The largest transgender medical advocacy organization influenced the results of research and restricted university freedom because it did not want results contrary to its ideas.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) hushed up its unpleasant research results and influenced research freedom, according to the Economist article and other sources, such as the summary published on the CAN-SG website.
Below, we first present what WPATH is and how the organization's "professional standards" have been questioned in the past, and then we briefly touch on the American situation, showing that both the Biden administration and WPATH are working to liberalize trans-party health interventions, that they are minors can also be performed on children (in fact, many such interventions have already been performed). And finally, we come to the main issue.
WPATH, an advocacy organization that has existed since 1979 and has been considered an authority on the subject until now, in the eighth edition of its guide
considers both breast removal and genital transplant to be standard procedures for minors with gender identity disorder.
A 2017 study found that for WPATH-affiliated surgeons, “age is just a number” and reports of an increasing number of children presenting for vaginoplasty.
Although it claims to be a professional organization, WPATH has been repeatedly criticized for basing its recommendations solely on the opinions of activists and doctors who support the transgender movement, rather than on a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. Despite these weaknesses, which have been known for several years,
WPATH's "standards of care" have been highly influential in shaping transgender health care practices around the world,
but mostly in the Anglo-Saxon world. WPATH is chaired by a certain Marci Bowers, a man who considers himself (and looks) a woman and is himself a "pioneer" in the field of "gender-affirming" (sex reassignment) interventions.
Marci Bowers Matt Walsh 2022 What Woman? in his film, he says that his youngest patient was 16 years old, and he is not at all afraid that minors do not know who they really are.
They get into the trans party WPATH, but it fights back
As the Economist writes: In April 2024, British pediatrician Hilary Cass published her review of services related to gender identity for children and young people (Cass Review) on behalf of the English National Health Organization (NHS England), and her results cast doubt on the evidence that is usually presented bring in addition to the treatment of young people suffering from gender identity disorder as transgender, i.e. in support of "gender reassignment surgery". That is, he claimed that the evidence presented by WPATH in favor of the interventions was actually not very strong. WPATH fought back, claiming that its practices are based on more solid evidence than Casse's, based on several so-called systematic reviews.
A systematic review is a scientific synthesis of the evidence on a given topic that takes into account and evaluates all previous research on the topic in search of answers to a specific research question. For example, if we want to know the effect of puberty blockers or hormone treatments, a systematic review will review and critically evaluate all research in these areas.
Cass research found that almost all international guidelines are based on WPATH or the Endocrine Society, which closely cooperates with it, and the two organizations have a strong influence on each other. Many WPATH members are members of the World Health Organization's (WHO) policy-making group, which also shapes the World Health Organization's transgender policy.
However, the professionalism of WPATH has recently been strongly questioned.
Minors are also included
All this is also important because scientific (or, as we see, "scientific") results are increasingly being taken into account in the courts. And in the United States, since Joe Biden took office, there has been a culture war regarding trans issues: Democratic-led states are introducing more and more extreme trans policies, while Republican-led ones limit the teaching of gender theory in schools, do not allow male athletes who identify as women to participate in women's sports competitions, and the "gender-affirming ” so-called medical interventions (gender-affirming care) are also frowned upon, restricted or banned. And the Supreme Court will soon rule on whether Tennessee had the right to ban such "gender-affirming" interventions.
The unsealed documents of another American court case revealed, as the Economist also writes, that WPATH is a high-ranking official of the Biden administration,
At the order of Deputy Health Minister Rachel Levine, she removed all age limits for hormonal and surgical treatment of transgender people in her procedures,
that is, according to the organization, such interventions can also be performed on minors (as we wrote earlier). By the way, the Department of Health and Human Services of Joe Biden's government also writes in an official document (Gender Affirming Care and Young People) that double mastectomy and genital transplants are "typical procedures in adulthood and occasionally in adolescence". .
And then here is the current case: university scientists are being controlled
However, the current case of research manipulated and suppressed by WPATH broke out in Alabama.
In 2022, Alabama passed a law banning "gender-affirming" health care services for under-18s, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and "sex reassignment" surgery. Therefore, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a liberal advocacy organization, sued Alabama. As a result of the lawsuit, WPATH was required to submit numerous documents to the court regarding the eighth edition of its previously mentioned guide.
The emails and documents related to WPATH's relationship with Johns Hopkins University (JHU), which was tasked with reviewing the evidence. It turns out that
WPATH, after entering into a research contract with the university, forcibly interfered with and manipulated research conducted by university scientists on the subject.
From the beginning of the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed its desire to be able to control the results of the university's research work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, WPATH's executive director, told Karen Robinson, director of the university's Evidence-Based Practice Center (EPC), that WPATH's board of directors believed that EPC researchers "cannot self-publish their findings." A few weeks later, Kelly emphasized that WPATH "wants to make it clear that the data cannot be used without your approval."
The documents reveal that WPATH leadership went out of its way to suppress systematic reviews conducted by Johns Hopkins because the reviews' conclusions did not provide scientific support for WPATH's plans to provide broad access to gender reassignment interventions. Suppression of evidence was achieved using two strategies. First
WPATH forced the university to withdraw manuscripts already completed and submitted that did not meet the desired conclusions.
Subsequently, WPATH decided that all future publications by the University Center on the subject must be approved by them.
The new approval protocol required that all reviews meet a specific WPATH checklist, which included questions such as whether the review would make a positive contribution to advancing transgender interventions and whether it included transgender people as authors. WPATH required two rounds of approval—first at the proposal stage, which had to approve the expected conclusions of the review, and second at the final stage of the manuscript.
WPATH reserves the right to change the content.
Time to expose the brutal industry behind the trans movement!
The new policy also required that the final publication contain a disclaimer that WPATH had no influence on the process and that the conclusions were solely those of the university's researchers. Which is the complete opposite of what was described above. This wish list drew opposition from the university, but in the end WPATH prevailed.
After that, only one research was published, Baker et al. (2021) review of hormonal interventions. This research is also problematic: it did not assess any physical harm (even though the protocol said so), and its conclusions supporting trans interventions contradicted its own findings. Baker et al. includes the WPATH-required statement that WPATH had no role in the review and, ironically, uses exactly the language required by the approval policy. Internal documents confirm that Baker et al. it went through WPATH's approval process (ie WPATH actually had a lot to do with the research). (By the way, hormone therapy has many dangers, such as increasing the risk of heart failure and osteoporosis.)
There have been doubts so far
a 2023 article in , Mark Helfand, a professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University, examined the standards of care in the eighth edition of the WPATH guidelines and found several serious problems. For example
the strength of evidence supporting the recommendations contradicted what their own systematic reviews found,
and there was a lack of transparency. The BMJ already wrote in 2021 that WPATH tries to support harsh interventions with low-quality research.
The so-called Dutch protocol, on the basis of which minors with gender identity disorder have been treated with anti-puberty drugs for many years, is also receiving more and more criticism. Recently, a number of researchers have spoken out against the practice.
But it also turned out that the largest American children's clinic in Texas performed sex-change procedures on minors, even after the hospital announced that it would stop performing such procedures. In September 2022, The Telegraph exposed the British trans youth organization Mermaids, which has existed since 1995, in an investigative report, accusing it of performing mastectomy for underage girls without parental consent. A staff member of the paper pretended to be a 14-year-old girl (Kai) and started exchanging letters with Mermaids. According to the Telegraph, Mermaids did not want to investigate 'Kai's' psychological situation and did not ask her to obtain parental consent; "Kai" wrote to the organization that her parents were hostile about her "trans" identity.
In October 2022, an investigative report by Reuters found that between 2019 and 2021, in the United States, 56 13- to 17-year-old boys with gender dysphoria underwent genital reassignment, such as vaginoplasty - that is, they transformed their male genitalia into an apparent vagina. And these are only cases financed by health insurance.
the City Journal drew attention to the fact that the number of people undergoing breast removal in America is increasing sharply, which means that their number increased 13 times between 2013 and 2020 (which means an annual increase of 50-100 percent). The estimated number of American teenage girls who have undergone mastectomy is around half a thousand. According to data published by gender-biased researchers, the operation is performed even at the age of 12.
Laura Kuper, one of the authors of the WPATH guide, for example, argues that the option of breast removal should be available to black girls at the age of 10-11.
According to a partial survey by Parents Defending Education, almost 20,000 schools in the United States are currently refusing to release information to parents about their child's gender identity and sexual orientation; and more than 11 million children attend these 20,000 schools.
Most recently, California's far-left governor, Gavin Newsom, passed a law that prohibited California school districts from requiring their schools and staff to notify parents of students who show signs of being transgender. The decision prompted the Chino Valley Unified School District to sue the governor, arguing that parents have a constitutional right to such information. And Elon Musk announced: as a result of the law, he will move the base of the social media platform X from San Francisco to Austin, and the headquarters of the rocket manufacturer SpaceX from Hawthorne to Starbase, Texas.
True gender reassignment surgery does not exist anyway, as all our cells are female or male, just as our brains and bones are male or female.
In addition, there are no trans children either, since 95 percent of children with gender identity disorder spontaneously outgrow it by adolescence, and psychosexual development lasts roughly until our twenties.
Featured image: “Generation Drag” from the Discovery+ series
