Thread by @benryanwriter

ACLU Deputy With $543,500 Salary Issues Many False Or Misleading Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine

🧵⬇️I report: The 4th highest paid staffer, AJ Hikes was the ACLU's 1st DEI chief and is at the center of an NLRB case against the ACLU that found it illegally fired an employee on claims she used racist language.

LINK: ACLU Deputy With $543,500 Salary Issues Many False Or Misleading Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
The 4th highest paid staffer at over $500,000 per year, AJ Hikes was the ACLU's 1st DEI chief and is at the center of an NLRB case against the ACLU that found it illegally fired an employee on claims she used racist language.

The ACLU’s fourth highest paid staffer, who is at the center of a National Labor Relations Board case against the legal nonprofit that it lost in August, made a series of false or misleading claims about pediatric gender medicine in a recent interview.

@AJ_Hikes, who identifies as nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns and describes themselves in their ACLU bio as “a social justice advocate, community organizer, TED Talk Speaker, and unapologetically queer and Black,” holds a powerful position at the liberal legal juggernaut as the deputy executive director for strategy and culture.
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According to the @ACLU’s 990 tax form, AJ Hikes, who does not have a law degree, earned a salary in 2023 of $543,532, plus $30,884 in “other compensation.” This represented a 50 percent jump compared with their $363,055 salary in 2022, when they were the 11th highest paid staffer. In 2021, when they served as the ACLU’s first chief DEI officer, their salary was $313,806. In 2020, this figure was $264,274.
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In the Dec. 23 edition of the Bad Queers podcast, entitled “F*ck ‘Em (w/ AJ Hikes),” Hikes spoke at length about the case, U.S. v Skrmetti, that on Dec. 4 received oral arguments at the Supreme Court concerning Tennessee’s ban of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors. Among the numerous false or misleading claims that the ACLU deputy made during the interview were the suggestions that such treatment is only given to minors in their mid-to-late teens and that cisgender (non-transgender) boys can simply go to the doctor and request testosterone to make their voice deeper.
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
In fact, gender-transition treatment can be given to children with gender dysphoria as young as eight years old. And testosterone is a controlled substance; boys cannot legally obtain the hormone for mere cosmetic reasons. They would need to have a diagnosis of a medical condition, such as an endocrine disorder, to obtain a prescription.

The @ACLU's @AJ_Hikes is a central player in an unfair-labor-practice case that the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, brought against the ACLU and that went to trial earlier this year. The case concerned Kate Oh, a Korean-American lawyer who was fired from her position as senior policy counsel at the legal nonprofit in 2022. She accused by the ACLU of using “racist stereotypes” to characterize her Black bosses in her internal complaints about them.
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The NLRB charged that the @ACLU retaliated against Kate Oh’s complaints when it fired her. In August, a judge ruled against the ACLU in the case, finding that the organization had illegally terminated Oh. The ACLU is appealing the decision to the full NLRB. benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…

AJ Hikes, who according to their LinkedIn page has a master of social work degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a received a B.A. in English from the University of Delaware in 2006, joined the @ACLU in 2019 as, according to their bio, its first chief equity and inclusion, or DEI, officer. Their bio emphasizes how powerful a position they hold at the ALCU, stating that Hikes “serves as chief counselor and principal partner to the executive director overseeing the critical functions of organization strategic planning and programmatic priority setting.”
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Prior to joining the legal nonprofit, @AJ_Hikes, who previously went by the name Amber, was executive director of Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs. (Some people consider it offensive to cite the previous name of a transgender or nonbinary person, calling the practice ‘dead naming’. I am specifying the name Amber here for clarity, given the name comes up in references I make below.) In that position, Hikes made a mark by adding black and brown stripes to the rainbow LGBTQ Pride flag.

AJ Hikes’ elevation to their current title at the @ACLU in Nov. 2022 and massive pay raise occurred in the wake of the departure of Ronald Newman, who had been the director of the ACLU’s national political advocacy department since 2019.

As Molly Redden @MTRedden reported for @HuffPost in Feb. 2022:
huffpost.com/entry/aclu-exe…
"Newman was the subject of sustained complaints about his treatment of staff, including claims of bullying and misogyny and accusations that his fixation on short-term wins was thwarting the ACLU’s ability to push for more meaningful and lasting policy changes. In Newman’s nearly three years as director, his department of roughly 100 people shed dozens of employees, many of them women of color."
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When AJ Hikes joined the @ACLU in 2019, their bio characterized them as “an unapologetic queer black woman.” By 2022, when they announced their promotion to their current position at the organization, they characterized themself as nonbinary. Hikes publicly announced their name was now AJ in an Instagram post on March 31, 2024.
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Hikes’ Instagram post about their new name came nine days after The New York Times ran its first article about Oh’s lawsuit, in which Hikes was referred to as April Hikes and with she/her pronouns and the “Ms.” honorific. The earliest archived version of Hikes’ ACLU bio under the name AJ is dated April 5.
instagram.com/p/C5L7MBrL4Km/…
References to Hikes in the March 22 Times article included:
nytimes.com/2024/03/22/us/…
Soon after, Ms. Oh heard from the A.C.L.U. manager overseeing its equity and inclusion efforts, Amber Hikes, who cautioned Ms. Oh about her language. Ms. Oh’s comment was “dangerous and damaging,” Ms. Hikes warned, because she seemed to suggest the former supervisor physically assaulted her.“Please consider the very real impact of that kind of violent language in the workplace,” Ms. Hikes wrote in an email
.…
The following month, Ms. Hikes, the head of equity and inclusion, wrote to Ms. Oh, documenting a third incident — her own.“Calling my check-in ‘chastising’ or ‘reprimanding’ feels like a willful mischaracterization in order to continue the stream of anti-Black rhetoric you’ve been using throughout the organization,” Ms. Hikes wrote in an email.“I’m hopeful you’ll consider the lived experiences and feelings of those you work with,” she added. (Citing the ongoing case, the A.C.L.U. said Ms. Hikes was unable to comment for this article.)

The many false and misleading claims that AJ Hikes, top @ACLU deputy making over a half million dollars annually, said about pediatric gender medicine in a recent interview:

During the recent 75-minute Bad Queers podcast, Hikes gave a wide-ranging interview, speaking about coming out as nonbinary, the double mastectomy they underwent, the upcoming second iteration of the Trump administration, and U.S. v Skrmetti.
youtube.com/watch?v=CxePK2…
The conversation about the Skrmetti case regarding Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment starts at the 28:00 mark. During that discussion, at the 32:31 mark, the podcast’s YouTube page indicates this is where Hikes is “[e]xplaining gender-affirming care to transphobes.”
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
youtube.com/watch?v=CxePK2…

Hikes made a series of false and misleading claims about pediatric gender medicine, which I have indicated in bold below.

Hikes:

▶️Asserted that Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment concerned “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year olds, young people. We’re not talking about eight year olds, nine year olds.”

In fact, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or @WPATH, places no minimum age on who can receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria. Children are eligible to receive puberty blockers as soon as they hit the first stage of puberty, known as Tanner Stage 2. This typically occurs between age 8 and 13 for natal girls and age 9 and 14 for natal boys, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…
my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/pu…
As I reported regarding the recently filed detransitioner lawsuit against leading pediatric gender medicine doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy, in 2017, she sought and received approval for for her NIH-funded research to reduce the minimum age for prescribing cross-sex hormones to children from 13 to 8 years old. The plaintiff in the case against her, Clementine Breen, received puberty blockers from her at age 12, cross-sex hormones at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14. While the Tennessee case before the Supreme Court does not concern gender-transition surgeries, it’s worth noting that @LeorSapir of the @ManhattanInst found evidence that between 2017 and 2023, 50 to 179 girls who were 12.5 years old or younger underwent a double mastectomy as part of a gender transition.
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31290407/
benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…
city-journal.org/article/a-cons…
▶️Used the term “medically necessary” regarding pediatric gender-transition treatment.

As subpoenaed documents from Alabama’s lawsuit regarding that state’s ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment indicated, WPATH included this term in its trans-care guidelines for adolescents despite the authors’ awareness that the available science did not clearly back that such treatment is indeed “medically necessary” for gender dysphoric minors. Those documents also showed that WPATH coordinated with the ACLU itself when drafting these guidelines, with an eye towards employing wording that would help them in the very type of litigation that the ACLU is currently waging against state bans on such medical interventions.
supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/2…
tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…
▶️Claimed that non-transgender boys can access testosterone simply because they want their voices to be deeper or in the event that such a boy “wants to grow facial hair and wants to have these typical male characteristics come on faster.”

This falsely suggests that minor males are able to make essentially cosmetic requests of doctors that would warrant a testosterone prescription. Testosterone is a controlled substance. No child could legally receive the drug in this context. To obtain such a prescription, a boy would need a medical diagnosis, such as delayed puberty. A trans male (natal female) would need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to receive testosterone.

▶️Asserted that cisgender people are the primary recipients of gender-affirmative care.

This claim is indeed factual if one considers that any treatment or modification that men or women make to their bodies that helps emphasize their gender—such as hair transplants for men and breast implants for women—is gender-affirming care, per se.

That said, breast implants obtained for purely cosmetic purposes by cisgender women—which Hikes made reference to in the podcast—are not covered by insurance, as they may be when trans women undergo such an operation. No one is calling a teenage girl’s desire to go from a B cup to a D cup to catch the eyes of boys a “medical necessity.”

And regarding gynecomastia surgeries in particular, Harvard recently misled the public about how common such operations are compared with so-called “top surgery” among natal females who identify as trans males or nonbinary. I covered this previously: benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…

▶️Said that a so-called Brazilian butt lift, or “BBL”, is gender-affirming care for non-trans people.

Doctors strongly advise against minors receiving such a surgery, which has the highest mortality rate of any cosmetic surgery.

Because both men and women obtain such operations to improve their sex appeal, it is not necessarily a female- or male-specific cosmetic operation.
niptuckaesthetics.com/what-age-can-y….
nytimes.com/2021/08/19/sty…
▶️Said that erectile dysfunction drugs are gender-affirming care for non-trans people.

The @MayoClinic says of Viagra (sildenafil): “Sildenafil should never be used in children for erectile dysfunction.”
mayoclinic.org/drugs-suppleme…
▶️Furthered the claim that puberty blockers provide young people a time to think about whether they want to continue onto cross-sex hormones.

According to multiple sources, almost all children who start puberty blockers for gender dysphoria continue onto cross-sex hormones. As British investigative journalist Hannah Barnes @HannahSBee reported in her book Time to Think, this fact strongly suggests that children are not using that time for reflection about whether they wish to take the second drug. Rather, they apparently see their time on blockers as a mere way station before they get what they want: hormones.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ap…
amazon.com/Time-Think-Col…
▶️Said that blockers do not cause sterility.

Given that puberty blocker use is overwhelmingly part and parcel of cross-sex hormone use among minors with gender dysphoria, starting on blockers does indeed typically begin a process that, in particular for natal males who begin them early in their puberty, poses a substantial risk of infertility.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36806443/
▶️Claimed that puberty blockers “have saved young people’s lives.” And said: “Young people are literally dying because they can’t access this care.”

Only one study has ever directly assessed whether gender-transition treatment is associated with an independent, statistically significant difference in the suicide death rate among young people. Conducted in Finland and published in February, the study found no such difference in the death rate.
mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e…
nypost.com/2024/02/24/opi…
Top ACLU litigator Chase Strangio admitted that gender-transition treatment for minors has not been shown to save lives when he told the Supreme Court justices earlier this month:
city-journal.org/article/aclu-a…
MR. STRANGIO: "What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide. And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them. However, there are multiple studies, long-term longitudinal studies that do show that there is a reduction in—in suicidality."

▶️Claimed that puberty blockers are highly effective at treating mental health problems.

A 2024 systematic literature review of puberty blockers as treatment for gender dysphoria, conducted by the University of York, found: “No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development.”
adc.bmj.com/content/109/Su…
Multiple cohort studies, including one conducted by researchers at Britain’s National Health Service that sought to replicate the success of the original study out of the Netherlands that kickstarted the global pediatric gender medicine field, have found that the drugs have no impact on mental health metrics.
nytimes.com/2024/10/23/sci…
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC78…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20646177/
▶️Claimed that blockers are “reversible.”

University College London neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale’s recent review paper on the potential neuropsychiatric impacts of puberty blockers concluded: “Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers. The impact of puberal suppression on measures of neuropsychological function is an urgent research priority.”
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38334046/
benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…

I presume this here post about me by someone by the name of @awkward_duck is in reference to my reporting about the @ACLU's AJ Hikes's over half million dollar salary and false claims about pediatric gender medicine.

All I will say is that I disagree.