As the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and Federal Trade Commission sue each other for First Amendment retaliation and deceptive trade practices, respectively, a broader question looms: Has WPATH pulled the financial rug out from so-called gender-affirming care to defeat the federal government?WPATH, the creator of the 2022 “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People,” now claims the SOC-8 guidelines – covertly and crucially shaped by the Biden administration pertaining to minors – are just “statements of opinion,” not settled science, and that states have the prerogative to regulate the industry.
WPATH’s surprising concessions, in its July 28 motion to dismiss the FTC lawsuit, were flagged Aug. 10 by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Its generally liberal members played a leading role in the Trump administration’s systematic review of youth-gender medicine, concluding that such interventions are not supported.
“It’s possible the FTC just got its win, regardless of how this case turns out,” the Manhattan Institute’s gender-medicine researcher Leor Sapir wrote.
By conceding the “medical and scientific uncertainty” around treatment for minors specifically – quoting the Supreme Court’s ruling for Tennessee’s ban on the practice – WPATH gave insurers ammunition to deny claims for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries and judges and doctors reason not to defer to WPATH claims, Sapir said.
The organization undermined its own arguments before SCOTUS against Tennessee’s ban, that the “widely accepted view of the professional medical community” is that gender-affirming care is “appropriate” and even “necessary” for some adolescents, said Alliance Defending Freedom President Kristen Waggoner.
WPATH even compared SOC-8 to the gender-critical talk therapy derided by gender-affirming care proponents as “conversion therapy” but upheld by the Supreme Court, saying each is free speech even if critics deem them “substandard care,” SEGM marveled.
“Overnight, WPATH went from defender of the medical consensus to one voice among many in a disputed debate,” Waggoner said, illustrating that “the case for childhood medical ‘transition’ is in full-scale collapse.”
The dam started to break for WPATH’s reputation when its leaked discussion forum showed members swapping stories about young patients or colleagues developing life-threatening medical conditions or even dying after years of treatment, not just the sexual dysfunction and developmental problems already revealed by research and federal guidance.
A lawsuit against Alabama’s similar ban on treatment for minors subsequently revealed that then-Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine successfully pressured WPATH to remove age minimums from the SOC-8 draft, which Levine warned would “result in devastating legislation for trans care,” in the words of Levine’s chief of staff.
The author of the email acceding to Levine’s pressure, directed to “Rachel,” was unmasked this week as then-WPATH President Walter Bouman, when gender medicine journalist Ben Ryan obtained and published the unredacted version. Bouman signed it “in servitude, Walter.”
The unredacted email also reveals who else was involved with removing age minimums outside the Delphi consensus method WPATH claimed to use: adolescent chapters’ working group leaders Annelou de Vries and Scott Leibowitz, and SOC-8 chair Eli Coleman and co-chairs Asa Radix and Jon Arcelus.
Judicial Watch sued for related Levine communications when the Department of Health and Human Services ignored its Freedom of Information Act request. Another Judicial Watch document production uncovered evidence that gender-transition providers obfuscated, misled and threatened the media when their procedures on children came under scrutiny.
