical decisions.“I don’t really know what President Trump means by reverse surgeries, but the reality is that he should leave medical decision-making up to the patient and their providers to discuss what medical care is right for a certain patient,” Shanker says. “These kinds of decisions really don’t have room for politicians in the middle of that conversation.”Trump’s “wild statement,” Shanker says, is evidence that politicians do not belong in the “patient-provider dyad.”“For the party of small government, maybe they would consider trying to leave people’s health care decisions alone,” he says. “Trans people deserve access to the care that their bodies need, not the care that President Trump thinks that they need.”Related: Donald Trump claims schools are performing gender-affirming surgeries on transgender kids. That's not true.Graham turns a national security stumble into transgender obsessionThe rally came days after Graham’s disastrous performance in a televised de