Chronicling pediatric “gender” radicalism at the American Academy of Family Physicians’ annual conference has become something of a fall tradition at Do No Harm.
We would just as soon break the habit if allowed.
Sadly, AAFP seems determined to politicize medicine anew each year, unapologetically departing from the evidentiary standard and throwing in their lot with vogue ideology.
In 2024, for example, one AAFP conference speaker stated falsely that “[t]here’s no question that it [pubertal suppression and cross-sex hormones] works; there’s no question that it saves lives,” ignoring the fact that the exhaustive Cass Review had recently determined that the evidence for such procedures is of “poor quality.”
A 2025 session, titled “Gender Affirming Puberty Suppression: Initiation and Management,” instructed attendees to give into a 12-year-old’s easily manipulable desires “over and against the counsel of both his parents and the mass of emerging medical evidence,” as the Washington Stand would later characterize the presentation.
This year’s conference, held October 20–24 in Nashville, continued the trend, not least in a session titled “Family Physicians’ Role in Caring for Transgender Youth,” led by Kevin S. Wang, MD.
There, Dr. Wang delivered a presentation so steeped in ideology that one questions whether a single word had scientific value.
The problems started with the Learning Objectives themselves, three propositions that took for granted the desirability of “gender-affirming medical care,” including “surgical care,” for children.
Shortly thereafter, Wang’s presentation featured a legal map dedicated to “adolescent transgender healthcare services” and composed from an explicitly ideological perspective.
(Specifically, the map revealed which states ban “medically necessary medication and surgical care for transgender youth,” a framing that begs the question whether any such “care” is, in fact, “medically necessary.”)
Things got worse later in the presentation. One slide argued falsely that “[t]ransgender healthcare is lifesaving care,” a claim clearly meant to apply to the “youths” mentioned elsewhere on the slide.
Another purported to offer a “summary of the current evidence” concerning “the provision of healthcare services to transgender and gender-diverse adolescents” but included a graphic implying that some of the so-called evidence comes from WPATH, a discredited medical “authority” currently being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for helping providers to make false and unsubstantiated claims to parents.
A grotesque slide near the presentation’s midway point concerned “[t]alking with families at visits” and presented a series of leading questions (e.g., “Do you feel more like a boy? A girl? Both? Neither?”) with which children might be inducted into pediatric transgender ideology.
Still later slides considered how best to treat “[y]ounger gender-diverse patients” less than 11 years of age, with the second slide in that sequence urging physicians and parents to “support” gender-dysphoric young children with “clothing” and “pronouns.”
The same slide promised without evidence that such actions “provid[e] significant behavioral and mental health relief and improvement.”
This is ideological radicalism, not science. It belongs at a political convention, not the flagship annual gathering of an influential medical professional organization.
As previously stated, Do No Harm would love to wake up to a world in which the AAFP can be trusted to stick to the facts, stop advocating for damaging, irreversible medical procedures, and draw the line at manipulating children.
Will 2027 be the year? We have few reasons to suspect so, but we hope for it.
