WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, “is not a scientific or medical group,” Mia Hughes writes. What they do is “not consistent with medical ethics.” Their “approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.”
Released last week by Michael Shellenberger’s environmental nonprofit, the WPATH files are evidence of the greatest medical crime since lobotomy, Hughes writes. She compares it to three more historical episodes of doctors harming patients, including “Battey’s operation,” in which tens of thousands of women had their ovaries removed in the belief that it would cure a variety of issues.
The WPATH files reveal an activist organization committed to practicing and defending sex lobotomy on children and adults without real informed consent. “A medical experiment based upon an untested article of belief was unacceptable in the 19th century,” Hughes argues. “It is unforgivable today.”
In her 70-page summary of the evidence, Hughes points to “the consumer-driven model of autonomy” inherent in the WPATH belief system. In their own words, members of the organization “regard sex trait modification as a ‘human rights’ issue first and foremost, and only secondarily, if at all, as a medical question.”
Personal autonomy is a long-running American cultural value about medicine, and WPATH members are hardly the first profiteers who invoked ‘human rights’ to protect themselves from liability. As we have explored here at The Distance, sex lobotomy has striking similarities to the American tradition of patent medicine, including iatrogenic (medicine-caused) harm.
Hughes writes that pediatric sex lobotomy was an “innovative practice” that “escape(d) the lab” in a “runaway diffusion” across the medical and therapeutic professions thanks to WPATH.
“WPATH and its members have also influenced the position statements and practice guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Psychological Association (APA), and The Endocrine Society,” she writes. Hughes might go on to name any number of therapeutic and community health organizations, to say nothing of Stonewall, the ACLU, HRC, and all the alphabetical civil rights organizations.
They made self-harm a human right, and ran with it.
Hughes traces the first signs of trouble to the so-called “Dutch protocol” which begat the craze in the first place. During 2019 and 2020, systematic reviews in Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom led to bans on the practice in all three countries.
She notes that WPATH discussed the same issues raised by those systematic medical reviews, but only after they took place. Rather than stop what they were doing, or slowing down, the so-called professionals of sex lobotomy forged ahead on their weak evidence base, knowing it was weak.
They thought that being a professional association would protect them from consequences. “The group exists solely to shield doctors from legal liability, through the creation of guidelines it conveniently calls ‘standards of care,’ and to ensure insurance coverage for sex-trait modification procedures,” Hughes writes.
A thin veil of weasel-language protects them. “‘Standard of care’ is a legal term, not a medical term, and ‘represents the benchmark that determines whether professional obligations to patients have been met.’” Rather than investigating the mental well-being, social functioning, or happiness of patients, WPATH measures success according to their cosmetic “embodiment goals.”
Yet it will not be enough to save them. “Discussions in the files show that WPATH is aware that this treatment protocol is creating a generation of sexually dysfunctional young people,” Hughes writes. Let the lawsuits begin. “We call for WPATH’s consumer-driven gender-affirming care to be banned by ethics committees in every town and city across the US and globally.”
One problem for WPATH is that their internal communications reveal an awareness that detransitioners exist, as well as an effort to dismiss their experiences and diminish their importance. Even “acknowledgment that de-transition exists to even a minor extent is considered off limits for many in our community,” reads one of the threads in the files.
“There is talk of detransition being just another step in a patient’s ‘gender journey’ and not necessarily involving regret. By this self-serving logic, it is impossible for clinicians practicing the affirmative model to ever be wrong in their diagnosis or treatment decisions,” Hughes writes. “In no other branch of medicine is the patient blamed for consenting to a treatment based on a misdiagnosis.” No other branch of modern medicine would follow unfalsifiable assumptions with such rigor.
Sex lobotomists invoke the so-called ‘minority stress hypothesis’ in order “to deny culpability when a person regrets their transition or when the transition doesn’t improve their mental health.” They blame society for making their victims feel unwelcome as ‘trans people.’
And “because ‘intolerance’ is defined by the activist clinician-researchers themselves in ever more implausible ways, minority stress is essentially an unfalsifiable and, thus, unscientific theory,” Hughes writes. “It is thus also an all-too-convenient insurance policy for gender clinicians against malpractice allegations.” This is a tissue-thin excuse, however, and it has already been torn to shreds in a federal courtroom.
As we noted last year, Alabama SB 184, the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act (VCAP) prohibiting transgender hormones and surgeries for minors, has been allowed to stand by the 11th Circuit court. The case is titled Boe v. Marshall.
Plaintiffs suing to strike down the Alabama law cited WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, as well as AAP, the American Association of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society in their complaint. Under subpoena pressure by the state attorney general, both AAP and the Endocrine Society demurred to WPATH.
AG Steve Marshall wanted to see the organizational receipts of scientific evidence. “The process WPATH used to create, review, and adopt their position statements, treatment guidelines, and standards of care regarding transitioning treatments,” along with their “review of the literature related to transitioning treatments for minors” as well as their “reaction to members’ concerns about pediatric transitioning care in America.”
Thus a federal court has already seen some of the contents of these files, and decided at least one case accordingly. Taken together, all of this information might explain why global and national WPATH membership has drastically declined in the last year.
“If there were suddenly a surge of teenagers being given vasectomies and tubal ligation on demand, or if plastic surgeons were selling breast augmentation and facelifts to adolescents as a remedy for their mental disorders, it is certain that both the media and legislatures would weigh in on the issue,” Hughes writes. The word “gender” has such power that people are blind to obvious harms, and to history.
Much like women in the 19th century who internalized the reflex theory narrative, fixating on their reproductive organs as the root cause of their mental distress and subsequently requesting ovarian removal surgeries, vulnerable women and girls in the 21st century are now embracing the narrative of the modern trans rights movement that tells them if they hate their female bodies, it is an indication of the need for surgical alteration. Once again, they are fixating on their reproductive organs, and this time their breasts too, as the source of their anguish and seeking a surgical solution.
Henceforth, the best service WPATH can provide to humanity is an historical example of an imploding ideology, crushed by punishing criminal verdicts and damning civil judgments. Hopefully Mia Hughes will also be writing that history as it happens. She chose four good examples of parallel medical scandals, but there are others that a more comprehensive historical volume might include as well. Hopefully, we will promulgate just such a volume this year. It’s on our to-do list.
Don't you just fucking hate being right?
I do.