‘Damning’ Information About Trans Medical Group Expected To Reach Supreme Court, as Justices Consider Challenge to Ban on Gender Treatments for Minors
🧵⬇️I report for the @NewYorkSun: Unsealed internal communications from the trans medical organization @WPATH will likely undermine pediatric gender-transition treatment in litigation, including a Supreme Court case.
‘Damning’ Information About Trans Medical Group Expected To Reach Supreme Court, as Justices Consider Challenge to Ban on Gender Treatments for Minors nysun.com/article/damnin…
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health is tasked with promoting and defending access to gender-transition treatment for minors. Amid a storm of litigation over these practices @WPATH’s leaders now find that their own words threaten to undermine this mission.
Last month, a federal court began unsealing an abundance of subpoenaed internal communications among top @WPATH members. The docs concern Wpath’s recent revision of the chapters in its trans-medical-care guidelines concerning pediatrics, or medical care for children and teens.
Wpath’s once-secret maneuverings, now laid bare, have only just begun to backfire. The explosive contents of the unsealed communications are expected to impact the litigation that will determine the future of pediatric gender medicine , including a SCOTUS ruling next term.
Erica Anderson, a psychologist, transgender woman, and former head of Wpath’s American branch, characterized the recent disclosures as “damaging” to @WPATH. @eanderh nysun.com/article/damnin…
Why did @WPATH remove all the age limits on pediatric gender-transition treatment in its 2022 revision on its treatment guidelines? Internal comms unsealed in an AL court case suggest HHS official Rachel Levine, the @AmerAcadPeds and @Trevor_Project all pressured WPATH to do so.
Even as she pressured @WPATH to remove age limits on pediatric gender-transition treatment for political reasons, Rachel Levine touted WPATH as the go-to source for evidence-based guide to such care and said that laws banning such treatment were all politically based.
WPATH published its new transgender treatment guidelines on Sept. 10, 2022, and later that same day removed the age limits on pediatric gender-transition treatment. This was in the immediate wake of the @AmerAcadPeds and the @Trevor_Project pressuring them to do so.
The documents unsealed in the Alabama court case that have so damaged @WPATH's credibility as a science-based organization removed from politics have already started to show up in litigation. nysun.com/article/damnin…
In private, at least some @WPATH members have acknowledged that the evidence behind some of their treatment recommendations is wanting. But in public the organization has said the opposite. nysun.com/article/damnin…
Eli Coleman, who headed up @WPATH's revision of its treatment guidelines, issued a full-throated denial of the suggestions of a trove of internal communications from the organization that were recently unsealed. nysun.com/article/damnin…
How might the unsealed @WPATH communications impact the Supreme Court case about Tennessee's pediatric gender-transition ban next term? I spoke with TN's attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, for the @NewYorkSun: nysun.com/article/damnin…
The internal @WPATH documents are also expected to aid the plaintiffs in the approximately 20 medical-malpractice lawsuits waged by detransitioners against their former care providers.
The unsealed @WPATH communications are expected to aid in the conspiracy suit against the @AmerAcadPeds. One WPATH member was particularly scornful of the AAP's 2018 policy statement on the gender-affirming care method. nysun.com/article/damnin…
Roger Brooks of the Alliance Defending Freedom said he expected the Alabama documents would have an even greater impact on future detransitioner lawsuits, by undermining physicians’ arguments that they were acting in good faith by following WPATH’s guidelines.
Psychologist Erica Anderson, who positioned herself as WPATH’s Cassandra some years ago, having sought to warn her colleagues that they were steering the organization in a perilous direction, reflected over what it has meant to have, as she sees it, been proved right.
“Many who know of my historic efforts to stem the tide of ideology have proclaimed that I should feel vindicated, but I cannot be consoled,” Dr. Anderson said.
The internal @WPATH communications in the Alabama suit over the state's pediatric gender-transition treatment ban also suggested that WPATH coordinated on the drafting of its 2022 trans-care guidelines update with the @ACLU, which is behind many of the lawsuits seeking to overturn the bans of the treatment that WPATH recommended in those guidelines. nysun.com/article/damnin…
New York Magazine reviewing work of writer facing plagiarism allegations, @BobbyAllyn reports for @NPR.
New York magazine is examining the past work of one of its writers who has been accused of plagiarism after publishing at least three stories with striking similarities to other published work.
@RossBarkan, who is a contract writer for the magazine, first attracted critical scrutiny when one of his stories earlier this week on the conservative influencer @BenShapiro appeared to copy another piece on Shapiro published days before in The Washington Post.
When this was pointed out on social media, the magazine updated Barkan's story to directly quote the Post writer, @drewharwell, whose opening paragraphs Barkan lifted nearly wholesale.
After this, NPR found at least two other instances in which Barkan apparently pulled partial paragraphs from other stories that appeared in the publications @theintercept and @CompactMag.
NYU professor @JonHaidt, who has stood at the forefront of the movement to challenge academia’s culture of suppressing the free exchange of ideas, is facing a campaign to cancel his graduation address. nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/…
NYU’s Student Government Assembly is urging the university to reconsider selecting Jonathan Haidt as commencement speaker, arguing his views on DEI, transgender identity and social justice are out of step with the values and diversity of the Class of 2026. The letter says students feel “disappointment, disgust, defeat, and embarrassment” over the choice of @JonHaidt and accuses NYU of prioritizing a narrow ideological narrative over students’ experiences.
The NYU protesters have held up as exemplars a number of past speakers: Molly Shannon, Taylor Swift, and David Boies.
Progressive journalist David Roberts says: “It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Bluesky has been a net negative for US politics. They corralled everyone on the left into a little glass fishbowl where they shout at one another & everyone else ignores them. Meanwhile, all the pols & institutions stayed on X & are being dragged farther right.”
Progressive journalist Marisa Kabas says it’s not right to blame Bluesky. It’s all X’s fault.
Like clockwork, Harvard Law School clinical instructor and trans activist Alejandra Caraballo has expressed her rage that Azeen Ghorayshi was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Caraballo does not seem to understand that being a finalist in and of itself is a considerable honor.
In @TaylorLorenz’s new Substack, she used Panagram to detect how many top Substackers are using AI to produce their articles, in an apparent effort to criticize their ethics.
Panagram sponsored Lorenz’s Substack, revealing that it is effectively an advertorial. She doesn’t make a note of this sponsorship until the very end of her article.
This comes after Lorenz was widely criticized for posting a free ad for The Bark Phone, which is parental-control software for a children’s smartphone. In the ad, Lorenz touted smartphones as good for kids because they help kids express themselves.
Should a tech journalist such as @TaylorLorenz weave sponsorship of tech products into her reporting thanks to receiving payments from tech companies? That’s what Lorenz did here with Panagram: usermag.co/p/how-much-of-…
@TaylorLorenz When magazines run advertorials, they typically change the layout to make abundantly clear that this is sponsored content. The disclaimer about it being sponsored content is typically at the top of the text, not buried at the very end, as Lorenz has done.
In Erin Reed’s chat group, people debate whether it would be better to attend this Sunday conference panel of four skeptics of pediatric gender medicine and ask pointed questions, boycott it, or disrupt it with boos. Frank Dowling, who refers to the group as “frauds”, was among the AMA members whose LGBTQ message board posts I quoted from in my reporting for @thefp about how members reacted to the organization coming out against youth gender surgeries: thefp.com/p/the-medical-…