A leaked video and documents exposing the inner workings of the organization responsible for setting the so-called standards of care for gender transition treatments and surgeries on children are “shocking” and “horrific,” critics have said.
Environmental Progress, a nonprofit organization founded and led by Michael Shellenberger, obtained the files and released them to the public in an exposé on March 4.
The files show WPATH doctors and other medical practitioners privately acknowledging that they’re not getting proper informed consent from parents and children before proceeding with gender transition treatments and surgeries, prominent civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon told The Epoch Times.
Ms. Dhillon, the founder and CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which is representing several women who’ve allegedly suffered harm and irreversible damage as a result of WPATH’s recommendations of transgender surgery for gender dysphoric children and young adults, called the exposé “an important act of journalism.”
“These leaked files show that behind closed doors, WPATH members are admitting to the fact that they’re not getting informed consent for hormonal and surgical interventions from young patients, which is the very premise of our litigation for young women who’ve been mutilated by these doctors when they were children,” she said.
The Report
WPATH advocates that children have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to alter their bodies to align with their gender identities, according to the report. This suggests that children should be able to understand the full ramifications of these drugs and procedures and that their parents can provide informed consent.“But while WPATH publicly supports minors and their families consenting to these hormonal and surgical treatments based on a nebulous inner sense of self, privately, some members admit that consent is not possible,” the report reads. “Behind closed doors, WPATH-affiliated healthcare professionals confess that their practices are based on improvisation, that children cannot comprehend them, and that the consent process is not ethical.”
In video footage of an internal WPATH panel, Dianne Berg, a child psychologist, said experts wouldn’t expect children and youth to fully understand the effects of transgender procedures, because it is “out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them,” according to the report.
“What really disturbs me is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for,” Ms. Berg said. She suggested encouraging patients to ask questions and offering a “real informed consent process” rather than what was happening.
Jamison Green, an activist and former WPATH president, told the panel that sometimes patients avoid learning important information about procedures out of fear.
“People also are afraid many times about surgery, and so they can read other people’s descriptions about surgery, and they’ll miss details, or they’ll miss the most important piece of information for them simply because they’re afraid to read it,” he said.
Dr. Daniel Metzger, a Canadian endocrinologist, said gender doctors are “often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.” He added that even adults have limited knowledge of many of these medical interventions.
WPATH guidance states that doctors must inform patients about “the potential loss of fertility and available options to preserve fertility.”
But Dr. Metzger told the panel: “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. ... Most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about [fertility preservation] in a serious way.”
‘They’re Doing It Anyway’
Informed consent is a well-known prerequisite for ethical medical treatments and procedures, yet “the so-called transgender medical community” in the United States continues to prescribe this “gender-affirming care” for children, Ms. Dhillon said.“They’re doing it anyway,” she said. “The WPATH medical practitioners are fully aware that the gender-affirming care they’re pushing is based on shaky and inadequate medical research, but they continue to push it, ignoring the growing body of scientific evidence that is distancing mainstream medicine from these procedures.”
The leaked video also reveals that what WPATH is stating publicly is the opposite of what its members are saying privately, Ms. Dhillon said.
“They know what they’re doing is wrong and that’s what they say to each other behind closed doors. They’re not getting proper informed consent. It’s not working,” she said. “We’re enabling, through WPATH’s quack medicine ideology, 9-year-olds to decide that they’re able to change their gender.”
“Gender-affirming” doctors and politicians in California, for example, continue to push puberty blockers as safe, effective, and reversible treatments and the only way to prevent suicide among gender dysphoric youth, but the facts say otherwise, according to Ms. Dhillon.
The Center for American Liberty litigation has shed light on the fact that puberty blockers are “absolutely permanently damaging,” she said.
“Every day, detransitioners come out and announce that they’ve been told by their doctors [they] can’t have children,” she said. “All of our clients who have this so-called treatment have permanently altered voices. They can’t reverse that even though they stopped taking the hormones.”
She said this is all being justified and underwritten by pseudo-medical standards even when doctors privately and openly admit they don’t know all the long-term effects of their “radical procedures” or how to deal with them.
The exposé shows that a WPATH member confirmed that fertility and sexual pleasure could be destroyed for young patients undergoing these procedures, Ms. Dhillon said.
In any other field of medicine, doctors’ cutting off body parts “and then saying they don’t really know what the long-term effects of that are” would be considered “completely outrageous,” but in “this sexual experimentation field,” the same standards of care don’t seem to apply, she said.
WPATH Statement
WPATH President Dr. Marci Bowers, issued the following statement on March 5:“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 through scare tactics. The world is not flat. Gender, like genitalia, is represented by diversity. The small percentage of the population that is trans or gender diverse deserves healthcare and will never be a threat to the global gender binary.”
Blaine Vella, executive director for WPATH, stated in a memo to association members on March 5:
“This is and will continue to be our response to any media outreach. If any of you receive inquiries from the media, we request that you do not respond, send the request to us ... and our media partners will respond with the statement above.”
WPATH did not respond to an Epoch Times request for comment about the allegations.
‘A Giant Experiment’
Erin Friday, an attorney and co-leader of Our Duty, an international group that opposes gender ideology, especially exposing children and young adults to it, told The Epoch Times that the WPATH Files are an admission that gender transition procedures are “a giant experiment.”Ms. Friday referred to the case of a 16-year-old girl from the report who developed large tumors on her liver after taking testosterone and other medications, and an oncologist and surgeon both indicated the hormones were the likely reason for the cancer, according to the report. Many other known or potential complications and other related medical conditions were also discussed in the document, along with evidence of a lack of research.
“There have never been any properly controlled trials in the wider field of gender medicine, which also consistently lacks long-term data,” the report reads.
“Gender-affirming” doctors don’t question a patient’s comorbidities, especially in matters of mental health, even though WPATH’s recommendations state that the goal of “gender-affirming care” is to partner with people who identify as transgender and gender diverse “to holistically address their social, mental, and medical health needs and well-being while respectfully affirming their gender identity,” Ms. Friday said.
“They push aside any patient mental health issue, regardless of whether it’s severe schizophrenia or a dissociative disorder,” she said. “They know that these people ... have severe mental health issues and they transition them anyway.”
Ms. Friday, whose daughter formerly identified as transgender but has since accepted being female, said she anticipates the WPATH Files will lead to congressional hearings.
The WPATH Files reveal much more than an organization that has overstepped its bounds, she said.
“They have admitted to medical malpractice. They have admitted to lying,” she claimed.
Hospital boards and medical societies, Ms. Friday said, would be “well-advised” to use the leaked WPATH Files as “an off-ramp,” to move away from such harmful practices.
In most states, the WPATH “standards of care” are the only treatment allowed, which includes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, social transitioning, and ultimately top and bottom surgeries, Ms. Anderson said.
“It is illegal in most states to actually offer another treatment avenue, which is crazy,” she said.
Another “absolutely horrifying” aspect of the leaked files is WPATH’s admission that “they’re conducting these radical life-altering procedures on individuals with severe mental health disorders,” she said.
Ms. Anderson, now the director of psychology and co-director of ethics and advocacy for the American Association of Christian Counselors, which bills itself as the world’s largest faith-based mental health organization, said “gender-affirming care” policies have hamstrung therapists from being able to talk freely with patients about gender dysphoria and have trampled free speech.
But, like other critics, she said she expects that the WPATH Files exposé will lead to congressional hearings and more litigation to restore free speech so therapists can do their jobs.
“Psychotherapy is speech. That’s what we do. We talk,” she said. “And so when there is this ban against talking and exploring someone’s gender dysphoria, we’re not even allowed to ask questions about it or explore it.”
WPATH doctors admitting they know children cannot give informed consent is “a huge deal,” she said.
“That is actually one of the reasons why I had my license threatened in California. I spoke before a school board about how teaching children about transgender ideology is inappropriate and dangerous because they can’t begin to comprehend all that goes into a transgender identity and transformation,” she said. “And what the WPATH Files expose is that I was right, essentially, that when they undergo these gender treatments, they cannot give informed consent.”
WPATH members acknowledged not only that children can’t grasp the scope of what’s going to happen to them with these treatments, but also that the parents can’t, and that they’re not disclosing all the risks and dangers associated with them “because they don’t know what they are,” she said.
There isn’t enough research to determine the long-term effects of such treatments and procedures, and the research that does exist shows that a “watch and wait” treatment is best because a vast majority of gender dysphoric minors outgrow the condition and accept their natural bodies, she said.
Worst Medical Scandal in History?
In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, a well-known Canadian psychologist and author, Mr. Shellenberger said he was unfamiliar with WPATH at first.“I thought maybe people were exaggerating what was happening,” he said.
Then, “a source or sources” gave him about 170 pages of the internal files from the discussion boards of WPATH, along with the video of WPATH leaders and members talking about some of the problems they were encountering.
“These files put to rest any doubts anybody should have that what is happening is one of the greatest medical mistreatment scandals in human history,” he said. “It might be the worst. It’s certainly up there with lobotomies. It’s up there with the Tuskegee experiments.”
Mr. Peterson responded, “It’s way worse than both of those.”
The WPATH Files show “without a shadow of a doubt” that the people who are performing these “mistreatments” are not getting informed consent, Mr. Shellenberger said.
“And then they just sort of throw up their hands and they say, ‘We don’t really know how to solve this problem.’ At no point in the video does anybody say, ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,’” he said. “There’s a basic horror to it, but then at the intellectual level, you can’t help but be slightly fascinated by these people. What is wrong with them that they’re so in the grip of an ideology that they’re doing these mistreatments and never questioning ... that perhaps they shouldn’t be doing them at all?”
Mr. Peterson referenced Ken Zucker, a psychologist whose studies showed that of 2- to 12-year-olds in two separate studies of boys and girls clinically referred as experiencing gender dysphoria and not socially transitioned, 88 percent later reported as adolescents and young adults that they no longer suffered from the condition and were comfortable with their natal genders.
“Leave them the hell alone till they’re 18,” Mr. Peterson said. “The man who established that was Ken Zucker. He ran the best journal that dealt with childhood gender dysphoria for years up in Toronto. That was his recommendation for treatment, and the bloody radicals ran him out of business 10 years ago.”
Mr. Peterson said that now doctors are doing the opposite and are recommending the “most extreme” treatments and surgical intervention possible and telling people “that if they don’t listen, their children are going to die, that they’re going to commit suicide, which is a complete bloody lie.”
“There was never a bit of evidence for that, not even bad evidence. It was just a lie,” he said.
Then, he said, they offer “this absolutely cataclysmic treatment with unimaginably dire consequences to people who don’t even understand and can’t understand what they’re agreeing to” and tell them “that’s how they’ll find their true self.”
