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Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
@benryanwriter
Jul 10, 2024 • 23 tweets • 9 min read • Read on X
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‘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.Image
‘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. Image
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…
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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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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…
Image
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…
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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…
Image
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…
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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. Image
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…
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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.

“I am heartsick.”
nysun.com/article/damnin…Image
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…Image
nysun.com/article/damnin…
Here is my coverage for the @NewYorkSun about the detransitioner lawsuit against the @AmerAcadPeds: nysun.com/article/lawsui…
@NewYorkSun @AmerAcadPeds
@NewYorkSun @AmerAcadPeds
@NewYorkSun @AmerAcadPeds

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More from @benryanwriter

Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Apr 1
HOW GENDER MEDICINE SET ITSELF UP FOR DISASTER

For @CompactMag, I report on what the 100s of WPATH conference videos I obtained tell us about this troubled field: compactmag.com/article/how-ge…

👉I 'll be publishing the conference videos on my Substack: benryan.substack.com/p/i-obtained-1…

As I write for Compact magazine:

This catalogue, which the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, fought to keep shielded, provides a rich account of how leading figures in pediatric gender medicine approached scientific research, drove the evolution of medical practices, and strategized politically during a critical turning point in this field’s brief and tortured history. The two years following Chase Strangio’s 2021 address were a period in which statehouse Republicans escalated their attacks on this field. The WPATH conference presenters largely responded to the political siege by doubling down. Rather than engage in soul searching over whether their methods in pediatrics were ethically sound and whether any criticisms had merit, they overwhelmingly stuck to their guns.

Presenters frequently downplayed fundamental hazards about irrevocably altering adolescents’ bodies. Meanwhile, a parade of systematic reviews—the gold standard of scientific evidence—was concluding that the evidencebacking pediatric gender medicine is weak and inconclusive. These findings have led health authorities in a number of European nations, concerned about risks such as infertility, to reverse course. They reclassified pediatric gender-transition interventions as experimental and sharply restricted minors’ access.

Not WPATH. The organization remained on an inexorable trajectory in the opposite direction, toward its eventual head-on collision with the second Trump administration.

For highlight clips, see the 🧵👇Image
Kellan Baker counseled against saying “gender-affirming care.” Messaging research indicated that when people hear it, he said, “they think ‘trans kids in the driver’s seat.’” But he said this was an accurate assessment. “I think we all support trans kids in the driver’s seat because it’s their bodies, it’s their lives,” he said.

“But when you think about folks who don’t know trans people, they are very scared by the idea that young people are making irreversible decisions and that no one else has any oversight over those decisions.”

To read my article in @CompactMag about the 100s of videos I obtained from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its US offshoot, USPATH: compactmag.com/article/how-ge…

I will be publishing the most notable conference videos on my Subsack: benryan.substack.com/p/i-obtained-1…
Johanna Olson-Kennedy: “I think that a lot of this conversation...gets talked about through a lens of ‘How can we make sure people are really trans,’ right? And ‘They’re not going to regret their decision later?’” But “that’s actually not the discussion that I’m interested in participating in," she said. "I’m interested in discussing and having a conversation about giving the very best possible care to trans young people—the care that they need and deserve.”

To read my article in @CompactMag about the 100s of videos I obtained from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its US offshoot, USPATH: compactmag.com/article/how-ge…

I will be publishing the most notable conference videos on my Subsack: benryan.substack.com/p/i-obtained-1…
Read 6 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Mar 29
🧵👇Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes is wrong about the American Medical Association’s longstanding position about youth gender surgeries.

Before Feb. 2026, the AMA had never specified that gender surgeries should generally be reserved for adults.

In 2024, the AMA asserted: “Our American Medical Association recognizes that medical and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria and gender incongruence, as determined by shared decision making between the patient and physician, are medically necessary as outlined by generally-accepted standards of medical and surgical practice.”

No mention of age limits.

policysearch.ama-assn.org/policyfinder/d…Image
Hobbes is pointing to this WPATH FAQ without acknowledging (or knowing) that it actually misrepresents what the organization’s trans-care guidelines, The Standards of Care Version 8 (SoC 8) says. WPATH famously removed all age limits (except for phalloplasty) in the SoC 8 when it was published in Sept 2022 under pressure from the American Academy of Pediatrics.Image
Hobbes fails to understand that the original reporter who published the AMA’s statement saying it sided with the ASPS on youth gender surgeries was not Jeremy Peters, it was Andrew Jacobs, who could in no way be considered a part of this supposed “anti-trans braintrust.” Peters was only reiterating what Jacobs originally reported.

And yes, the statement was a shift, otherwise the AMA wouldn’t be trying to walk it back and say they were misquoted. Because the AMA knows that the statement reads as if they did make a shift in policy.Image
Read 6 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Mar 26
Is the AMA Telling the Truth About Their Expressed Positions on Youth Gender Surgeries?

The American Medical Association to the @StrackHaley at the National Review @NRO on Feb. 3: "[T]he AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood."

The @AmerMedicalAssn today: "We responded" to questions about the American Society of Plastic Surgeon's opposition to pediatric gender-transition surgeries "only after being contacted by media outlets, using the language approved by the board. While some media coverage characterized this as agreement with the ASPS statement, that phrasing did not come from the AMA."
The AMA on Feb 3:
nationalreview.com/news/first-maj…Image
The AMA today: Image
Read 5 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Mar 17
Meghan Wachspress, who accused Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss of an "inappropriate relationship" after he, at 26, was her math prof and she, 20, was his student and the 2 dated for a while and made out in '04, wrote on Substack in 2025 that MeToo didn't go far enough.

"In an alternate universe the experiences encompassed by #metoo could have expanded outward to include other kinds of workplace interactions and structural inequalities that minimized or objectified women in the Kantian sense (making them men’s tools), costing women status, money, and time compared to their male colleagues," she wrote.
substack.com/home/post/p-16…Image
She also posted this:
Wachspress did a stint on Jeopardy.

jeopardyhistory.fandom.com/wiki/Megan_Wac…
Read 4 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Mar 3
IN DEFENSE OF EFFEMINATE GAY BOYS

If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded, by @BenAppel for @TheAtlantic.

GIFT LINK: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…Image
Similarly, @chadfelixg wrote:

thefederalist.com/2020/02/24/if-…
@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.” Image
Read 5 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Feb 24
"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.

GIFT LINK: nytimes.com/2026/02/24/opi…Image
For @NYTOpinion, @JesseSingal writes:

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.”)Image
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@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.”

Bluesky: “YOU TRANSPHOBE!! Image
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Read 9 tweets

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