The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) is the world’s preeminent transgender medical organization and a leading force in the push for minors to receive transgender medical interventions, including sex-change surgeries. The group’s medical guidance, called the Standards of Care Version 8, informs clinical practice, insurance policy, and government regulations throughout the United States.
Systematic reviews and legal investigation have shown the SOC-8 to be built on faulty methodology and politicized science. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against WPATH in June 2026, stating the organization has “misled parents and children about the medical consensus and medical necessity, as well as the safety and effectiveness” of child sex-change interventions.
WPATH members receive access to a member-only forum that discusses various topics related to transgender medicine and policy. Through a public records request The Daily Wire uncovered almost 250 pages of messages from WPATH’s member-only forum written between June 2024 and November 2024. The messages offer a glimpse into the organization’s cultural reach and challenge some of its public-facing recommendations.
This is the third article in The Daily Wire’s investigative series on the uncovered WPATH messages.
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World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) members discussed how to help female inmates overcome “internalized transphobia” and learn to affirm “transgender” men living in women’s prisons.
Michelle Webb, a gender affirming program administrator for the Washington State Department of Corrections, suggested female inmates have “open and frank” discussions with “trained staff” to better understand the needs of men wanting to “live their authentic lives” in women’s prisons, messages from the WPATH online member forum show.
“The cis female population should have open and frank discussions with trained staff, with community experts, to understand why the [transgender and gender diverse] females want to be in an affirmative environment,” wrote Webb in the online forum. “They [are] not trying to take resources; they are not getting ‘more than’ cis females, they are just looking to live their authentic lives and have equity.”
Screenshot of messages from a WPATH member forum obtained through a public record request.
Webb explained many men had a difficult time integrating into women’s prison and were “not accepted by the cis females.”
“[Transgender and gender diverse] females living in the cis female facilities have all mentioned something they call the ‘mask’ meaning the mask they wore in the male facilities, the mask that kept them safe, it allowed them to blend in and not draw attention to themselves,” wrote Webb. “When individuals were moved to the female facilities, they found it difficult to drop the mask and this made their integration into the female facilities extremely difficult, they were often not accepted by the cis females and on occasion were ostracized.”
WPATH’s medical guidance, the Standards of Care Version 8, has been cited in multiple lawsuits demanding prison systems implement policies that affirm gender ideology and provide “gender-affirming” healthcare.
Amie Ichikawa, an ambassador at Independent Women and co-founder of the nonprofit Woman II Woman, told The Daily Wire transgender activists have treated female inmates as “support animals,” forcing them to cater “to the fleeting feelings of male inmates who identify as women.”
“Departments of Corrections across the country have let WPATH bully them into sacrificing female prisoners to be used like support animals,” Ichikawa said. “Never, at any point, should a woman need to be reprogrammed to accommodate a male inmate. This is just a peek into the female future if we do not stop this attack on their existence.”
Ichikawa says the effort to include men in women’s prison is making incarcerated women “invisible.”
“Prison is already a difficult place to be. The aggressive, forced acceptance of gender ideology as some kind of state-sanctioned religion has pushed incarcerated women completely out of the spectrum of concern,” Ichikawa told The Daily Wire. “They barely had any visibility or relevance before this started trending, so they are almost invisible now.”
Screenshot of messages from a WPATH member forum obtained through a public record request.
The Daily Wire obtained the WPATH forum messages through a public record request to the Washington Department of Corrections, which has some of the most radical transgender prison policies in the nation. Washington State is being investigated by the Department of Justice for forcing women to be housed with men, in possible violation of their constitutional right to safe incarceration. The America First Policy Institute filed a lawsuit against the Washington Department of Corrections in April 2026 that alleges two women living in a Washington State Women’s prison were assaulted by a “six-foot-four, ‘biologically intact’ male” with a history of violence against women, housed in a women’s prison because he self-identifies as female.
Leigh Ann O’Neill, America First’s chief legal affairs officer, told The Daily Wire women should be able to rely on corrections staff to prioritize their physical safety over the feelings of men.
“While women incarcerated in state prisons should be able to rely on corrections officials to protect their physical safety and support their rehabilitation, these officials were instead coordinating with WPATH over ways to make male inmates feel more comfortable in women’s prisons,” O’Neill said.
“These emails raise serious questions about the influence WPATH has exerted over correctional policies affecting some of the most vulnerable women in government custody,” she added. “Female inmates should never be treated as collateral damage in the pursuit of an ideological agenda. Department of Corrections has a legal and moral duty to protect the women in their custody from foreseeable physical and sexual harm — not to prioritize the comfort of male inmates over the safety, dignity, and rights of women.”
Webb’s comments were in response to a post by a psychologist who asked WPATH members what skills “transgender” males needed to learn to adapt to life in women’s prisons and find “joy in their identities,” records show.
“I am still trying to identify all the things transgender women need to know about being in a female facility versus what they learned in a male facility,” wrote the psychologist. “I am open to ideas that folks have, things they have heard from women about what they learned about how to do time in a women’s facility.”
A screenshot of a message obtained through a public record request by The Daily Wire.
The psychologist said they were designing a transgender integration unit to help men adapt to life in a women’s prison for the Colorado Department of Corrections, writing that “cultural forces” worked against men trying to integrate into women’s prison.
“There are structural and cultural forces acting against their individual success,” the psychologist wrote. “We can train staff all we want but the larger culture and social beliefs impact how custody staff behave. There are cultural issues that transgender women will have to face no matter how much we train the staff or other incarcerated people.”
The Colorado transgender integration unit was created as part of a settlement from a class action lawsuit filed by transgender inmates who claimed they faced discrimination in Colorado prisons.
The Washington Department of Corrections did not respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment.
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