WPATH EXPOSED
In 2023, a whistleblower leaked incriminating internal communications between members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to journalist Michael Shellenberger. WPATH purports to represent the world’s most pre-eminent “gender medicine” experts, but the leaked documents reveal an organization plagued by politics and mired in medical scandal.
Commissioned by Shellenberger, author Mia Hughes compiled the leaked materials into a comprehensive and damning report, The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults, released in March 2024.
Gender clinics and other medical organizations throughout the world have trusted WPATH’s Standards of Care (SOC) to guide the services they provide. The WPATH Files made clear that trust was unfounded. (More information about WPATH below.)
Video footage and messages between WPATH members reveal doctors who appear to barely register the humanity of their “clients” (formerly known as patients). Clinicians describe disturbing surgical complications and discuss initiating and managing hormones and surgeries for those suffering from significant mental illness. While U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored what should have been breaking news, a number of health care agencies throughout the world have quietly removed WPATH’s Standards of Care from their websites.
For more about the immediate aftermath, see this article from Gender Clinic News.
As stated in The WPATH Files report:
“The consumer-driven model of autonomy involves giving the patient whatever he or she wants, so long as certain criteria are met: The clinician is technically capable of doing it; the patient wants it for whatever reason; it’s legal, and the patient can pay for it. … The world-leading transgender health group advocates for a transition-on-demand style of care, valuing patient autonomy over avoidance of harm. WPATH’s SOC8 [Standards of Care Version 8] more closely resembles a shopping list of risky and invasive cosmetic interventions, with each chapter concluding that the procedures are medically necessary if the patient so desires.
Such recommendations extend as far as non-binary ‘nullification’ surgeries to create a smooth, sexless appearance or ‘bi-genital’ surgeries involving the creation of a second set of genitals. There is also a chapter on people who identify as eunuchs and seek chemical or surgical castration as a means to affirm their ‘eunuch identities.’ Within the WPATH Files, there are discussions regarding these “non-standard” procedures and how to manage them. However, notably absent from these discussions is any consideration of the ethical concerns surrounding surgeries that destroy healthy reproductive organs in pursuit of creating bespoke anatomical features that do not exist in nature.”
*Note: In SOC8, the chapter on ethics was removed. Age restrictions were also removed.
ISSUES IDENTIFIED IN THE WPATH FILES
Conversations among WPATH members reveal that WPATH clinicians are fully aware of the serious ethical and medical problems with “gender affirming care.” Issues exposed by the files:
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Clinicians Harming Patients: WPATH clinicians knew that “gender affirming care” could harm patients and cause irreversible physical damage.
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Lack of informed Consent: Clinicians acknowledged that patients were not mature enough or psychologically well enough to comprehend the consequences or the realities and limitations of “affirmative care” interventions, and were incapable of providing consent or assent. Often their parents were also unable to understand the implications of the medical pathway.
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Psychiatric Comorbidities: Children and adolescents who are referred to gender clinics often already suffer from debilitating mental illness including schizophrenia, PTSD, anxiety, depression and Dissociative Identity Disorder, as well as neurocognitive challenges including ASD and ADHD — conditions that can contribute to distress and dysphoria.
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Detransition: Growing numbers of patients who undergo these procedures later experience profound regret. The lack of systems for tracking patient experience has resulted in the misconception that only a minority of patients detransition. A new study from Germany puts detransition numbers at least 63%.
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Physical Harm: The recommended opposite-sex hormones, cosmetic mastectomies, and genital surgeries that comprise “gender-affirming” interventions can result in sterilization, loss of sexual function, liver tumors, and death.
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Lack of an Evidence Base: WPATH member correspondences expose serious ethical breaches and raise critical questions about the scientific rationale behind some clinical decisions, casting doubt on WPATH's claim that SOC8 is evidence-based and constitutes best practice.
Download our “WPATH EXPOSED” fact sheet for printing
WPATH FILES “HIGHLIGHTS”
A NEW WPATH LOW
In April 2024, further damning evidence about WPATH came to light. Despite the organization's claim that it was impossible to conduct a systematic review of the evidence for “gender-affirming care,” WPATH had contracted with Johns Hopkins University to undertake exactly such a review. The results (unsurprisingly) showed that the evidence was weak. Emails between Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality indicate that WPATH prevented the publication of the review. England’s Cass Review — the systematic review deemed “impossible” by WPATH — concludes that the evidence, including the limited studies cited in SOC8, are “low quality, with short follow-up periods and variable outcomes, as well as a selected account of detransition rates.” The scandal continues as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services department, Admiral Levine, M.D., is revealed to have pushed WPATH to remove all age restrictions from SOC8. Newly unsealed documents show emails in which Levine pressured WPATH to remove the age limits due to political concerns, despite a lack of scientific evidence supporting the change.
The Cass Review also revealed that WPATH, along with the Endocrine Society, and the authors of studies on pediatric gender medicine, was guilty of “citation laundering” — the practice of referencing their own and each other’s policies or findings (without regard for the quality of evidence) to lend false legitimacy to their claims.
TAKE ACTION
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Write to your local gender clinic (template available).
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Join the effort to counter WPATH’s malign influence. Sign the Beyond WPATH Declaration.
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Tell the Biden Administration that Admiral Levine, who pushed politics over ethics to have age limits removed from WPATH’s SOC8, should be fired.
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Send a letter to your state legislators, stating that consequences for the collusion among the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, WPATH, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are long overdue (template available).
ABOUT WPATH
In its first incarnation (1978), The Harry Benjamin Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders, was nominally a science-based organization for medical professionals involved in the new field of gender medicine. By 2007, the group renamed itself the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health,” and became increasingly politicized.
This self-appointed group of so-called experts on “gender care” offers full membership with voting privileges to “professionals working in a variety of areas including medicine, psychology, law, social work, counseling, psychotherapy, nursing, family studies, sociology, anthropology, speech and voice therapy, and sexology.” By 2024, as many as one-third of WPATH’s members were not medical practitioners, but one unifying principle seems dominant — all board members and officers are required to “...affirm commitment to affirmative care.” According to an article in the Guardian UK, “WPATH is neither solely a professional body – a significant proportion of its membership are activists – nor does it represent the ‘world’ view on how to care for this group of people. There is no global agreement on best practice.” Yet, WPATH’s SOC guides all medical and psychological treatment of those who present with gender distress, and is the basis for a vast number of gender-based policies, including those in educational mandates for schools, medical insurance coverage, legislation, federally funded school, college and university Title IX updates, police training, social worker programs, and company HR policies.
It’s almost impossible to overstate WPATH’s influence.
WHAT’S IN WPATH’S STANDARDS OF CARE?
WPATH’s most recent SOC8, published in 2022, actively dismantles barriers to accessing puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and surgery. In addition, the term "gender identity disorder" (a term with pathological implications) which changed to "gender dysphoria" in SOC7, and changed yet again to “gender incongruence” in SOC8. This shift was to eliminate the stigma associated with mental illness and characterize trans identity as a normal human variation rather than a medical problem … while at the same time insisting that “gender-affirming care” is medically necessary and critical for suicide prevention — and, of course, recommending that treatments are covered by insurance.
EVERYTHING BUT ETHICS
New to the SOC8 is a chapter on eunuchs (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26895269.2022.2100644, p. S88 (p. 90)). (Yes, a chapter on eunuchs is one of the latest, apparently essential, additions to the SOC.) What’s missing from SOC8 is as important as what it contains — thin as it was, the ethics chapter, which appeared in the draft circulated for public comment, was removed prior to publication.
In its FAQ about the changes since SOC7, WPATH states “The Standards of Care 8 represents the most comprehensive set of guidelines ever produced to assist health care professionals around the world to provide best-practice health care for transgender and gender-diverse adults, adolescents, and children who are taking steps to live their lives in alignment with their gender identity.” Contrast that statement with the clear weakening of safeguards, including removing all minimum age requirements for children.
IN SUMMARY
WPATH is an organization whose ethics are blighted by ideology, and whose credibility is utterly compromised due to:
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Conceptualizing eunuchs as a “gender identity,” and linking to a database of sexual fantasy material involving castration, much of it involving minors
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Eliminating the chapter on ethics
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A leaked video of a prominent member admitting that the age restrictions were removed to protect doctors already performing procedures on minors from litigation
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Prescribing hormones and operating on those with debilitating mental illness including schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder, and with highly unstable living situations
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Admission by WPATH members that they know opposite-sex hormones likely caused cancer in a young female, and despite this knowledge, continue to prescribe these drugs.
Read the SOC8 on the WPATH website.