Internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which purports to be a medical association that develops “standards” for transgender treatment, show members engaging in fly-by-night, experimental treatments — contradicting the public line that its recommendations are governed by evidence and science.
The research group Environmental Progress analyzed hundreds of pages of internal posts and videos after they were obtained by its founder, journalist Michael Shellenberger.
It concluded that the nominally scientific group was nothing more than an unethical activist group that existed to give cover to doctors who didn’t want to be sued by allowing them to say they were just following experts’ standards.
“’Standard of care’ is a legal term, not a medical term, and represents ‘the benchmark that determines whether professional obligations to patients have been met.’ Failure to meet the standard of care is medical negligence, which can result in significant consequences for healthcare providers,” it said.
The low-barrier gender-transitioning of youth consists of “medical malpractice” that violates the Hippocratic Oath and “causes harm without justification, and its victims are some of society’s most vulnerable people,” the report added.
Though the internal discussions show WPATH members essentially experimenting on young people, WPATH publicly says its procedures are not experimental, which allows them to be covered by insurance — which, in practice, enables the wide-scale deployment of them.
Environmental Progress called for “reputable medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the American Medical Association (AMA) to cut ties with the organization and to abandon its guidelines in favor of ethical, evidence-based medicine.”
In earlier decades, as men who tried to become women complained that they weren’t persuasively “passing,” activist medical providers tried to address that by having them transition before undergoing puberty. But Dianne Berg, a child psychologist and co-author of the child chapter of the group’s so-called Standards of Care, acknowledged that youth often didn’t actually understand what they were consenting to.
“They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair,” Berg said.
The consequences include not being able to have children. Dr. Daniel Metzger, a Canadian endocrinologist, acknowledged that the people he was explaining the procedures to often “haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” and that when he mentions kids to a 14-year-old, they say “ew.” Years later, he said he sees patients and “I’m like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, is it?’”
Nonetheless, WPATH has reduced the body of evidence from psychologists that is necessary before performing surgery — even as some practitioners seem to rubber-stamp letters as a form of advocacy.
One California marriage and family therapist said she has written letters approving of gender surgery for every single person who has asked, including mentally ill people, except for one because “the person evaluated was in active psychosis and hallucinated during the assessment session.”
Providers seemed to do little follow-up afterwards and simply assumed the best, with her saying that “everyone got their assessment letter, insurance approval, and are living (presumably) happily ever after.”
When youth changed their mind about gender surgery, they didn’t describe it as regret, but as just another phase in their “gender journey,” absolving the providers of having enabled a calamitous mistake, the report said.
Some people who were put on hormones seemingly developed cancer as a result. And even in the best case, the fake genitals didn’t work.
WPATH President Marci Bowers admitted that she had never seen a boy whose puberty was blocked achieve orgasm as a transgender woman — meaning people who risk their lives to become the opposite sex wind up having no sexual experience at all. Other WPATH members talked about how common it was to have bleeding after sex, pain, and odorous discharge.
Environmental Progress said that transgender activists are fixated on cosmetic outcomes that side-step the ultimate purpose of looking attractive, which is attracting mates. One paper on puberty blockers mentioned height — boys who wanted to become women and not look odd by being tall — 23 times. But the words orgasm, libido, and sexuality do not appear in the paper at all.
The report said the overall tenor of WPATH was clearly not that of a scientific or medical group, but rather of activists who had convinced the rest of the world that they were one, and that any judgments about transgenderism should be deferred to them as the “experts.”
Stephen B. Levine, who was in charge of the WPATH Standards of Care in the 1990s, resigned his membership due to his “regretful conclusion that the organization and its recommendations had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific process, as it was years earlier.”
It now uses an “informed consent model of care,” which essentially means that if a patient says they want gender surgery, they can have it.
Yet the internal message boards suggest that even doctors don’t know exactly what a consenting person has in store for them. WPATH’s members often took to message boards to ask how to deal with gender transitions, and received advice about what “might” work, and essentially trotted out remedies on a lark.
In contrast to objective medical groups, there was evidence that its members were willing to cut corners and work around rules, with one saying that she billed the Department of Veterans Affairs for treating transgender patients by calling it something else. “If they weren’t paying out of pocket, I was still billing the VA but for PTSD,” she said.
Like other WPATH members, she sought to lower the barriers to access gender surgery, while downplaying its risks. “Therapy is not required, hormones are cheap, and surgery, well that’s a one-time event,” she wrote.