Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a lawsuit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The association richly deserves this comeuppance.
The FTC alleges that WPATH “has provided the means for medical providers to make false and unsubstantiated claims to parents in order to sell pediatric medical transition services.”
In plain English, WPATH’s member clinicians have long profited from so-called gender-affirming care for minors, and the association is now accused of misrepresenting the science behind that “care” to keep the dollars flowing.
To begin with, WPATH has spent recent decades positioning itself as the preeminent authority on gender medicine.
In a March 2023 statement, for example, the association referred to the current eighth edition of its “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People” (SOC-8) as “the foremost evidence-based guideline for the provision of [transgender and gender diverse] healthcare.”
That document, WPATH continued, “is based on the best available science with input from over 100 global medical professionals and experts and represents best-practice guidelines for the provision of gender-affirming healthcare.”
As a result, in part, of this institutional self-aggrandizement, WPATH’s recommendations have been widely adopted by insurers, hospitals, and regulators. Clinicians rely on WPATH’s representations when diagnosing children.
In the U.S. at least, it is not too much to say that pediatric gender medicine is WPATH, and WPATH is pediatric gender medicine.
Were the association an honest broker, we might merely lament its grievous ideological misjudgments. Yet, according to the FTC, WPATH has knowingly made false and unsubstantiated claims about the medical necessity, effectiveness, and safety of sex-denying interventions for minors.
Specifically, the FTC alleges that “[t]he methodology WPATH used to create SOC-8 does not satisfy accepted medical standards of evidence.” In creating its document, WPATH “selected authors who had conflicts of interest” and “made material changes to its recommendations in response to external pressure rather than scientific evidence.”
These are not the allegations of the federal government alone. The New York Times reported only last year that “[i]n fending off attacks on gender-affirming care … WPATH had itself allowed politics to dictate some of its recommendations.”
Moreover, the FTC’s complaint contends, WPATH “misrepresented the quality of evidence underlying its guidelines.” In a 2023 memo to his colleagues, Eli Coleman, MD, chairman of the SOC-8 team, confessed, “[a]ll of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in [the] research to back up our recommendations.” Nevertheless, those recommendation went forward unamended.
Perhaps most damagingly, WPATH has made unsupportable claims about the juvenile sex-denying interventions from which its member clinicians profited.
According to the FTC, “WPATH represents … that … transition services are medically necessary and effective at preventing suicide in children[;] that puberty blockers are fully reversible[;] that cross-sex hormones improve mental health[;] and that breast amputations are safe, effective, and consistently and directly increase children’s health-related quality of life.”
These claims are false.
As Do No Harm has previously demonstrated, the myth that “sex-change” interventions reduce the risk of suicide is completely unsupported by the evidence.
Experts from the Mayo Clinic have cast doubt on the reversibility of puberty blockers, and the removal of healthy breast tissue through so-called top surgery “creates permanent and disfiguring changes.”
Studies professing to show mental-health improvements for minors who receive cross-sex hormones and other sex-denying interventions are deeply flawed.
Given the known realities of child “gender-affirming care,” it is difficult to see WPATH’s recommendations as anything other than ideologically (or financially) driven.
That’s bad medicine and an abuse of patients’ trust.
