‘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…
@chadfelixg Harvard Law School clinical instructor and trans activist Alejandra Caraballo is unhappy about @BenAppel’s article in @TheAtlantic, calling it the “‘they're transing the gays’ conspiracy theory.”
"The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a 'policy statement' on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect," writes @JesseSingal for @NYTOpinion.
The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024, it published what it touted as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letterwritten by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.
The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”
In 2024, the A.P.A. criticized those “mischaracterizing gender dysphoria as a manifestation of traumatic stress or neurodivergence.” In 2025, it cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of “trauma-related presentations” rather than a trans identity, and noted that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria.” It seems undeniable that the 2025 A.P.A. published what the 2024 A.P. A considered to be “misinformation.” (“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 F.T.C. letter are consistent,” said Ms. McGuire in an email, and “both documents reflect A.P.A.’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care.”)
@nytopinion @jessesingal Jesse Singal on youth gender medicine in @NYTOpinion: “I’ve been covering this controversy for about a decade from a left-of-center perspective, and I’ve found that anyone who questions these treatments, even mildly, is invariably accused of bigotry.”
NEWS: Mt. Sinai, the sprawling hospital system, has joined NYU Langone in shuttering its pediatric gender clinic in the face of threats from the Trump administration of cutting off its Medicaid funding.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani @ZohranKMamdani @NYCMayor pledged in his campaign to spend $65M in city funds on gender-transition treatment to evade pressures from the Trump administration to cut off such access. But since NYU announced it would no longer provide gender-transition drugs or surgeries to minors, the mayor has been mum on the potential for spending public funds on these interventions.
The blue-state pediatric gender clinic closures started with Children's Hospital Los Angeles last July and have continued steadily since then. benryan.substack.com/p/dr-johanna-o…
YouTube sleuths found: @TaylorLorenz apparently copied substantial portions of a TechDirt article about Joseph Gordon-Levitt @hitRECordJoe and Section 230.
Lorenz appeared to pass off the article's text as if it was her own script.🧵⬇️
Go to 4:22 in this video to see the part where the YouTube hosts assert that @TaylorLorenz has plagiarized her narration from a TechDirt article about Joseph Gordon-Levitt @hitRECordJoe and Section 230: youtube.com/live/JXI9uRwfG…
I can’t even begin to enumerate all the nasty things Parker Molloy has said about me in an effort to punish me for reporting about pediatric gender medicine and to scare off other reporters who might dare to enter this arena. My policy with responding to such behavior is I report what people such a Molloy say or do, and will often fact check errors. They then turn around and make vicious and demeaning claims about who I am.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened a consumer protection probe into the American Academy of Pediatrics and has demanded its records regarding pediatric gender medicine.
In 2018, the AAP published its foundational policy document on the gender-affirming care method. It was written by a single medical resident, Dr. Jason Rafferty, and edited by a small committee. It was subjected to a brutal fact check by Canadian sex researcher Dr. James Cantor the following year. The AAP never responded to the fact check. In 2023, the AAP reaffirmed the policy statement with no changes.
The statement asserts that even very young children know their gender identity as well as anyone and should be trusted to guide the way in their own pathway of transition.