One of the arguments you hear a lot in the debate over gender ideology, across the political spectrum, is that adults should be able to do what they want. This is the supposedly “moderate” position. Several presidential candidates believe it. Millions of Americans believe it, too. As long as you stay away from the kids, they tell you, then there’s no problem. The moment you hit 18-years-old, do what you want. “Live your truth.”
It’s not hard to see why that position is tempting for so many people. Children obviously can’t consent to life-altering procedures, including genital mutilation and castration. Adults, on the other hand, are able to consent to a lot of things. They can vote, buy guns, and serve in the military. So, if they want to pay a doctor to carve up their bodies, then what’s the big deal? That’s the argument you hear again and again.
No one really means it, though. And you know that because none of the people making that argument would use the same reasoning to justify, say, lobotomies. If you walked into a doctor’s office today and asked him to drill a hole in your head and sever your prefrontal cortex in order to make you feel better about your life, he’d say no. If he did it, he’d lose his license. No amount of informed consent — no matter how old you were — could possibly justify it. It’s barbaric. Tens of thousands of people’s lives were ruined by lobotomies. And everyone recognizes that now. No one’s marching in defense of “lobotomy-affirming care.”
So, if you defend these gruesome “gender-affirming” procedures on adults, you’re not really saying that adults should be able to do what they want. You’re saying that, yes, people can change their sex if they want. You’re conceding that these procedures — slicing up a woman’s arm to make a fake penis, lopping off healthy breasts, grafting fake nipples onto patients’ chests, et cetera — are medically reasonable. And in the absence of any kind of statistical data about positive long-term outcomes of these surgeries, you’re trusting the doctors to follow an established standard of care. You’re assuming they’re not going to just mutilate anyone who walks in the door, without regard for what happens to these people afterwards.
The problem is that the entire industry of “gender affirming care” is a scam. We know that because we just spent weeks investigating the largest providers of so-called “trans healthcare” in the country. We went undercover at one of them.
What we found is that there are no real “standards of care” governing any of this. To be clear, there are “standards of care” on paper, and they’re provided by the transgender activist group WPATH. WPATH’s standards are used by major hospitals in this country, including UCLA, UCSF, and Mass General, just to name a few.
How rigorous are these standards, exactly? After a 22-minute video call, the largest “trans healthcare” provider in the country — carefully following the WPATH guidelines — approved one of my producers, Gregg Re, for an orchiectomy. That means testicle removal. Now, 22 minutes would be a record time to get approved for an orchiectomy if you had a real medical reason for it, like testicular cancer. It’s insane to approve any serious procedure that quickly, having just met a patient on a video call for the first time. But that’s what happened.
We recorded the whole call. At no point did anyone at this health care provider, which is called “Plume,” push back in any way. They didn’t suggest that maybe, this was a rash course of action. They didn’t verify any of the information Gregg provided, including his fake legal name. All “Plume” did was insist that he pay $150. If Gregg did that, they promised to write him a medically sound letter in support of life-altering surgery. That letter, under the WPATH standards, is required for anyone trying to get transgender surgery in the United States. You have to get one of these letters from a healthcare provider and present it to your surgeon. And Plume rubber-stamped Gregg’s letter in 22 minutes. And not all of that time was spent discussing the surgery, by the way. Some of the conversation was about traffic, and the weather.
We’ve uploaded footage of the call on Twitter. In this video call, Gregg assumed the name “Chelsea Bussey.” He did not dress up as a woman. He didn’t wear any women’s clothing or makeup. He didn’t go to Party City and dye his hair blue. He just told them he identified as a woman and that he was taking hormones prescribed by his father. Gregg couldn’t even pronounce the name of the surgery he wanted, calling it an “orchi-dect-omy.” He claimed at one point that the reason he wanted the surgery is that it would speed up his nonexistent transition, which the Plume nurse said didn’t make any sense from a medical perspective. But none of this raised any red flags for Plume. The nurse told Gregg she wanted to write him the strongest letter she could. Watch:
10/ Plume quickly scheduled Gregg for a video interview anyway. He assumed the identity "Chelsea Bussey.” He didn’t even attempt to pass. He badly mispronounced the name of the surgery he wanted. He made it clear he didn't know what effect the surgery would have. pic.twitter.com/ph8UbM3i6r
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 7, 2023
11/ Nevertheless, Plume’s nurse practitioner said she wanted to write the most "solid" letter possible to justify surgery. Gregg tells her that he once wrote an essay in school about being a woman, which everyone thought was ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/iY7Ec3Q1wd
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 7, 2023
12/ Gregg also tells Plume’s nurse practitioner that his father has been prescribing him hormones for years. The nurse doesn’t question this in any way. Instead, she says that arrangement is “perfect.” pic.twitter.com/YsB4BEkUpu
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 7, 2023
A couple days after that interview, as we documented on Twitter, Plume sent Gregg a letter diagnosing him with significant and ongoing gender dysphoria. Therefore, Plume said, he was an “appropriate candidate for Orchiectomy.” According to Plume, testicle removal would help Gregg make “significant progress” in alleviating his dysphoria. Even after Gregg followed up with text messages to Plume, explaining that he doesn’t have dysphoria, they didn’t retract or amend that letter in any way.
13/ Three days later, Plume sent this letter to "Chelsea Bussey” – who does not exist — saying he was experiencing "significant, ongoing gender dysphoria.” The letter strongly recommended “Chelsea” for testicle removal. pic.twitter.com/WzIMsjygS6
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 7, 2023
There’s no excuse for that. Plume had multiple opportunities to tell the truth in their letter, and they chose not to. In his intake form, Gregg indicated he didn’t have dysphoria for 6 months or more. That means, under the current version of the DSM, he never should have been diagnosed with it in the first place. But Plume never once asked Gregg about this in his video interview. Instead they just said he had dysphoria in his letter, which they intended to be used by a surgeon who would then carve up Gregg’s testicles.
Why didn’t Plume amend the letter once they were made aware that Gregg didn’t have dysphoria? As Plume’s nurse explained, “in order for the surgery to be paid for,” the diagnosis would need to remain. In other words, insurance companies won’t pay for the operation unless the letter contains a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. That’s why Plume uses templates that include the gender dysphoria diagnostic code. It appears that they plug whatever information patients feed them into the template, whether or not those patients actually have the diagnosis. The templates are provided by WPATH, by the way — Plume admitted that to us.
It’s not hard to conclude that this operation is fraudulent, but what do insurers think of it? What’s Aetna and United Healthcare’s position on paying for surgeries based on cooked-up diagnostic codes? How about Cigna? We understand those insurance companies work directly with Plume. What about David Sacks, whose venture capital firm is one of many that’s funding Plume? What are his thoughts on this? Is he aware this is happening? Those are good questions.
But the problem is much bigger than Plume. They’re far from the only ones doing this.
Folx, for example, is a major competitor of Plume. They’re in almost every state in the country. They’re also extremely well-funded by venture capitalists. Folx, like Plume, also sells letters used to authorize surgeries under the WPATH guidelines. On their website, Folx admits, “It’s quite possible the information in a letter may not be specific to you. For example, they may use a gender dysphoria diagnosis, but you really do not have dysphoria… You may not fit this diagnostic code exactly, but in some cases, the code is needed in order for insurers to pay for the surgery.” We reached out to Folx to ask about this. They confirmed that a “diagnosis” — in scare quotes — was necessary in order for insurance companies to pay out.
Again, that’s probably news to the insurance companies. But the bigger issue, of course, is what’s happening to the patients who are mutilated as part of this process. It’s not just Plume and Folx who are authorizing surgeries like this. There’s a whole network of doctors who crank out these letters. It’s called the Gender Affirmative Letter Access Project, or G.A.L.A.P.
Think of the lives these doctors and these companies are destroying for profit. If they’ll approve Gregg for castration, they’ll approve anyone. Many of the luminaries in the field will admit that, by the way. On Twitter, we highlighted this training session from the Juniper Center, which is one of the largest gender therapy practices in the Chicago land area. Watch as the licensed clinical social worker, named Ari Groner, explains that she’ll rubber-stamp whatever letter patients want. She says she’ll even authorize a suicidal patient for surgery, because she’s not a “gatekeeper.” In fact, Groner says that if her patient is suicidal, that would just make the case for surgery even stronger. Listen to this:
2/ First, some background. Ari Groner is a licensed clinical social worker who educates doctors on “trans healthcare.” At a recent training session for the Juniper Center, Groner explained that she writes whatever letters her patients want, because she’s not a “gatekeeper.” pic.twitter.com/8CVUWiYetY
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 7, 2023
If you’re defending “gender affirming care” for adults, this is what you’re supporting. You’re saying it’s reasonable for medical professionals to listen to a suicidal patient, who isn’t thinking clearly, and approve them for surgical castration within minutes. You’re saying there should be no barriers to this kind of mutilation, whatsoever. At that point, why not bring back lobotomies? What’s the serious, principled argument against it?
No serious person can defend this industry. It’s completely corrupted, at every level. It’s not just targeting children, although it’s certainly doing that as well. The underlying claims and promises of the entire “gender affirmation” industry are lies, and the lies are propped up by even more lies. And we’ll have much more on WPATH soon, and how they became so prominent in this field. It’s a truly disturbing story. Their supposedly rigorous standards of care are purpose-built to be manipulated, as we’ve now revealed.
The practical effect of these WPATH standards isn’t to protect patients. Instead, the WPATH standards protect doctors who butcher their patients. These doctors understand that they need to follow some “standard of care,” or else they’ll eventually get sued into the ground for malpractice by the patients they’re disfiguring. So medical providers point to the WPATH standards, and say, “look — we followed those standards. These gruesome surgeries are in fact legitimate medical care!”
Now it’s time to put an end to this. Insurance companies should cut off these providers. Investors should stop funding this barbarism. And at the political level, we need laws so that any doctor who mutilates patients, or lies to insurance companies, goes to prison — regardless of the patients’ age. Florida recently passed a law outlawing, among other things, “trans telehealth” services. They require in-person visits for most of these procedures. That’s a start — which is why the media and the trans activists are furious about it. They’re probably going to sue to block that portion of the law, just like they blocked the part of the law outlawing child castration yesterday.
But once people see the truth about what’s happening, the radical gender activists won’t win that fight. That’s why we published our investigation today. The truth is obvious and undeniable. Now that the “standards of care” have been exposed for what they are, there’s nothing to stop a flood of lawsuits that could shut down these butchers. We saw it in the U.K. with Tavistock. If something like that happens here, it could save tens of thousands of lives.
This investigation is just one part of what we have planned for Pride Month. We’re going to expose the full extent of the depravity that you’re told to believe is “medically legitimate.” We’re going to show you the truth behind all the euphemisms. We’re going to reveal how exactly activists have managed to hijack the medical profession so they can mutilate patients for profit.
This is just the beginning.