Dr. Blair Peters,a gender-transition surgeon at OHSU, responds with disdain to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons coming out against such surgeries for minors. He says the broader membership was never polled about this.

Which is the same thing that has happened at the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, but going in the other direction. No matter how hard @JuliaMasonMD1 has pushed, the AAP’s 2018 policy statement on the gender-affirming care method has never been up for a vote by the broader membership.

All of the major medical organizations that have led the way in establishing pediatric gender medicine’s broader credibility, including the AAP and the Endocrine Society in particular, have supported these practices in minors based on the decisions of small committees.

The AAP’s 2018 policy statement was written by a single person, Dr. Jason Rafferty, who was a resident at the time.

All of the other medical societies’ little committees have followed these other groups’ lead, along with WPATH. This has given the illusion that all medial providers support these practices in minors.

But I’ve spoken to pediatricians who are too afraid to express their concerns at the AAP’s annual conference for fear this will destroy their careers. More from Blair Peters:

People are shocked that all it took for the AMA to change its policy on pediatric gender transition surgeries was for another medical group, the ASPS, to do it. But this phenomenon is how the unanimity among the medical groups fell into place in the first place. It was only ever based on a few small committees within a couple of medical organizations, putting aside WPATH, which is a quasi-activist-medical organization.

It got started in the 2010s as WPATH and the Endocrine Society, which have a lot of overlap between them and referred to one another's guidelines in their citations, put out guidelines. And then in 2018 a single medical resident wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement on the gender-affirming care method. Along the way, other major medical associations took these other groups' lead, including the APA and AMA. And then all the other ones fell in line.

These groups did not conduct major independent analyses of the evidence. Even the AAP never conducted a systematic literature review to support its policy statement. And in August 2023, the AAP said it was going to conduct one. But there is no sign that the organization has even started on that. Because if they ever did, there is only one conclusion that it could have: that the evidence backing providing gender-transition interventions to minors is weak and inconclusive.

All this is to say is that the mantra "all major medical association support gender affirming care for kids" was always a hallow claim. What it really meant is that: "A few small committees at a few organizations decided to support this, in part because of one another, and all the other small committees at all the other organizations followed their lead."

https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/2018889106298990779

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of how citation laundering laid the groundwork for the supposed medical consensus on gender-transition treatment for minors, I highly recommend @buttonslives's reporting: buttonslives.news/p/new-systemat…

A Legal First That Could Change Gender Medicine

At 16, Fox Varian got a mastectomy while undergoing a gender transition. She sued her psychologist and plastic surgeon for leaving her ‘disfigured for life.’ Benjamin Ryan reports from the courtroom.

Read the @TheFP article: thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…

Follow and support my Substack, where I cover pediatric gender medicine: benryan.substack.com. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial and will be providing more in-depth reporting and commentary on the case.

The opening of my Free Press article:

Fox Varian had a turbulent childhood. Her parents split when she was seven, triggering a three-year custody battle that ultimately saw her estranged from her father. She suffered from a constellation of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and social phobia. She was diagnosed with autism and bounced around various schools. Her first period sent her into a meltdown, and she battled disordered eating and body-image issues. By mid-adolescence, she was completely lost.

At 15, she began questioning her gender during sessions with her psychologist. She changed her birth name, Isabella, to Gabriel, which she saw as androgynous. Over the next two months, she cut her hair short, began binding her breasts, switched her name again, to Rowan, and started telling people she was transgender.

In December 2019, 11 months after she started this public social transition, Varian underwent surgery to remove her breasts. She was 16 years old.

Varian, who adopted the name Fox at 18 and is now 22, is one of thousands of minors who underwent gender-transition surgery over the past decade. And she is just one of the young people who have come to regret permanently addressing what was only a temporary identity shift.

Three years after her mastectomy, Varian stopped identifying as transgender and began a process known as detransitioning. In May 2023, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the two principal Westchester County, New York, care providers who oversaw her gender transition: her long-time psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, and Dr. Simon Chin, who performed the mastectomy.

On Friday, a jury in White Plains, New York, awarded Varian $2 million in damages. Varian’s case is the first malpractice suit from a detransitioner to go before a jury, and I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. Represented by personal-injury attorney Adam Deutsch, Varian said she had been injured by the defendants due to their deviation from standard practices and a lack of informed consent. While there are no guarantees in medical malpractice lawsuits, legal experts believe Varian’s victory could inspire a wave of similar cases that would significantly disrupt pediatric gender medicine. Claire Deacon, mother to Fox Varian, the detransitioner who won a $2M jury award after suing her care providers over the mastectomy she got at 16, testified that Varian's psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, browbeat her into consenting with threats of her child's suicide.

I report for @TheFP:
thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…

Subscribe to my Substack for further in-depth reporting about the case. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. benryan.substack.com

NYU neurologist/psychiatrist Jonathan Howard has been making a stink over @MichaelShermer's recent statements about transgender issues on @BrianLehrer's show.

Here, Howard cites a @Harvard study that falsely claimed youth "rarely" get gender-transition surgeries. In fact, about 1,000 minors got a mastectomy for this purpose annually in recent years, before state bans set in.

I wrote about that Harvard study when it came out. I demonstrated how its authors had quite evidently sought to mislead the public about this issue: benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…

So, in fact, it is not Shermer who is "making things up" about this point in particular, it was Harvard researchers that at least effectively did so.

As for expressing concerns about minors getting these surgeries, I would like Howard to look into the eyes of the mother who testified in the detransitioner civil trial that I just finished attending yesterday (the plaintiff won a $2M judgment against her care providers; my article on the suit will run in a major outlet next week) and tell her that the loss of her daughter's breasts when she was 16 amounts to a false concern.
How Harvard Teed Up the False Claim That the 'Vast Majority of Minors Getting Gender-Affirming Surgeries Are C-s Kids'

An opaquely written Harvard study and linked press release prompted false reporting that gynecomastia surgeries for boys are vastly more common than gender-affirming surgeries for transbenryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…

BREAKING: 1st Detransitioner to Take a Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit to Trial Wins $2 Million Judgement

Fox Varian sued her Westchester, NY, area psychologist and plastic surgeon for the gender-transition mastectomy she got at 16.

I was the only reporter to attend the entire 3-week, historic trial. Subscribe to my Substack to receive an alert about the feature article I have coming out next week in a major publication out about the trial: benryan.substack.com. I cover pediatric gender medicine as a specialty on my Substack.

Sorry to just give just a teaser for now about the case! But I wanted to get the word out about the verdict promptly, the slower pace of feature-article publishing notwithstanding.

The entire case file was put under seal when the trial started (although I obtained all those documents before they was sealed), and all the transcripts from the trial are also under seal. The riveting trial was sparsely attended and there was only one other reporter at the trial; and he only attended for part of it and, as I observed, took few notes. So my own hundreds of pages of notes from the trial will likely remain the only way for the public to learn about the all finer details of what transpired, possibly ever (or until an appeal, should that happen).

In addition to my article coming out in the media outlet soon, I intend to write a lot about what I observed and learned on my Substack over the coming weeks. Stay tuned… I have identified 28 detransitioner lawsuits filed to date. Varian v. Einhorn was the first to go to trial and the first to win a judgment, making history. If anyone knows of any additional cases that are not on my spreadsheet below or sees any errors, please DM me.

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.

Sources: link.springer.com/article/10.100…

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39716906/ 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-…

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…

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.

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.



 archive.ph/2025.12.07-002… 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.

https://twitter.com/hannahsbee/status/1997214624194740592

‘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…

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…

BREAKING: The 3rd part of Ryan Lizza's Olivia Nuzzi saga is live

Part 3: Catch and Kill
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…
"One night in early August 2024, before I knew anything, Olivia Nuzzi became obsessed with obtaining an advance copy of an article that The New Yorker was set to publish the following day. Olivia was desperate to get a preview of a profile of Bobby Kennedy Jr. by Clare Malone, a political reporter whom Olivia viewed as a competitor.

"The piece included a killer anecdote, one of the most memorable of the presidential campaign, and which would come to define Bobby’s image for much of the public: A decade earlier, he had left the carcass of a black-bear cub in Central Park as some kind of twisted prank.

"This was precisely the sort of story that Olivia relished, a Twin Peaks-like tale that illuminated the darker parts of a candidate’s mind. Olivia had written one of the earliest profiles of Bobby, so I figured her fixation on getting The New Yorker piece was also about professional jealousy. Bobby was her subject. Now she had missed a major scoop about the candidate whom, behind the scenes and without much explanation, she insisted would be the next president.

"What I didn’t know at the time was that she was secretly working to help make Bobby the next president." Ryan Lizza catalogues Olivia Nuzzi's catch-and-kill effort for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.):

"And [@OliviaNuzzi] didn’t want to get her hands on that @NewYorker profile because she envied Clare Malone’s bear scoop. In fact, I later learned, she already had it. Olivia had heard the strange story from a confidential source. But instead of writing it herself and owning what would become one of the most infamous stories of 2024, or handing it off to a colleague at @NYMag, Olivia outed the source to Bobby [Kennedy] and told him everything she had learned. Together they plotted ways to kill it, or, at the very least, get ahead of it. (Bobby eventually pre-empted Clare’s piece with a video about the bear story after a New Yorker fact-checker called him.)

"As she later revealed to me during hours of conversations, Olivia did this regularly throughout 2024: canvassing sources who trusted her, obtaining their opposition research on Bobby, and then feeding it directly to the candidate."
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…

VACCINE NEWS: A pair of Cochrane Review papers provide the strongest evidence to date that the HPV vaccine is very safe and highly effective.

Girls who are vaccinated before age 16 have an 80 percent lower risk of cervical cancer.

HHS secretary RFK Jr has disparaged the HPV vax, calling it dangerous. This rigorous analysis of numerous studies finds considerable evidence to the contrary. The vaccine was not associated with serious adverse effects and instead was only associated with mild effects, like a sore arm after the injection.

The papers:

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination for the prevention of cervical cancer and other HPV-related diseases: a network meta-analysis 
cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10…

Effects of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programmes on community rates of HPV-related disease and harms from vaccination cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10… The Cochrane review pored over a huge amount of safety data and found that serious adverse health events were rare and occurred at the same rate regardless of whether people received the vaccine or a placebo.

BREAKING: Ryan Lizza has issued Part 2 of his saga with Olivia Nuzzi:

She did it again.

It was four years later. Another presidential campaign. Another book project. Another candidate whom she had profiled. Another note—a poem, according to Olivia—though this time from the candidate to her.

“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, had written to my then-fiancé. “Drink from me Love.”

He continued, “I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Dont spill a drop’. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”

telos.news/p/part-2-she-d… "Olivia [Nuzzi] insisted that she and Mark [Sanford] only had sex one time, on the night of February 24, 2020, after she arrived at his home at about 7 PM. During their encounter, he was paranoid that she was taping him, so she briefly turned her phone’s recorder on and off to show him how it worked, leaving behind a short voice memo of the two of them giggling. She left his house around 11 PM."

The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition

More gay people are speaking out against the gender ideology of trans and queer activists, by Pamela Paul for @WSJ. Gift link: wsj.com/us-news/the-gr…

Update: The Texas doctor sued by Ken Paxton for allegedly prescribing gender-transition drugs to minors after the state’s ban went into effect has surrendered her medical license. She had written the prescriptions under the diagnosis “endocrine disorder not otherwise specified.” From Oct 2024: open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

NEWS: Trans and nonbinary identities are indeed in free-fall in college age Americans.

Prof. Jean Twenge @jean_twenge found new survey data that supports @epkaufm's much disputed claim from last week.

Twenge also found data indicating that trans identity increased exponentially by birth year until those born after about 2002. These identities have plummeted in those born more recently—who are now 20 to 23 years old.

The problem with Kaufman's data is it didn't distinguish between trans and nonbinary identities. The data that Twenge found does.

The decline in such identities in younger Americans raises important questions about the future of the field of pediatric gender medicine and the question of whether these identities are at least partially driven by social influences, as opposed to immutable, inborn traits.


@jean_twenge @epkaufm Check out @Jean_Twenge's blog: generationtechblog.com/p/trans-identi…

Pressured by Transgender Activists, Star Academic Backs Out Of His Own Research

I report for @NewYorkSun: By imperiling a paper on gender-transition interventions for youths, evidence-based medicine expert Dr. Gordon Guyatt joins a wider suppressive trend seen in academic publishing in pediatric gender medicine. LINK: Pressured by Transgender Activists, Star Academic Backs Out Of His Own Research

By imperilling a paper on gender-transition interventions for youths, evidence-based medicine expert Dr. Gordon Guyatt joins a wider suppressive trend seen in academic publishing in pediatric gender medicine.nysun.com/article/pressu…

NEWS: ABC Pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Indefinitely After Host’s Charlie Kirk Comments

Disney’s ABC said it would take Jimmy Kimmel‘s popular late-night show off its schedule “indefinitely” after one of the biggest owners of TV stations in the U.S., Nexstar Media, said it would pre-empt airings of the program following remarks the host made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

In his monologue Monday night , Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed Sept. 10 at a debate at Utah Valley University. Three days later, authorities announced they had arrested the suspected shooter.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said.

Nexstar said Wednesday that its “owned and partner television stations affiliated with the ABC Television Network will preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for the foreseeable future, beginning with tonight’s show.” The company said it  “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.” variety.com/2025/tv/news/n…

Update: Now The Guardian has cut from this article about Tyler Robinson the quote from the unnamed high school friend about his being “leftist”.

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1966620670634381628

I would very much like to know whether the unnamed source got cold feet and demanded a retraction of his quote (and if so, why), or if his words and his capacity to recall a time from about six or seven years ago were somehow misrepresented in the first place.

I report for @UnHerd on the tangled and tortured case of Gordon Guyatt, the towering figure of evidence-based medicine who has caved to transgender-activist pressure and thrown under the bus the funder of his systematic reviews of pediatric gender-transition treatment, @SEGM_EBM. He and his colleagues also contradicted their own research findings by adopting activist language touting the benefits of these interventions as “medically necessary.”

My reporting plumbs the depths of the internal tensions at McMaster University, where Guyatt is a star professor, over the mounting activist pressure. I spoke with one of the authors of the review papers, who was sharply critical of Guyatt’s decision to take sides on how his work should be used in the policy arena. This source shared with me internal emails diagramming the thought process of Guyatt and one of his key McMaster colleagues as they tried to quell the furor over their commissioned work for SEGM.

I also report on how Guyatt’s team is seeking to sink or at least divorce themselves from two other systematic reviews about youth gender medicine, and also kill an analysis of @WPATH’s trans care guidelines. unherd.com/2025/09/the-ta…