The Cult Of The 'Trans Child' Is Doomed

Trump administration takes on the systematic fraud of 'pediatric gender medicine'

Jonathan Schweppe, Senior Policy Adviser at the Federal Trade Commission, opens last week’s workshop on the frauds that ‘gender medicine’ perpetrates on children

It was a casual conversation with a security guard during the first break, in the middle of the morning session, that convinced me we have reached the beginning of the end.

He was an average federal employee, a man with a teenage daughter who had experienced gender dysphoria. His estranged wife had encouraged the identification. His daughter is now an adult, no longer caught in the grip of the trend.

The story was relatively mild. His daughter never medicalized. Still, his experience was all too familiar. It would not stand out from the stories that PITT Parents tell. Yet this man had been busy, unaware of the larger story, and now he had just spent the morning discovering that he is not alone, and his story is not unique.

He had not understood how bad it could have been. He knew that ‘transitioning’ his own child would have been terribly wrong, but he did not realize how many children have been negatively affected by ‘gender medicine’.

Having just listened to a panel of young people who suffered extreme harm, and a father of a detransitioned 21-year old man, that Average Joe security guard had been transformed into a witness for the prosecution.

First they laughed at us.

Then they fought us.

Now comes the part where we win.

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Last Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission held a full-day workshop, “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors.” Clinicians, experts, and families affected by the phenomenon told their stories and offered insights for the FTC to consider.

You can watch the entire workshop at this link. (It is 7:40:04 long.) But you will not be able to see me talk to the security guard, or eavesdrop on the hundreds of amazing conversations that took place in and around that auditorium.

The cult of the ‘trans child’ is doomed. It was obvious by the end of the workshop. For as Dr. Michael Laidlaw said during a panel sesson, no responsible physician would ever give insulin to a patient without objective proof that they actually have diabetes. This is the normal ethic of normal medicine.

What endocrinologists and surgeons do to minor children, on the other hand, is not normal or ethical medicine. No one has patented a laboratory test or scientific instrument that can determine whether a person was ‘born in the wrong body’. So-called ‘gender medicine’ is an entirely subjective, unscientific endeavor.

Fraud. A crime.

Detransitioners told the FTC how comorbid mental health issues were ignored, ‘gender’ was promoted to them over all other forms of suffering, and ‘transition’ was presented as a panacea for all their problems.

This is not scientific medicine. It is fraud.

Simon Amaya Price’s doctor told him to attend transgender support groups in secret, without telling his father, then told his father to remove all the knives from the kitchen drawers to prevent Simon from self-harming. “The pediatrician then asked my dad in front of me, ‘Would you like a dead son or a living daughter?’”

“That was emotional blackmail,” Simon’s father Gareth said. “And in my opinion, malpractice.”

Also: Fraud.

The absolute need for federal intervention was laid clear. Gareth Amaya Price eventually took his son to a private center that did not affirm Simon. “I can’t say the name of that facility — because they did a good job treating his anxiety and depression,” Gareth said. “And treating a child with transgender ideation in any other way than so-called ‘affirmation therapy’ is illegal in Massachusetts.”

Elvira Syed described the loss of her autistic daughter Ilene to false abuse claims by a FTM transgender pastor. At her instigation, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) investigated Elvira for “abuse” because she did not “affirm” Ilene. While DCF eventually dismissed the case, her estranged daughter took her own life after breaking up with a boyfriend. Elvira blames the testosterone, which failed to prevent suicide as advertised, because gender medicine is fraud.

Jay Richards of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family zeroed in on the suicide extortion. “It’s only with that emotional blackmail that most parents would ever have entertained starting this process in the first place, and it’s exactly why the FTC has relevant jurisdiction on this issue,” he said. They have jurisdiction over fraud.

Kayla Lovdahl was 12 when she received testosterone and Lupron. “I went from training bras, to binding, straight to the operating table at 13,” she said. Lovdahl had read about transgenderism online and mentioned it to her therapist, who immediately ‘affirmed’ her and began writing letters of referral for doctors specializing in pediatric transition. She received no screening. No questions were asked — because it was fraud.

“I hadn’t even learned algebra yet. But I was old enough to choose to have healthy parts of my body electively amputated,” Claire Graham told the workshop. She had a double mastectomy at 14 and still suffers from pelvic floor and urinary problems. “We need to make sure that no more kids are sold a product they can’t return.” We need to stop the fraud.

Doctors offer fertility preservation to very young children about to undergo sterilizing transition. But Jennifer Lahl, founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, told the audience that she has found “zero success stories” in which males transitioned in Tanner Stage II have been able to father a child. It is simply another fraud.

Whistleblowers described how ‘affirmation’ policies require clinical workers to ignore their conscience, their training, and their education to endorse madness. Tamara Pietzke was ordered to affirm a child who ‘identified’ as a “wounded male dog.” She left that job, was then fired from her next job, then got harassed by the state of Washington for failure to affirm this obvious delusion. She was in the way of a state-sanctioned fraud.

Borderline personality issues, self-harm, eating disorders, autism, trauma histories, and depression severe enough to qualify children for disability status were ignored in favor of transition. “We were harming disabled children,” Jamie Reed said. Whereas a “significant percentage” of people tested for any other condition must receive negative results, ‘gender medicine’ never leaves any child behind — because it is fraud.

“They don’t even play by the rules they set for themselves,” attorney Jordan Campell noted. Campbell has represented detransitioners before. Now he is the Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Consumer Protection Branch of the Civil Division at the Department of Justice. He prosecutes fraud.

Every pediatric gender clinician in the country should be very, very afraid for their licenses right now. Also their bank accounts. And their freedom. But all they have to do is stop committing criminal fraud on the bodies of kids.

Gareth Amaya Price was not the only parent present at the workshop. Most of them were in the audience, anonymous.

But Beth Bourne is fearless, so she told the story of her daughter’s transgender identification and showed email exchanges with Kaiser Permanente containing fraudulent information and coercive statements. “When I voiced my concerns to the pediatrician and the endocrinologist about what was happening, the endocrinologist said ‘this is an emerging field … we don’t know the long-term medical effects.’”

This is a common verbal tactic. “A lot of times, gender doctors kind of use language to imply that they’re going to get an answer to the ‘gender question’ soon. ‘The science is almost there,’” attorney Glenna Goldis said. “And they’ll say this is like a really new area of study. It is not. All this stuff goes back to the early 1960s … it’s had very little change to the theories underlying it since the 1970s, when they coined the term ‘gender dysphoria.’”

Presenting numerous examples, witnesses described the use of false billing codes to defraud insurers for hormones and surgeries. Prisha Mosely’s double mastectomy was coded as a breast reduction. Dr. Miriam Grossman presented a memorandum from Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania that explains how code E34.9 (‘endocrine disorder, unspecified’) is used to “decrease barriers” to “care” by simply lying about the purpose of the treatment.

“When young people hear the idea that their feelings are more consequential than their bodies, they believe it,” Dr. Grossman said. “The proponents of gender-affirming care declare that a person’s inner sense, something that cannot be directly observed, measured, or verified, is more authentic than the material world.” No actual science is involved in this sorcery.

“It seems safe to say that patients don’t know what doctors mean by the term ‘gender,’” Goldis said. “And doctors don’t really have any meaning.” Instead, they use circular definitions. Goldis provided examples from depositions in cases around the country.

Leor Sapir of the Manhattan Institute dismissed the entire premise of pediatric gender affirmation, not just the “child-led model.” For contrary to the notion that a better, more careful way forward exists through the so-called “assessment model,” systematic reviews have found that diagnosis of gender dysphoria is “not predictive of adult outcomes.”

Informed consent is not really possible in a minor. Put simply, there is no ‘right’ way to do sex reassignment on a child. The clinicians understand this, so they don’t bother. They just do the fraud and cash the checks.

Edmund Gerald LaCour Jr., the Solicitor General of Alabama, told the audience that the ACLU dropped its case against Alabama’s ban on pediatric transition “with prejudice,” a highly unusual step. For even if the Skrmetti decision had gone the other way, he said, the plantiffs would have been forced to confront the evidence that the state obtained from WPATH in discovery, such as the chapter on “eunuch identities” for children.

Before the workshop ended, Chad Mizelle, Chief of Staff at the Department of Justice, announced that the DoJ has issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and medical associations.

Turning to The New York Times, gender clinicians immediately spun the story as an attack on patient privacy. This seems to be another common defensive tactic: Texas whistleblowers Dr. Ethan Haim and Vanessa Sivadge, who both spoke at the workshop, were persectued by the Biden administration on false charges of violating HIPAA. The charges against Dr. Haim were frivolous and fraudulent, so they were eventually dismissed.

Such fake affronts are not going to work anymore, however. “If you are somebody who has been harmed by this industry, let us know. If you are a parent, if you are a child, if you were somebody who was lied to, deceived, told that a particular drug might be reversible, when we know it’s not actually reversible, we want to know about that,” Mizelle said. “That will help us in our investigations. Not just on the civil side, but on the criminal side” (emphasis added).

The speakers “gave a lot of extremely alarming and concerning information that absolutely gives us the basis to investigate, to fill out the entire legal framework that we would need to pursue a case,” Mark Meador, Commissioner of the FTC, told The Daily Signal. While much preparatory work remains to be done, “I think what we saw today gave us an unequivocal basis to start investigating and determining how and where there have been violations.” Frauds.

The FTC is empowered to use compulsory process and subpoena records. They can pursue court injunctions wherever they determine a fraud has taken place. But the DoJ has power to put people in prison, so the presence of DoJ officials at the workshop is a tantalizing sign of things to come.

Attendees suggested that the clinicians identified in the workshop, such as Marci Bowers, Sidhbh Gallagher, and Johanna Olson-Kennedy ought to be the first subjects of any federal inquiry.

In the closing hour, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson announced a public request for information on transgender medical interventions will be published this week. The Distance will update when further details are available. The time has come for all of us to share what we know. Powerful people are listening to us at last.

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A reporter that I had met in March when I travelled to Washington for Detrans Awareness Day 2025 was also there. She told me she has never seen any social movement display as much unity as ours does.

While I had to inform her that ‘gender critical’ infighting does indeed happen, she was correct that years of social ostracism and propagandizing have galvanized opposition to genderwoo rather than suppressing it. We have come a long way together, and now the time has come for us to succeed together.

The so-called ‘trans child’ was foundational to the project of creating the new, protected class of human being called ‘transgender’. The children were supposed to make the world safe for adult men who impose themselves on women’s spaces and justify rules that allow boys to cheat at girls’ sports.

The larger fraud being perpetrated on human society depended on the children to lead. Thus the end of the ‘trans child’ undermines every other part of the transgender project in a slow-motion cascade.

We are going to win. We will see the cultic evil of the ‘trans child’ brought to justice in our time. Standing now at the end of everything that came before, we still have many battles to fight, but we have reached the turning point in our biggest battle of all.

For we do not know our own strength. America is filled with parents like that security guard. Most detransitioned people suffer in silence. Until now, these people were afraid, alone, and unaware of one another. When the silencing and intimidation tactics are removed, the cult of the trans child has no future.