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. benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
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. benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
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. benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
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.” benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
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." benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
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. benryan.substack.com/p/aclu-deputy-…
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.
Media outlets that claim that transgender women have no competitive advantage over women in athletics are not making evidence-based claims.
Two recent review papers, by @DrMJoyner and @Fondofbeetles, have found that even after sustained testosterone suppression and estrogen treatment, biological males still maintain a competitive advantage in women's sports. The research is less clear about those who have undergone pubertal suppression and then estrogen treatment starting soon after puberty's onset. However, Dr. Joyner's research indicates that prepubescent boys have a small but significant competitive advantage over girls, likely because of exposure to testosterone in utero and a surge of T during "mini puberty" during infancy.
Notice how @NPR doesn't even mention the review papers by @DrMJoyner and @Fondofbeetles finding that trans women on gender-transition treatment maintain a competitive advantage in women's sports. I spoke with Dr. Joyner and other experts who criticized the methodology of the IOC study. They all called its conclusions weak and unreliable. npr.org/2026/01/11/nx-…
@NPR @DrMJoyner @FondOfBeetles The claim by NPR that there is only a handful of trans youth playing sports is belied by survey data, reported by @HRC, that 19% of trans and gender expansive youth play sports. That translates, based on data from a CDC survey, to about 135,000 middle and high school students.
Supreme Court To Grapple With the Role of Transgender Athletes in Sports
I report for @NewYorkSun: On Tues, the justices will hear oral arguments about Idaho & West Virginia laws that restrict those born male from sports specifically for girls and women. nysun.com/article/suprem…
The trans-sports ban cases before the Supreme Court raise critical questions about how the Equal Protection Clause of the 14thAmendment applies to restrictions on transgender athletes competing on teams traditionally reserved for the opposite sex. The court will also be asked to consider how such laws square with the aims of Title IX, the federal law governing sex-based opportunities in education, and its associated regulations pertaining to sex-segregated sports teams. nysun.com/article/suprem…
After years of sidestepping the question, the Supreme Court could finally determine whether transgender status itself is considered a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause, as is sex — a determination with profound implications for civil-rights law. nysun.com/article/suprem…
Bluesky is not amused by this WSJ article on people gaming the wheelchair system at airports, but not because people are gaming the wheelchair system at airports.
Blueskyism tends to favor a low bar to entry for disadvantaged identity groups or to receive treatments or benefits for certain disadvantaged-identity-based conditions, such as being disabled or transgender. People on Bluesky tend not to worry that over-inclusion into these groups will threaten services for those who are more deserving of the benefits or for whom treatment is more appropriate, so to speak, whether because there are limited resources or public opinion sours on benefits that people start to think are being distributed too broadly and unfairly.
Children taking DIY cross-sex hormones before going to gender clinics
Hundreds of young trans people are buying puberty blockers, oestrogen and testosterone without prescription from websites and even recreational drug dealers.
Hannah Barnes also reported on this yesterday. If kids are getting hormones from abroad, this could jeopardize the effort to study puberty blockers in the UK.
‘We’re All Just Winging It’: What the Gender Doctors Say in Private
In footage obtained exclusively by @TheFP, gender doctors acknowledge they perform life-altering procedures on vulnerable youth with no supportive evidence—and they are proud of it, By @LeorSapir. thefp.com/p/were-all-jus…
At their conferences, closed to outsiders and the press, the gender clinicians allowed themselves to speak freely. They spoke about the boys who said they wanted to be girls and the girls who felt they were meant to be boys, and the medical and surgical interventions that would make them appear as the opposite sex. The clinicians also discussed new procedures for a new type of patient—some of them adolescents—who wanted to be made to look as if they had no sex at all.
In one of the videos, obtained exclusively by The Free Press, from the 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) spoke about one such case. Penkin told the audience about Sky, who she described as an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who was living on his own for the first time.
Penkin explained that Sky expressed a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Sky, Penkin said, reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future.” Indeed, Sky did “not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible,” according to Penkin. thefp.com/p/were-all-jus…
Not so long ago, a patient like Sky would have been given a psychological evaluation and offered mental health counseling. But in the evolving world of gender medicine, clinicians now want to help young people like Sky achieve their gender goals.
Penkin explained to fellow professionals that requests for procedures that are “nonbinary” are “growing in number.” But the field is still wedded to binary assumptions. This means that procedures such as “nullification” (surgically leaving patients with no external genitals) or “penile preserving vaginoplasty” (surgically crafting a pseudo-vagina underneath the penis) are not as accessible as they should be.
Penkin said that when confronted with a patient like Sky, existing “research” and “standards of care” are “not enough to meet the needs of our patients, and we need to take it to the next level to really think about how we evolve and match the needs of our patients as their needs are being expressed to us.”
BREAKING: Ryan Lizza has just dropped Part 4 of his saga on Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr.
🧵👇👇Part 4: Means of Control
The Mar-a-Lago tape, the Bobby phone call, Olivia's side of the story, and the neighbor who cracked the case.
"Bobby [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and Olivia planned to consummate their relationship on August 23, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona, after he endorsed Trump at a rally in nearby Glendale. The timing was perfect. Bobby would no longer be a presidential candidate himself, so the media glare would dim, and, more importantly, Olivia later told me, he would no longer have the Secret Service protection that complicated an encounter. (And presumably Cheryl wouldn’t be around, either.) Olivia had a present for Bobby she was going to bring: a 1943 edition of Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter, a book based on the old comic strip about Starr’s wild adventures while on assignment for a newspaper.
"There were two problems. Inconveniently for them, I was also planning to be in Arizona to cover the Trump-Kennedy event. And then, a few days before the rally and the planned hotel room encounter, after Bobby and Olivia had been talking, texting, and FaceTiming for almost a year, I finally learned about their affair. Olivia reluctantly canceled her rendezvous with Bobby, who was about to become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump universe, a fortuitous development because Olivia was wrapping up her latest New York magazine assignment, a profile of Trump." telos.news/p/part-4-means…
Ryan Lizza on what Isabelle "Izzy" Brourman allegedly found by surreptitiously taping, for Olivia Nuzzi, Trump talking about the assassination attempt at Bethlehem, PA:
"According to Olivia, Izzy thought Trump said something that cast doubt on the official story behind Trump’s bloody ear, which was injured on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Thomas Crooks tried to kill Trump.
"I assumed the context of what Izzy thought she overheard was about whether it was one of the eight rounds fired by Crooks that nicked Trump’s ear or something else—ricocheting glass or a bullet fragment—but that’s just speculation.
"What I know from Olivia is that the quality of the audio recording was poor, that she couldn’t corroborate Izzy’s recollection, that she discussed the recording with Bobby, and that after a phone call with Bobby while he was on vacation with his wife in Baja, Olivia erased the recording." telos.news/p/part-4-means…
Ryan Lizza reports that the tape that Olivia Nuzzi asked Isabelle "Izzy" Brourman make of Trump talking might have raised questions about whether a bullet or something else nicked Trump's ear at the assassination attempt at Butler, PA. Lizza writes:
"Obviously, this episode raises a lot of questions:
"*When did Bobby [Robert F. Kennedy Jr aka RFK Jr.] learn about the operation to record Trump, and was it before or after it happened?
*Did Bobby ever disclose what he knew to the Trump campaign or anyone else?
*Did Olivia pass on any intel to Bobby from the recording, which would have included hours of Trump’s private campaign meetings at Mar-a-Lago, that aided him in his endorsement negotiations with Trump?
*What information from the recording, if any, did Olivia use in her profile of Trump, which was published on September 9, 2024?
*What did Trump really say about Butler, if anything?
*Does anyone still have a copy of the recording?
"The answers to these questions, and any additional information about what really happened, will have to come from Olivia, Izzy, and Bobby." telos.news/p/part-4-means…