Gender ideology is unraveling. It’s fraud all the way down. There is no good evidence that “transitioning” helps anyone, especially children. And people are realizing that the entire premise — that a boy can somehow be born into a female body, or vice versa — is superstitious nonsense. Indeed, transgender ideology is so insane that the coalition against it ranges from conservative Christians to lesbian feminists.
Transgender ideology has many enemies, but the most effective are those who have been victimized by wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” especially the detransitioners who have realized that so-called transition is a pursuit of the impossible, driven by lies. The power of their testimony was displayed during the recent Detrans Awareness Day, which was organized by Genspect and hosted at the U.S. Capitol on March 12. There were interviews and meetings with administration officials and members of Congress. The public centerpiece was an outstanding series of panel discussions involving activists, doctors, policy experts, and especially detransitioners.
The first panel included Dr. Eithan Haim, the whistleblower whom the Biden administration persecuted after he exposed the continued medical “transition” of children in Texas. He warned that transgender programs resist being shut down and explained how doctors may be committing fraud to keep performing trans experiments on children. Put simply, they may deliberately use the wrong billing codes to hide what they are doing.
For example, if a girl claims to be transgender, a doctor might change her chart to show her as male, which is easily done in the Epic medical records system, and then “diagnose” her with testosterone deficiency. The doctor could then prescribe testosterone for her and get either private insurance or the government to pay for it without them knowing it was to “transition” a child. Leftist groups are promoting this scheme, publishing literal guides to committing insurance fraud.
Transgender ideologues are resorting to insurance fraud because of laws and policies restricting the medical fraud that is “gender-affirming care.” Pro-trans doctors were confident that if they just kept transing people, eventually evidence would come in and vindicate them, but the opposite happened. Among other examples, the U.K.’s Cass Report foundthere is no good evidence that performing transgender medical interventions on children helps them. It has also been revealed that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) suppressed a review of the evidence it had commissioned, and that Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading pro-transgender pediatric doctors, is suppressing the results of her own taxpayer-funded study.
Detransitioners are flesh-and-blood proof of what the numbers show. Their testimonies indict a medical profession that is either in the grip of radical gender ideology or cowed by those who are, and which has therefore betrayed its duties to patients and the public. The detransitioners speaking in the Capitol described a conveyor-belt approach to transgender medical interventions that quickly affirmed trans identities and encouraged each new step of so-called transition.
Thus they were harmed by those who were charged above all with doing them no harm. In the words of Laura Becker, “I have to wear a mastectomy bra for the rest of my life because I was lied to.” She “was a traumatized girl” who needed help, not a “gay trans man” who needed her breasts cut off.
The malfeasance of the medical system is fed by the internet (increasingly joined by the school systems and social services), which is filled with encouragement to embrace a transgender identity. Instead of addressing trauma or the difficulties of being different, there is the false hope of fleeing into another identity.
The online world and transgender ideology intersect in other malevolent ways. As Chloe Cole put it, exposure to online pornography makes many young women want to escape their femininity; if that is what being a woman is, many girls will want nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, Forrest Smith noted that for males there is often a sexual aspect to the desire to transition, which may also be the result of pornography exposure and use.
Though there are common themes to their stories, and insights to be gained from them, detransitioners are not interchangeable, so it was important to have more of them sharing their distinct experiences. Yes, some detransitioners are more publicly prominent and polished, but they are hardly alone. As Detrans Awareness Day demonstrated, the number of people speaking out about the harms transgender ideology inflicted on them is increasing.
These detransitioners are leading the way to defeat radical gender ideology. Their stories expose the lies and fraud of “gender-affirming care.” Their boldness in speaking out informs both politicians and the public. And their lawsuits against the medical systems that have injured them will likely be the final nail in the coffin of the medical industry’s embrace of transgenderism.
Suing “gender” doctors may make “gender-affirming care” impossible by making it uninsurable. As Soren Aldaco explained, it is not about money but about holding the medical system accountable. The first lawsuits will be the hardest. But it will get easier after the first few wins, and then the floodgates will open as trans-experimenting doctors are rightly sued into oblivion for their fraud and malpractice.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.
Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.
No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.
Consider a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Michael R. Ulrich, a Boston University professor of law and public health who is also affiliated with Ibram X. Kendi’s scandal-plagued Center for Antiracist Research. Ulrich argues that restrictions on transitioning children are part of a broader right-wing culture war restricting and regulating medicine. There is a lot wrong with this assertion, but the fundamental problem is that so-called gender-affirming care is not medicine.
From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.
Ulrich tries to assuage concerns over these procedures by comparing them to “Pediatric chemotherapy and radiation,” which also “have lasting effects on growth development and reproductive capabilities.” Well, yes, but cancer kills people, which is why we are willing to accept serious side effects to treat it — and even then, doctors and patients have to balance the risks of the disease against the risks of treatment. In contrast, there is no physical risk from not receiving “gender-affirming care,” whereas, as the WPATH files show, there is significant, potentially lethal, risks from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition surgeries.
This is why the argument for transition always comes down to encouraging people, especially children, to take themselves hostage by threatening suicide. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. And so, Ulrich deploys the suicide threats early and often, writing that “it is not hyperbole to say that lives are at risk in states pursuing these bans on needed care.” Ulrich offers no real evidence to back this claim up. He simply presumes that the “high rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation among transgender young people” would be reduced with affirmation and medical transition.
Ulrich cites just one study as “evidence showing the effectiveness of gender-affirming care in reducing depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts.” But, despite hype to the contrary, that study showed no such thing. Rather, as Jesse Singal explained after it was published in 2022, “the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false” (emphasis in original).
No Evidence Regarding Suicide
There is no good evidence that transition prevents suicide, especially for children. Those who identify as trans do have an elevated risk of suicide (though this tends to be exaggerated by activists), but this is best explained by trans-identified individuals also having a much higher rate of mental health problems and trauma — and it doesn’t help to add to these underlying issues the lie that they were somehow born in the wrong body.
This extraordinary claim — that some children are born into the wrong bodies, and therefore must be chemically and surgically reshaped into a facsimile of the opposite sex — is medically unsupported. It is ideological and sexual fantasy masquerading as medicine. There is no good evidence to support transitioning children because gender ideology is just that, an ideology masquerading as medicine. The reality of human nature does not change, even though much of the medical establishment, such as the NEJM, was shamefully eager to capitulate to a small number of aggressive activists.
Rein in the Industry
Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.
This does not mean the fight is over. Indeed, we should expect gender ideologues to become more aggressive as their losses pile up. They thought time would be on their side, and that new research would vindicate them. But their time is running out, and the continued lack of evidence for “gender-affirming care” is pushing them to increasingly brazen lies and distortions as they attempt to justify their collapsing position. And they are also becoming more authoritarian in the places and institutions they do control, as they attempt to impose transgender dogma on the rest of us.
Thus, those opposed to gender ideology must not get cocky. Trans activists and their allies will keep fighting to the bitter end, especially those who have staked their reputations, livelihoods, and self-respect on radical gender ideology. Nonetheless, the end can now be envisioned, even if much work remains to achieve it.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’
As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.
Onlyafew studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.
Manystudiesaddresshigherincidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”
Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research
While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.
Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.
One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.
During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.
One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”
Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:
Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.
A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”
As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”
The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.
NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved
The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:
No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.
Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.
Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.
Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?
HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.
Growing Transgender Identification
The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.
From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.
The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.
Debate Among Medication Providers
“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,”according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.
When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.
A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.
The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.
The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”
Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”
Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria
Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”
Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
Imagine the Environmental Protection Agency decides that, instead of setting air pollution standards, it will outsource oversight to an industry group called the “Emission Standards Coalition,” which, despite its innocuous name, is funded and staffed entirely by coal companies. Or, closer to home, imagine that city councilmembers in your quiet suburb decide that henceforth all speed limits will be set by the local auto racing club. We all would promptly object, haranguing the government for abdicating its most basic responsibility to citizens. “Foxes shouldn’t guard henhouses,” we’d say. Rules meant for public health and safety shouldn’t become tools to advance special interests and profit seekers. Lifting pollution and speed limits may benefit factory and Ferrari owners, but the public at large will have to cope with the resulting damage.
Farfetched as these examples might seem, something like this is happening in health care. Along the new frontier of “transgender health,” novel and even destructive “standards of care” are being set by ideologues and billionaire-backed foundations — all with the government’s blessing.
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a proposed rule under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. Behind its 190-plus pages and innocent-sounding name (“Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities”) hides a radical agenda that would reshape the nation’s health care in alarming ways. HHS is proposing new national standards for what it calls “gender affirming care,” mandating that doctors provide these services and insurance plans cover them. What is “gender affirming care” exactly? HHS never really says. Its proposed rule neither defines the term nor identifies objective standards — such as age limits — that might apply. Instead, HHS incorporates guidance from medical societies and a group calling itself the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health,” or WPATH.
WPATH is not a government agency. It is a trans-activist group. Its president is Dr. Marci Bowers, a man identifying as a woman and self-described “pioneer in the field of Gender Affirmation Surgery” with her own transgender reality show, “Sex Change Hospital.” WPATH’s staff appears to be largely borrowed from Veritas, a for-profit company that does marketing and public relations for medical societies. WPATH’s funders include the Arcus Foundation (“one of the largest LGBT funders in the world”), the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, and the Tawani Foundation, headed by transgender billionaire Jennifer Pritzker.
‘Standards’ Reflect Radical Backers
In 2018, the Tawani Foundation gave WPATH $200,000 to develop its so-called “Standards of Care,” a gift that earned Pritzker the WPATH “Philanthropy Award.” And Pritzker is heavily invested in trans causes. While the foundation has been funneling money to groups like WPATH and the National Center for Transgender Equality, its for-profit arm, Tawani Enterprises, is making financial bets on medical devices, implants, and surgical cutting tools. With the transgender surgery market expected to grow by billions of dollars over the next decade, one careful observer notes that “it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity” here.
No surprise, then, that the WPATH standards that HHS hopes to enshrine into law reflect the radical views of its backers. On the list of WPATH “treatments” are mutilating surgeries (mastectomies, vaginectomies, penectomies), “chest binding,” “genital tucking,” “aesthetic procedures” like “body contouring” and “voice surgery,” and puberty-blocking drugs for children. There’s no minimum age requirement for these procedures. WPATH even calls for “psychotherapy” for prepubescent “gender diverse children” to “explore their gender,” with parents involved “as necessary” and excluded if their involvement is “contra-indicated.” WPATH says it’s “committed to advocacy” for “social and political climates that ensure social tolerance, equality, and the full rights of citizenship.”
This isn’t medicine. It is the destruction of healthy bodies, the indoctrination of children, and the dissolution of parental rights. It is radical sexual ideology under the guise of science.
Rest of the World Backs Away
Even to call WPATH’s guidance “standards of care” is misleading. As the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine explains, a true standard of care “is a treatment approach that all reasonable providers would use in a particular clinical situation,” but no such consensus exists for so-called “gender affirming care,” especially for kids. And the mounting damage this form of “care” is doing to both kids and adults is well-documented. It’s why countries around the world are backing away from it, even as HHS bureaucrats are strangely doubling down.
WPATH published its latest guidance in its “partner” journal, the recently renamed “International Journal of Transgender Health.” Among its authors is Susie Green, who heads the United Kingdom-based group Mermaids focused on “gender-diverse kids.” Green is not a medical professional. She spent several years as an IT consultant before famously helping her 16-year-old son undergo transgender surgery in Thailand. Another contributor to the WPATH guidance is Laura A. Jacobs, a self-described genderqueer “activist” and “heretic” whose “psychotherapy specialties” include “LGBTQIA+” adolescents, “BDSM,” “kink,” and “sexwork.”
It isn’t shocking that a bunch of well-funded activists could come together, give their glossy PDFs a veneer of academic credibility, and market their views as a new sexual orthodoxy. What is shocking is that they’ve managed to capture the federal bureaucracy. For HHS to uncritically platform WPATH, mandating shoddy science and destructive medicine as law, is an alarming development that deserves greater scrutiny.
Ultimately, this is a lawless effort. HHS has no power to override the states and the medical profession by imposing “standards of care” for the entire country. Nor can HHS force these standards on health care professionals in violation of their ethical and religious convictions. And purporting to delegate these tasks to billionaire-backed ideologues with no democratic accountability is worse yet. Just as racing enthusiasts don’t set speed limits and coal companies don’t set pollution rules, transgender activists shouldn’t be setting national medical standards.
Douglas G. Wilson Jr. is the chief executive officer of the Catholic Benefits Association and founding board member of the Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
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