FTC Takes Aim at Child Transgender Industry’s ‘Deceptive’ Practices

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to hold a workshop to review statements made by doctors and medical providers surrounding the efficacy of child sex change interventions, according to documents obtained by The Daily Wire.

The workshop, titled “The Big Lie: The Dangers of Gender-Affirming Care for Minors,” is intended to build on President Trump’s January executive order targeting these procedures, according to The Daily Wire. 

“Every available and legal means to protect children from harmful transgender procedures should be taken,” said Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Chairman of Do No Harm. “The FTC is right to recognize that medical institutions captured by gender ideology are deceiving concerned parents into allowing their children to undergo these dangerous interventions. We applaud the FTC and the Trump Administration for taking this important step towards protecting children.”

Additionally, the workshop’s proposed guest list features several experts including Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Miriam Grossman.

“Under the Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC is provided broad authority to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade acts and practices,” a memo on the workshop reads, according to The Daily Wire. “There is now considerable reason to believe that the doctors and medical providers pushing [gender-affirming care] on minors are knowingly deceiving parents by exaggerating [gender-affirming care’s] ‘benefits’ and downplaying its harmful side effects.”

While it’s unclear exactly which entities the FTC is targeting, medical associations and doctors routinely make misleading statements and downplay the harms of sex change interventions for children.

For instance, the FTC’s actions follow on the heels of a letter by several state attorneys general warning the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that its statements supporting gender medical interventions for children are “deceptive” and may violate states’ consumer protection laws. That letter specifically targeted the AAP’s statements that characterized puberty blockers as “reversible.”

Puberty blockers can cause diminished bone density in minors, with research showing that they negatively affect “bone mineral density, especially at the lumbar spine, which is only partially restored after sex steroid administration.” 

Moreover, artificially preventing a child from going through puberty is inherently experimental, and there are long-term risks such as cognitive impairment, greater risk of infertility, and permanently impaired adult sexual function.

Additionally, nearly all children put on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones. And the risks are even more pronounced for cross-sex hormones; women taking testosterone see a 3.5 increase in incidence of heart attacks compared to women not taking testosterone, while men taking estrogen see a 46-fold increase in invasive breast cancer compared to men not taking estrogen.

The memo goes on to note that, “[w]hile several politicized medical organizations that promote [gender-affirming care] for minors as the best standard of medical care might claim a ‘consensus,’ there is in truth no widespread medical consensus as to whether [gender-affirming care] is the correct course of action for gender dysphoric youth.”

This statement gestures at the paucity of evidence supporting child sex change interventions. Several major reviews of the evidence, including the United Kingdom’s Cass Review and a recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services, concluded that there is very weak evidence to support the use of sex change interventions to treat minors with gender dysphoria.

Additionally, major tentpole studies cited to support so-called “gender-affirming care” are often rife with methodological errors.