The American College of Surgeons Remains Committed to Ideology

By now, one might expect the American College of Surgeons to reconsider its positions on DEI (or “Inclusive Excellence”) and so-called gender-affirming care for minors. The evidence for both remains weak, with many studies failing to show any benefits in medical practice.

Think again.

The ACS is reaffirming these commitments by inviting Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to deliver the Olga M. Jonasson Lecture at the 2026 ACS Clinical Congress this September in Washington, D.C. In 2018, the ACS’s selection of pediatrician Joan Reede to deliver the lecture, titled “A Path Toward Diversity, Inclusion, and Excellence,” signaled its embrace of DEI and prompted my own parting of ways, ideologically, with the organization, though I remain a fellow “in good standing.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rose to national prominence after then-President Joe Biden promised that his nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer would be a black woman. This move immediately disenfranchised all but a tiny minority of potential candidates who did not fit this narrow demographic.

Jackson was reportedly a standout student at Palmetto High School in Miami, Florida. At Harvard, she graduated magna cum laude in 1992, was accepted to Harvard Law School, and graduated cum laude in 1996. But grade inflation was rampant at Harvard in the 1990s, with as many as 90 percent of undergraduate seniors receiving some form of an honorary degree, and 76 percent of law students graduating with honors. None of this is to say that Jackson was not qualified for the Court, but by making his selection based on race and gender, Biden violated the spirit (if not the letter) of the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution.

Biden’s hopes for Jackson were perfectly realized. In her rulings and dissenting opinions, she has consistently advanced the view that racism remains systemic in America, and that no measure to deal with it should be off the table. In her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina et al., in which the majority held that affirmative action is discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional, she argued that race-conscious admissions were necessary to counteract systemic racism.

In addition to the racialized lens through which Jackson views the world, she famously refused to answer the question, “What is a woman?”, during her confirmation hearing. She dissented in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state restrictions on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors with gender dysphoria.

What does all this have to do with the ACS?

In 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the ACS assembled a task force to deal with alleged systemic racism. Its recommendations, later removed from the ACS website, included integrating antiracism and DEI principles into the organization, establishing an Office of Diversity, and providing leadership and staff training on topics such as implicit bias, microaggressions, and allyship. It also adopted the thoroughly discredited concept of racial concordance, which claims that surgical outcomes improve when the surgeon and patient are the same race. A year later, the ACS hosted its “Promoting DEI & Anti-Racism: Professional Surgical Society Retreat,” featuring an address from Ibram X. Kendi, whose book How to Be an Antiracist argues that the remedy for past discrimination is present and future discrimination.

Justice Jackson’s views seem to put her in the Kendi mold. By inviting her to deliver the Olga M. Jonasson Lecture, the ACS leadership is signaling its continuing commitment to DEI.

The ideologues in the ACS leadership have shown their contempt for ACS fellows by censoring and silencing those who disagree with their claims of racism in surgery. Last October, they effectively silenced the organization’s 93,000 fellows by eliminating the only means available for fellows to communicate with one another within the ACS: they dropped the Communities discussion forum without a plausible explanation.

Now, the ACS leadership continues to alienate fellows of the College by extending this politically charged invitation.

My suggestion to my fellow surgeons: boycott the Clinical Congress in September and make it the least attended in ACS history. Perhaps then, the leadership will get the message that we are not racists, that surgery is not racist, and that surgeons treat patients with the same care and competence, regardless of race or other immutable characteristics.