WPATH: From 'Too Big To Fail' To A Scandal That's Too Big To Ignore
Even mainstream outlets are forced to pay attention
That activist talking point that “the science of trans kids is settled” was exposed as a fraud perpetrated on the public and the courts this week.
The Alabama attorney general’s office unsealed documents related to the Boe v Marshall case. They show that activist lobbying, not science, shaped policy at WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.
Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Adm. Dr. Rachel Levine, as well as the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP), pressured WPATH to delete all age minimums from their Standards of Care.
It was too big of a story to ignore. The New York Times reported that Levine and the AAP had “concerns over political fallout” if they admitted that children of any age are unable to consent to permanent medical interventions.
Jessie Singal, who has been out front on this news beat, wrote that the new information “demonstrates an indisputable conflict between how WPATH has portrayed the SoC 8 — as a document steeped in evidence and careful deliberation on the part of experts — and how the guidelines were actually formulated.”
Politics and prestige were at stake. Since there was no good evidence for anything they were doing, and everyone from HHS on down knew it, they settled on abandoning the science.
WPATH also commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence base for pediatric sex trait modification from Johns Hopkins University. When those systematic reviews produced unacceptable results, WPATH buried them rather than confront the shortcomings of their approach.
The New York Times did not report on this Johns Hopkins angle, apparently because no one at the medical center would go on the record. However, the allegations and evidence are already part of a federal court record.
Singal did report on the Johns Hopkins story today. “While there are many gaps in the story and no one is talking — my article relies almost entirely on the documents — it’s indisputable WPATH sought to interfere with the systematic reviews,” Singal tweeted.
Conflicts of interest were unacknowledged and unresolved in SoC 8. Litigation, such as the Alabama case, seemed to be the primary concern of the people who wrote it.
“Members of the WPATH Guideline Development Group repeatedly and explicitly lobbied to tailor language of the guidelines for the purposes of influencing courts and legislatures, and to strengthen their own testimony as expert witnesses,” Dr. James Cantor charges in an affidavit.
Belief in the efficacy of ‘gender medicine’ was an unfalsifiable article of faith. “It is impossible to exaggerate the fatal importance of [this] categorization of scientific skepticism and evidence-based medicine as a problem rather than the goal,” Cantor writes.
Rather than science, “substantial portions of SOC-8 are constructed based on exactly the anecdotal, ambiguous, subjective, and insufficient features that evidence-based medicine rejects as unreliable, and is designed to replace.”
As Genevieve Gluck has tirelessly documented, two men who advised WPATH on the chapter in SoC 8 outlining so-called “eunuch identities” were simultaneously associated with a fetish forum called the Eunuch Archives. Pornographic stories on the site promote pedophilia and fetishize maimed children. Forum members were apparently very happy with an early draft of SoC 8 they were able to preview.
Despite these flaws in their own work product, the new documents show that WPATH members were dismissive of the AAP’s guidelines because they “have a very weak methodology, written by few friends who think the same” and were “very affirming but not so well underpinned” by evidence.
When the SoC 8 was released in 2022, the AAP “issued an ultimatum to WPATH: Should WPATH not delete the age minimums, AAP would not only withhold endorsement of SOC-8, but would publicly oppose the document,” Cantor says.
WPATH caved to the pressure. Standards of medical evidence review (“delphi”) were abandoned. Observers knew something was hinky about all of it at the time it happened.
Emails show that in addition to his demands that the age minimums should be removed, Levine pushed WPATH to hurry up and finish SoC 8 “in order to assist with Administration political strategy.”
Levine’s desire to remove age minimums was “based on the rhetoric [he] is hearing in D.C.” that “will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” according to internal WPATH communications.
An autogynephile who medically affirmed his ‘gender’ in his mid-fifties, Levine has expressed satisfaction that he was able to have children first, whereas infertility is just one major health risk for children ‘affirmed’ in the way Levine prefers. His path to transition and his healthcare needs are not at all the same as Jazz Jennings.
The ‘trans community’ is a political project to promote Levine’s interests at the expense of Jazz. Of course Levine prioritizes that political project over the health and wellbeing of other people’s children. Of course he does.
To quote the inestimable Lisa Selin Davis, “It’s officially a scandal now, and it goes all the way to the White House. Holy fuck.”
Politics aside, WPATH was supposed to be the global setter of ‘gold standards’ in so-called ‘gender affirming health care.’ Everyone else — the AAP, APA, ACLU, HRC, GLSEN, the entire alphabetical rainbow — has consistently cited WPATH to make their claims that “the science is settled” in media, courtrooms, and medical journals.
Invoking the parlance of economics, WPATH became ‘too big to fail.’ Like a company or a bank that can collapse and take down an entire system with it, the collapse of WPATH’s credibility creates a risk to the broader false consensus supporting ‘gender medicine.’
This week, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on the challenge to Tennessee’s puberty blocker ban. However, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall may have the greatest impact on how the court rules — to say nothing of how the politics may now change.
That’s because much of what we now know about WPATH has emerged from the efforts of his office. “Alabama has … engaged in extensive discovery to show that the [11th Circuit] court’s deference to WPATH was unwarranted,” reads the state’s amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court. As a result, WPATH has been forced to turn over millions of documents.
The brief brings the Court up-to-date on systematic reviews in countries which have applied the brakes to pediatric ‘transition’.
“This changing landscape may explain petitioners’ rush,” it says. “Assuring the Court that the WPATH guidelines reflect the uncontested standard of care, petitioners appear to hope that the Court will decide these cases before more evidence comes to light. The Court need not acquiesce.”
“The full picture … is not nearly as pretty as the one petitioners and their amici paint.” Hinting at the results available to legal discovery, the brief describes WPATH as “no normal medical organization” because they did not base their guidelines on a proper systematic evidence review.
We can therefore expect Marshall’s office to continue producing evidence of WPATH’s organizational hubris and total disregard for scientific medical ethics. This scandal is already too big for the media establishment to ignore — and it still has room to grow.