Opinion

The Secret History Of WPATH, The Perverse Cult That Pushed Gender Madness Into The Mainstream

   DailyWire.com
Cunaplus_M.Faba. Getty Images. Shot of the transgender flag blowing in the wind at street
Cunaplus_M.Faba. Getty Images.

When the Sixth Circuit upheld Tennessee’s ban on the chemical castration of children last year, they singled out the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. This is the organization that major hospitals and gender clinics cite as the all-important authority on so-called “trans healthcare.” In fact, in court, the ACLU argued that WPATH’s professional opinions are important enough to overturn the will of the overwhelming majority of voters in the state of Tennessee.

But the Sixth Circuit wasn’t convinced. In its opinion, the court pointed out that WPATH, by its own admission, has presented, “limited data” on the “long-term physical, psychological, and neurodevelopmental outcomes” that result from administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children. In part because WPATH’s data and documentation wasn’t exactly comprehensive, the court allowed the ban on these so-called “treatments” to take effect.

Six months later, we now have a window into what data and documentation WPATH actually does have in its possession. And it’s not “limited,” as they previously admitted.

Instead, this internal documentation at WPATH is comprehensive evidence that so-called “gender-affirming care” is an unscientific scam that ruins the lives of children and permanently damages their bodies. And crucially, the documents prove that WPATH knows it.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

These leaked WPATH files come to us from a think tank called Environmental Progress and the independent journalist Michael Shellenberger. Among the files is this internal communication at WPATH from a doctor concerning a 16-year-old girl who developed liver tumors — large ones — after she was given drugs to suppress menstruation, as well as testosterone: 

[Patient] found to have two liver masses… and the oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones.

In response to that report, another doctor on the WPATH’s discussion forum said that one of his colleagues had developed liver cancer and died after taking testosterone for about a decade: 

To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment,” the doctor wrote. “It was so advanced that he opted for palliative care and died a couple of months later.

At no point in these documents does WPATH suggest that they should go public with these concerns. They don’t immediately run to the media with their determination that cross-sex hormones could contribute to fatal liver cancer. They don’t warn anyone, as far as I can tell. 

Instead, they press on with a plan to mutilate the 16-year-old girl with the liver tumors they’ve apparently caused

We are prepared to support the patient in any way we can (e.g. top surgery when medically stable, etc).

Ghoulish doesn’t begin to describe this. After concluding that they’ve possibly caused tumors in a teenage girl’s liver, their only concern, apparently, is how quickly they can remove her breasts. In fact, from the documents, it appears that WPATH tries to rush these procedures in general, before patients can reach adulthood. 

One surgeon, Christine N. McGinn, boasts that she’s performed more than a dozen “vaginoplasties” on patients under the age of 18. In this context, that means removing a child’s penis, testicles, and scrotum, and replacing them with a non-functioning open wound. The surgeon writes: “I feel the best time for surgery in the U.S. is the summer before their last year of high school.” She also says many other surgeons in this community agree with her.

What makes this even more egregious — as if that’s even possible — is that WPATH knows that children can’t provide informed consent to any of this butchery. They admit to that in these files, as well. Shellenberger obtained this footage, showing WPATH members discussing how little patients understand about these procedures. Parts of this video were made public last year, but Shellenberger obtained the full thing. 

Here are parts of it:

“We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it in a serious way.” That’s just one of many quotes like this from WPATH members. 

Here’s another one: 

[It is] out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. … 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.

Elsewhere in the files, there’s a confession from a therapist that, in 15 years, she’s only turned down one patient for gender treatments — and that’s only because that patient was in active psychosis and started hallucinating during their interview. There are also discussions about boys who began “transitioning” when they were 4-years-old. 

To understand the extent of the barbarism, you need to read the WPATH files for yourself. 

For now, it’s important to emphasize that none of these findings are surprising. They’re unbelievably disturbing, but there’s nothing in here that would surprise anyone who’s done even a cursory look into WPATH. There’s no excuse for any hospital or medical association to listen to a word WPATH says — and that’s been clear for a very long time. 

Reduxx has done extensive work exposing the various perverts who are connected with WPATH, including eunuch fetishists who post their fantasies anonymously on the internet. These are academics who have lectured at WPATH and spoken at conferences, and they’re apparently sexually aroused by the idea of castrating themselves. Imagine entrusting the care of your child to an organization that promotes people like this. They want to castrate themselves, and they want to do the same to your child. It’s unbelievable. But the truth is that, even before these kinds of people became affiliated with WPATH, the organization had no credibility.

WPATH – the organization that major hospitals and medical organizations hold up as the gold standard for “trans healthcare” standards – was a radical cult from the very beginning. 

I’m going to recount WPATH’s sordid history here because to my knowledge, no one has done it before. You need to know what this organization is, and to know that, you need to know where it came from. 

The history of WPATH starts with a gender-confused, new-age, drug-addicted, lesbian rich kid named Rita Erickson, her prolific nudist friend, Zelda Suplee, and the Erickson Educational Foundation, or EEF. Rita Erickson was born in Texas in 1917 to successful business owners Robert and Ruth Erickson. With immense privilege and educational opportunities, ironically at an all-girls high school, Rita grew up to become an engineer and contributed to the continued success of her family’s lead smelting business, ultimately inheriting and selling it for millions of dollars.

In 1963, after her father had passed away, Rita sought to transition into a ‘he’ under the ‘care’ of a quack doctor named Harry Benjamin. Rita changed her name to Reed Erickson, and became the ultimate financial force in the push for mainstream acceptance of transgenderism.

Rita Erickson. aka Reed Erickson. University of Victoria, Canada. "Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation." https://www.uvic.ca/transgenderarchives/collections/reed-erickson/”

University of Victoria, Canada.

Then, in 1964, Erickson launched the EEF to: 

…provide assistance and support in areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imaginative to receive traditionally oriented support.

But despite Rita’s plans to advance “human potential,” her own life was falling apart. Following the mutilation Erickson received under the care of Dr. Benjamin, she had four failed marriages, developed a drug addiction, and ultimately fled from California to Mexico to avoid drug charges. Her daughter had to take on a conservatorship of her estate due to her mental and physical decline. Still, beginning around the time of Erickson’s ‘transition’ and all through her decline, the EEF pushed transgenderism and mutilation-based ‘care’ of gender-confused people under the leadership of its Director, Zelda R. Suplee who was the ‘right hand woman’ to Erickson.

Suplee’s claim to fame was her obsession with nudity. She owned multiple nudist camps, and became the first woman to pose fully nude on the cover of Playboy. She also did psychic research and dabbled in “past life” new-age beliefs.

zagria.blogspot.com. Zelda Suplee. https://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/01/zelda-r-suplee-1908-1989-director-of.html

zagria.blogspot.com.

Under Suplee, the EEF sponsored symposiums to bring fringe doctors together. The organization paid these doctors to travel and spread gender ideology, sponsored programs at colleges to inject transgenderism into academia, and handed out propaganda to doctors, lawyers, police departments, and social workers. The EEF even provided grants to doctors who wanted to pursue gender mutilation, contributing heavily to today’s more mainstream acceptance of this butchery. 

The EEF helped to bankroll the first major gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins University, where Dr. John Money, an EEF board member, worked at the time. The clinic received a reported $85,000 from the EEF. That’s approximately $750,000 in today’s dollars.

The EEF revered Money, calling him one of the “leading scholars and researchers… of our time” in a 1972 newsletter.

https://archive.org/details/newslettervol5eric_l9q0/page/2/mode/2up

https://archive.org

What was John Money doing in 1972 to be celebrated and financed by the EEF? According to Arizona State University, he became infamous for directing twin boys to “inspect one another’s genitals and engage in behavior resembling sexual intercourse.” He also attempted to change one of the boys into a girl. A story you know if you watched “What Is A Woman?” Ultimately, one of the boys shot himself in the head and the other died of a drug overdose.

WATCH: “What Is A Woman?” on DailyWire+

The EEF suspended its operations in 1977, but not before helping fund the Janus Information Facility, or JIF, which overtook much of the EEF’s work. The JIF also absorbed the nudist director of the EEF, Zelda Suplee. The JIF served as a referral service for gender-confused people to find fringe doctors willing to sterilize and mutilate them. Along with Suplee, it was run by the University of Texas’ Dr. Paul Walker, a former Johns Hopkins colleague of Dr. John Money.

Through the late 1970s, bankrolled by the EEF, the Janus Information Facility and Dr. Paul Walker led the continued push to mainstream these extreme surgeries, which were increasingly marked by patient regret and high complication rates.

In 1982, researchers at Yale and the University of Kentucky found that post-operative complications included: 

breast cancer in hormonally-treated males; the need for surgical reduction of bloated limbs resulting from hormones; repeated construction of vaginal openings; infections of the urinary system and rectum; hemorrhaging; loss of skin grafts; post-operative suicides and suicide attempts” and “patient demands to reverse surgery.

Some sex-change patients, the researchers reported:

threatened to shoot the genitals of the surgeon with a shotgun.

Did any of this make Erickson, Suplee, Dr. Paul Walker, Dr. John Money, Dr. Harry Benjamin, or any of their other utterly unhinged counterparts stop? No. They doubled down. 

In 1979, the EEF-funded symposia led to the formation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which took over from the JIF. It was chaired by Dr. Walker, who left the University of Texas thanks to some financial backing from Erickson.

WPATH.org. University of Texas.

WPATH.org. University of Texas.

Dr. Harry Benjamin, the new organization’s namesake, had long been bankrolled by his former patient and funder-extraordinaire, Erickson. Benjamin received $18,000 per year from Erickson (worth approximately $176,000 today). 

In the early years of the Harry Benjamin Association, at the urging of Benjamin, Erickson allowed the EEF to be revived for a year to fund newsletters to get its message out to the masses. But what was it about Benjamin that made him so beloved?

In 1966, Dr. Harry Benjamin authored “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” which inspired this community of fringe doctors. In it, Benjamin acknowledges that fake vaginas are ‘wounds,’ and says these fake vaginas can degrade to the point of being “obliterated and useless for sexual relations.”

Excerpt: The TRANSSEXUAL PHENOMENON, Harry Benjamin, M.D. web.archive.org.

Benjamin also outlines the social motivation behind some “transitions.” In one case, Benjamin writes that a mother was “embarrassed” to be seen with her son in public. But when her son began identifying as a girl, the mother suddenly became “proud” of him – and even found him to be “attractive.” In a particularly creepy passage, Benjamin writes that he could also “verify the attractiveness” of the supposed “young lady.”

The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, led by Dr. Paul Walker, fully recognized its roots in Dr. Harry Benjamin, Reed Erickson, and Zelda Suplee, presenting them with Lifetime Achievement Awards.

And the newly formed Harry Benjamin Association wasted no time creating their first “Standards of Care” in 1979. Despite the ample history of failure and suffering they’d inflicted on people who often had comorbid mental illnesses, they declared themselves arbiters of authority. Their only mild redeeming quality was that they seemed to agree that this sadistic quackery shouldn’t be inflicted upon minors, who were obviously incapable of consent.

In 2000, one of the earliest iterations of the website for the Harry Benjamin Association linked to another website called “Transexual Women’s Resources,” run by one of their early members, Dr. Anne Lawrence who sat on the Standards of Care Committee for the Association. He was, and still is, an admitted autogynephile — which is a paraphilia where a man is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. In a paper, Dr. Lawrence refers to autogynephilia as an “underappreciated” paraphilia.

Few have been as honest about this paraphilia as Dr. Anne Lawrence. In a 1999 version of his website, which the Harry Benjamin Association linked to, he wrote about his personal genital mutilation, saying he very badly wanted to be a “receptacle.” Here’s a sample:

Dr. Nguyen smiles reassuringly, lubes up the smallest dilator, and gently but very quickly slides it into me, a full six inches. I let out an involuntary squeal of surprise, indignation and intense feeling – – it’s not exactly painful, but it’s surely not pleasurable, either. Next, he inserts the 1-1/8 inch dilator. This time I’m ready, and I merely pant loudly, anticipating pain that never comes. However, when he lubes up the 1-1/4 inch dilator, I’m again incredulous: “That will never fit!” But somehow it does. Grinning with insane delight, I pick up my hand mirror and take a good look. There it is, thick as a closet rod, inserted 6 inches into me. For so many years I have longed to be penetrable, to be a vessel, a receptacle: and now I am.

In 1997, Lawrence resigned from a hospital after admitting to a “serious lapse in judgment” involving a patient. According to an incident report, a hospital gynecologist repeatedly told Lawrence the patient, an Ethiopian woman, had not experienced ‘female circumcision.’ But when the gynecologist left the room, Lawrence performed a non-consensual genital exam on the unconscious woman anyway.

How many “trans women” are just men with a paraphiliac sexual arousal of themselves as women? And more concerningly, how many of them who view women as simply a genital “receptacle” are being allowed in the restrooms and locker rooms of actual girls & women? Despite having published this garbage, Dr. Anne Lawrence remained involved in the “Standards of Care” for the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. He was a co-author on the 6th Version of the standards (which was published in 2001). That was the last version published before the organization changed its name in 2007 to WPATH, or The World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Despite the new branding, WPATH continued promoting the same radical gender ideology and sexual paraphilia of its predecessor. The 7th Version of the ‘Standards of Care’ released under the new WPATH name in 2012 (and valid all the way through 2022), continued to reference the work of disgraced Dr. John Money, whose victims killed themselves. WPATH also cited the “receptacle” autogynephile, Dr. Anne Lawrence.

As recently as last year, the WPATH website fully acknowledged, almost proudly, their origin with the EEF, and how its suspending of operations in 1977 directly led this pack of fringe doctors to form the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (now WPATH).

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But despite its sordid history, WPATH is somehow now taken seriously as the standard-setter in the field, by major hospitals and medical associations.

This is maybe the single greatest scam in modern medicine. It’s destroying the lives of children across the country. That much is clear. What’s less clear is why anyone who knows the truth about WPATH’s origin would ever listen to a word they have to say. The WPATH of today is the proud product of decades of quackery and sexual experimentation. It is a threat to public health and in particular to children.

The good news is that there’s a simple solution. The fact that radical activists at WPATH provide “standards of care” doesn’t mean doctors, hospitals, medical schools, or insurance companies have to follow them, or use them for any purpose. Medical professionals have the capability of rejecting barbarism and doing what’s right. They can exercise some level of restraint. It’s happened before. Physicians used to engage in a wide range of practices that we now recognize are gruesome and unethical – like lobotomies, using heroin as a cough syrup, and treating asthma with chloroform.

In time, WPATH’s “standards of care,” and the procedures they endorse, will meet the same fate. WPATH exists because, for years, most people didn’t know about its history, or how its “standards of care” are used. Most people didn’t know that hospitals will perform double mastectomies, and other life-altering operations, on children. All that’s changing now. WPATH, and everything it stands for, has been exposed.

Now it’s time for the medical profession to do what it should have done long ago, and shut down these con-artists once and for all.

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