Michael Cook
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator
Amongst the dozens of themes covered by President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address was a big shout-out for the transgender lobby: “my message to transgender Americans: I have your back!”
No doubt about that, none whatsoever. Biden’s record is unequivocal. He appointed Admiral Rachel Levine as US Assistant Secretary for Health, the nation’s highest ranking transgender official. And he appointed Sam Brinton, a non-binary drag queen, as a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Energy. (Later Brinton was dismissed after being charged with stealing women’s luggage at airports on three occasions.)
Biden has swallowed the trans narrative whole, without a hiccup. Last year, a White House fact sheet stated firmly that, “There is conclusive scientific evidence that affirming a transgender or LGBTQI+ child’s identity is vital to protecting their mental health.”
This is, to put it mildly, hogwash.
An explosive leak of documents from the leading global transgender healthcare body has revealed that the clinicians who shape how “gender medicine” is regulated and practiced around the world consistently violate medical ethics and informed consent.
Leaked files from the internal messaging forum of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) were published this week by the US-based think tank Environmental Progress.
The revelations are shocking, sometimes stomach-churning, but news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have so far ignored them.
WPATH is considered the leading global scientific and medical authority on “gender medicine”. In recent decades, its “standards of care” have guided the policies and practices of governments, medical associations, public health systems and private clinics across the world.
However, Environmental Progress claims that WPATH does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along. Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of “gender-affirming care,” and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.
“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” said Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress. “The experiments are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled. It’s not medicine since the first rule is to do no harm. And that requires informed consent.”
Much of the discussion in the messages is incredibly disturbing.
Members appear to ignore long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments. Patients with severe mental health issues, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and other vulnerabilities such as homelessness, are being allowed to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions.
Members dismiss concerns about these patients and characterize efforts to protect them as unnecessary “gatekeeping.”
Doctors and therapists are aware they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. Yet they consider life-altering medical interventions for young patients, including vaginoplasty for a 14-year-old and hormones for a developmentally delayed 13-year-old.
The WPATH files also show how far medical experiments in gender medicine have gone, with discussions about surgeons performing “nullification” – removing all of the external genitals to present a sexless body — and other extreme body modification procedures to create body types that do not exist in nature.
A growing number of medical and psychiatric professionals say the promotion of pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments is a global medical scandal that compares to major medical malpractice scandals, such as lobotomies and ovariotomies.
A section in the report on medical ethics is particularly damning about the notion of autonomy. “In the past, the emphasis on autonomy in medical ethics was meant to act as a shield: there were things a doctor could not do to you without your consent,” says the report. “Nowadays, and especially in gender medicine, autonomy acts as a sword: in its name, there is nothing a doctor may deny you.”
After reading the leaked documents, it’s clear that the highly-praised WPATH guidelines are the work of crazed ideologues. Their treatments are largely experimental and based on weak evidence. In fact, the report from Environmental Progress concludes that:
“The group exists solely to shield doctors from legal liability, through the creation of guidelines it conveniently calls ‘standards of care,’ and to ensure insurance coverage for sex-trait modification procedures.”
Dr Marci Bowers, the president of WPATH, issued a brief, defiant and vacuous response to these “scare tactics”. She boasted that trans medicine is scientific and that sceptics aren’t:
“WPATH is and has always been a science- and evidence-based organization whose recommendations are widely endorsed by major medical organizations around the world. We are the professionals who best know the medical needs of trans and gender diverse individuals – and stand opposed to individuals who misrepresent and de-legitimize the diverse identities and complex needs of this population.”
Even Joe Biden, though, might be taken aback by the next few words in Dr Bowers’ letter: “The world is not flat. Gender, like genitalia, is represented by diversity.”
We’ve all heard of the controversial notion of gender diversity. But genitalia diversity? Yes, WPATH has actually given this a thumbs-up. Its Standards of Care discuss “penile-preserving vaginoplasty and vaginoplasty with preservation of the testicle(s)” (page S87). In other words, WPATH surgeons are willing to operate on males who want both male and female genitalia.
This is straight out of The Island of Dr Moreau. Where is the “conclusive scientific evidence” for this, Mr Biden?
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