Documents were leaked from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, earlier this month and reported by researcher Mia Hughes at Environmental Progress, a California-based think tank.
The eye-opening documents and video discussions suggest WPATH members are terribly conflicted over what is otherwise common sense to many: Can minors truly give approval for gender procedures that will have lifelong and debilitating consequences?
In a related and detailed X post, journalist Michael Shellenberger also shared the internal debates on the social media site. To sort through leaked documents and hours of footage, he broke down the discussions into topics about children and adolescents, mental illness, and ethics.
"What has been currently happening is, frankly, not what we need to be doing, ethically," one of the medical professionals tells his colleagues.
Those now-public concerns, such as children suffering terrible injuries, contradict WPATH’s previous public statements.
WPATH is an “interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health” whose members “engage in clinical and academic research to develop evidence-based medicine and strive to promote a high quality of care for transsexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals internationally,” its website states.
Now the medical group appears to be responding to pro-transgender backlash from the leaked documents.
The group on Monday removed from its website its “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8,” its most current recommended practices, only to replace the document later.
The question, of course, is why.
“The Standard of Care Version 8 documents are right back up on the front page,” Meg Kilgannon, the Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told the Washington Watch program Tuesday. “I don’t know if they were edited. They’re claiming there are internal web problems, but it’s curious that something like that would happen following the release of the files.”
“PLEASE BE ADVISED OUR WEBSITE IS CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING AN INTERNAL SYSTEM ISSUE AND WE ARE CURRENTLY WORKING TO RESTORE IT. WPATH CONTINUES IT’S MISSION TO PROMOTE EVIDENCE BASED CARE, EDUCATION, RESEARCH, PUBLIC POLICY, AND RESPECT IN TRANSGENDER HEALTH,” the group wrote on its website’s main page while providing a link to the Standards of Care.
Maybe a technical glitch, maybe not
However, reporting Tuesday by New York-based freelance journalist Jesse Singal suggests the up-and-down movement of the Standards of Care could be more than a technical glitch.
Singal cited one source who told him of an “out-of-cycle and clearly an emergency meeting.”
A second source told Singal, “WPATH has had huge internal controversies over the years, but now seems to be embroiled in unprecedented disruption.”
WPATH is viewed as the authority figure on health care for people who support gender-manipulation procedures. As such, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association rely on WRATH to guide their treatment and their care.
So Kilgannon says she is waiting to see their response.
"That means that school systems across the country rely on those organizations to inform their policies,” Kilgannon told show host Tony Perkins. “Until some of the major medical groups pull back from WPATH, things won't change very much, but we are hopeful that the continuing media coverage of this will make that happen.”
Kilgannon doesn’t have high hopes for quick change. WPATH’s vision is less about care and more about progressive politics.
“What they’re doing is creating a constituency so that they can develop this area of law called transgender rights,” Kilgannon said. “So, what better, more sympathetic group than children who have been affirmed in the wrong sex? They’ve been treated to be the gender that they’re not. You have adults using children for their own political and sexual agendas. That’s what this is.”
