How Deep Does the Corruption of Transgender Ideology Go?

T he transgender emperor has no clothes.

This fact was exposed last month when a federal judge unsealed documents in a lawsuit against Alabama’s law protecting children from so-called gender-affirming care. The media have focused on the documents’ disclosure that a senior Biden administration official — Admiral Rachel Levine — pressured the leading transgender medical group into dropping age limits for sex-change treatments. But the real revelation is that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health routinely puts advocacy ahead of medical evidence, while publicly asserting the opposite.

WPATH, as it’s known, is the most powerful pro-gender-transition organization in medicine. Its website declares that it’s an “interdisciplinary professional and educational organization” with a mission “to promote evidence-based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health.”

WPATH is perhaps best known for publishing “standard of care” guidelines, and the latest version, SOC8, is held to be the gold standard for transgender medicine. Policy-makers have relied on these standards when passing laws and regulations allowing sex-change treatments for children. So have judges when striking down laws that seek to protect children from those same invasive and irreversible treatments.

Activists hoped to strike down Alabama’s law in Boe v. Marshall, but instead, the case has struck down WPATH’s reputation for caring about evidence when children’s health is on the line. Attorney General Steve Marshall unearthed documents and secured testimony from WPATH leaders showing that the organization squashes and ignores evidence that undermines the case for child gender transitions. It also allows disqualifying conflicts of interests and caves to pressure from outside activists.

WPATH’s disregard for evidence is astounding. The organization publicly claimed to evaluate evidence using the well-regarded Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) framework, with its high emphasis on systematic reviews of evidence. Yet the chairman of WPATH’s Standards of Care wrote, “We were not able to be as systematic as we could have.” One of SOC8’s chapter leads testified that drafters “used authors . . . we were familiar with” instead of systematic reviews. And when issuing treatment recommendations, the standards failed to include GRADE notations, giving the appearance of high-quality evidence in cases where the evidence was low-quality at best.

Then there’s WPATH’s treatment of a Johns Hopkins University team it hired to conduct systematic reviews. The team’s head wrote, “We found little to no evidence about children and adolescents.” WPATH responded by, according to the team head, “trying to restrict our ability to publish.”

All told, the group rejected two of the Johns Hopkins team’s attempts to publish their findings. As WPATH explained, any publication must be “thoroughly scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender healthcare.” In other words, the primary goal is providing dangerous chemicals and body-altering surgeries, not following the evidence.

To be sure, WPATH’s guidelines were highly suspect and broadly questioned even before these documents were unsealed. The final Cass Review from England’s National Health Service noted that WPATH “overstates the strength of evidence” and that its guidelines “lack developmental rigour.”

Yet the Alabama case shows that WPATH knew it was playing politics while pretending to help young patients. The group restricted authorship of its guidelines to its own pro-transgender members, with its president saying that it was “important for someone to be an advocate.” The Standards of Care chairman privately said that “most participants in the SOC-8 process had financial and/or nonfinancial conflicts,” but publicly, WPATH said none were “deemed significant.”

The least surprising part of the story is what the media have covered. The court documents show that Health and Human Services assistant secretary Rachel Levine, who is transgender, pushed WPATH to eliminate age-limit recommendations contained in a near-final draft of its latest standards of care. But that’s what you’d expect from a partisan public official. While Levine should be fired for playing politics with children’s health, what’s far more concerning is that WPATH quickly agreed.

The organization started and ended the development of its so-called gold standard guidelines in the same place — by covering itself in muddy partisanship. WPATH is far from the only medical organization that consistently puts transgender ideology ahead of evidence. The same goes for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which attempts to stifle debate on pediatric gender medicine, and the Endocrine Society, whose president was publicly rebuked by international experts for claiming that gender-affirming care for youth is an evidence-based practice.

Yet the World Professional Association for Transgender Health is the worst offender because it has made the most consistent claims of following the evidence and has influenced laws to an unmatched extent. The organization will continue touting its standards of care, but policy-makers and parents should recognize its claims for what they’ve always been — a naked lie.