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Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
@benryanwriter
Jul 10 • 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…
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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…
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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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Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Jul 12
Pamela Paul writes for @NYTOpinion:

In U.S. Gender Medicine, Ideology Eclipses Science. It Hurts Kids.

Imagine a comprehensive review of research on a treatment for children found “remarkably weak evidence” that it was effective. Now imagine the medical establishment shrugged off the conclusions and continued providing the same unproven and life-altering treatment to its young patients.
This is where we are with gender medicine in the United States.
It’s been three months since the release of the Cass Review, an independent assessment of gender treatment for youths commissioned by England’s National Health Service. The four-year review of research, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s top pediatricians, found no definitive proof that gender dysphoria in children or teenagers was resolved or alleviated by what advocates call gender-affirming care, in which a young person’s declared “gender identity” is affirmed and supported with social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. Nor, she said, is there clear evidence that transitioning kids decreases the likelihood that gender dysphoric youths will turn to suicide, as adherents of gender-affirming care claim. These findings backed up what critics of this approach have been saying for years.
“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted.
After the release of Cass’s findings, the British government issued an emergency ban on puberty blockers for people under 18. Medical societies, government officials and legislative panels in Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium have proposed moving away from a medical approach to gender issues, in some cases directly acknowledging the Cass Review. Scandinavian countries have been moving away from the gender-affirming model for the past few years. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, called the review’s recommendations “seminal” and said that policies on gender treatments have “breached fundamental principles” of children’s human rights, with “devastating consequences.”

But in the United States, federal agencies and professional associations that have staunchly supported the gender-affirming care model greeted the Cass Review with silence or utter disregard.
There’s been no response from the Department of Health and Human Services, whose website says that “gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents” and which previously pushed to eliminate recommended age minimums for gender surgery. Nor has there been a response from the American Medical Association, which also backs gender-affirming care for pediatric patients.
When I reached out to H.H.S. officials, they declined to speak on the record. The A.M.A. referred me to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. The Endocrine Society, the primary professional organization of endocrinologists, told me, “the Cass Review does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in” the society’s own guidelines. (Cass’s mandate was to assess the quality and importance of existing research.)
When the NPR station WBUR interviewed Cass, it asked the American Academy of Pediatrics for a response to the review. The pediatricians’ group issued a statement that said nothing about the Cass Review. Instead, it denounced what it characterized as “politically infused public discourse” and promised to stay the course, conducting its own research review, which it agreed to do last year under intense pressure. In later comments to The Times, Dr. Ben Hoffman…Image
nytimes.com/2024/07/12/opi…
Pamela Paul refers to my reporting in the @NewYorkSun about detransitioner lawsuits:

nysun.com/article/damnin…
Image
Read 9 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Jul 2
NEWS: WPATH's Eli Coleman disputes claims that the Standards of Care 8 guideline committee bowed to political pressure from Rachel Levine to remove age limits on treatment and suppressed the systematic literature reviews WPATH commissioned from Johns Hopkins, in a new filing in the Alabama court case over the state's ban. That case received a stay today.

"First, it is not true that the development of SOC8 turned on any ideological or political considerations. Development of SOC8 followed the rigorous methodology designed by Johns Hopkins University to approve recommendations through the Delphi Method, a well-established methodology to develop clinical practice guidelines," Coleman said on July 1, 2024.

"WPATH’s review and revisions based on public feedback after the transparent review process was not ideological or political. It rested on the same measured, scientific basis as did the earlier development of the draft.

"WPATH did dispute the timing of when Johns Hopkins could publish their systematic reviews because WPATH wanted to include the information gleaned from the systematic reviews in its publication of SOC8. WPATH did not want Johns Hopkins University to publish its research prior to WPATH’s opportunity to release SOC8. This was not because WPATH had any interest in suppressing Johns Hopkins’ research. To the contrary, WPATH wanted to ensure that its release of SOC8 would be the first publication of the research.

"The recommendations included in SOC8 were based on the rigorous process set up by Johns Hopkins and supported by the scientific evidence base provided to us by Johns Hopkins and upon which the members of the chapter committees voted through the Delphi process."Image
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Here is the summary judgment to which Dr. Coleman refers:
Here are more details, the likes of which Dr. Coleman is refuting.
Read 5 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Jul 1
WPATH had internal dissent over its controversial eunuchs chapter in its Standards of Care 8 trans-care guidelines
Internal communications, subpoenaed and newly unsealed as part of the Alabama court case over the state's pediatric gender-transition ban, reveal such dissent. 🧵
The names are redacted, so it is not known who is saying the following, but a series of internal WPATH emails revealed: Someone saying, "I struggle with the concept of 'Eunuch as a gender identity.'" Image
This WPATH member said that not all Eunuchs and intersex people have gender dysphoria/gender incongruence. Image
Read 7 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Jun 28
NEWS: Alabama Attorney General submits motion for summary judgment in District Court case over ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment.
The document offers a scathing @WPATH's credibility, based on subpoenaed documents, dismissing it as an "activist interest group." 🧵Image
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."Image
The AL AG's motion for summary judgment borrows liberally from the UK Cass Review to portray the scientific literature on gender-transition treatment as weak and unreliable. It also relies on the words of @WPATH's president, Dr. Marci Bowers: "Asked whether 'reasonable people could conclude that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty blockers,' Bowers replied: 'There’s not enough high level evidence. Yes, you can – you can – you can say that.'”Image
Read 26 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Jun 27
Dr. Amy Tishelman, a Boston College psychologist, reached out to me to say that what James Cantor wrote about her in his report on internal WPATH communications is incorrect. Her statement is in the screenshot below.

She stated: "Item 140 in the Cantor report, claiming that I was discussing minimum ages for surgery at a WPATH meeting is false. I had nothing to do with writing any chapter in WPATH related to medical or surgical intervention of any kind and never referred to that in my talk, which was about guidelines for prepubescent children and the SOC8. At the time this story first came out I was horrified, and WPATH released a statement characterizing this out of context information as 'Dangerous Misinformation.' Please see the attachment below for a copy of the WPATH statement about this."Image
Here is the document to which Dr. Tishelman referred: Image
Here is the video in question from which James Cantor quoted Amy Tishelman. She says that she is being misrepresented. It is possible the video is missing a part in which she clarifies her statement, but I am not sure.
Read 5 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Jun 27
Claim of Suicide Surge in Youths on U.K. Wait List for Gender Care Undermined by ‘Cass Review’
🧵: I report for The @NewYorkSun: The report on pediatric gender care also undermines suggestions by @GoodLawProject's @JolyonMaugham that after the Tavistock v Bell decision in Dec. 2021, the UK GIDS pediatric gender clinic all but eliminated gender-transition treatment referrals in 2021 and that this drove a wave of suicides on the waiting list.Image
nysun.com/article/claim-…
The @GoodLawProject said there was a “huge increase” in suicide deaths in those on the waiting list for the UK's pediatric gender clinic, GIDS. @JolyonMaugham said the clinic’s harsh restrictions, starting in 2021, on treatment access drove the surge.
Read 20 tweets

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