The Federal Trade Commission has opened consumer protection probes into the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), over claims made about gender dysphoria treatments. As part of the civil investigation, the FTC is seeking documents and testimony from the organizations to evaluate whether the medical groups made “false or unsubstantiated claims” when marketing or advertising medical interventions for the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria. Both organizations are trying to overturn the FTC’s demands, arguing that it lacks the jurisdiction to investigate non-profits and that the probe violates their 1st amendment rights.
Journalist Ben Ryan describes the schism between members of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ Gender Surgery Task Force and Board over the organization’s position statement opposing surgical interventions for patients under nineteen. Ryan explains how some members of the task force—including prominent WPATH members Scott Leibowitz, Loren Schechter, and Asa Radix—penned an open letter alleging that their input was not considered in the recent position statement. Interestingly, the task force is not taking issue with the content of the statement but rather with its procedural opaqueness. Leor Sapir, however, points out the double standard at play. “Leibowitz made no public protests about ‘process’ when it was revealed that WPATH committed serious violations in the creation of its recent Standards of Care, including suppression of evidence reviews, failures to manage conflicts of interest, and elimination of age minimums for political reasons. Apparently, ‘process’ only matters when you don’t get the result you want.”
Earlier this week, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) introduced the Stop Gender Trafficking of Minors Act, a bill which would establish federal protections to challenge the overreach of “sanctuary laws” which allow the “interstate transport of minors” to receive gender transition medical procedures. Specifically, the legislation would make it a federal offense to knowingly transport a minor across state lines to obtain gender transition procedures, create civil remedies, and prohibit federal dollars from being used to “subsidize or shield” such practices. “Children should not be transported across state lines to undergo irreversible medical procedures that are abusive and harmful just to circumvent home state laws or keep parents and guardians in the dark. This bill draws a clear, defensible line: exploiting interstate loopholes to bypass state safeguards is unacceptable, and Congress has a responsibility to act,” Crenshaw said in a statement. The bill is currently under consideration in the House.
In Real Clear Health, Zhenya Abbruzzese—co-author of the HHS report on pediatric gender dysphoria and co-founder of SEGM—and Dr. Erica Li explain how gatekeepers like medical associations and scientific journals do a disservice to the public by suppressing research that challenges the narrative that “affirming care” is safe and effective. “Several major medical organizations function as gateways to an information cartel about gender medicine. Their refusal to acknowledge or share emerging evidence leaves clinicians in the dark -- and patients pay the price,” the authors write. As they go on to explain, although HHS’ report on dysphoria draws on the strongest systematic reviews from Europe and the U.S., many major medical associations refuse to grapple with the disconnect between the findings of reviews, which consistently indicate an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio, and their position statements which unambiguously endorse affirming care for minors.
STAT News published a letter to the editor by several HHS report co-authors that rebuts several bioethical claims made about prohibiting minors from accessing medical interventions for gender dysphoria. The HHS authors argue that the report’s critics fundamentally misunderstand the principles of evidence-based medicine, and fail to recognize that several studies which purport to find benefits were incorporated into the review’s evidence synthesis. Moreover, the response letter rejects the premise that the report suffers from “scientific and methodological flaws,” noting that none of the report’s peer reviewers challenged its methods or conclusions. The HHS authors also take issue with critics’ bioethical analysis, which suggests the review does not consider the harms of not rendering “affirming care.” “Wolfe et al. do not cite any evidence of these harms, and since systematic reviews show no reliable evidence of benefit of providing these interventions to youth, one cannot assert that there are harms of delaying them until adulthood” the authors explain.
In the Hill, Jesse Franklin-Murdock unpacks recent findings by the U.S. Department of Education that California’s DOE violated federal law, including Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), by hiding gender transitions from parents. Franklin-Murdock explains how many California school districts operate with an implicit “anti-parent” stance by presupposing that a trans-identified minor’s right to privacy trumps a parent’s right to direct their child’s upbringing. Moreover, California’s 2024 Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act, codified this stance as state policy. “While schools play an important role in educating children, that role is limited — raising children is the job of parents, and not the state. By shining a light on California’s disregard for parents and their rights, the Department of Education took an important step in restoring the importance of parents and their rights to their proper place in American law and education” Franklin-Murdock concludes.
In City Journal, investigative reporter Christina Buttons analyzes a new study published in Frontiers of Psychiatry, which further challenges the popular narrative that “affirming care” culminates in improvements in clinical outcomes and psychiatric functioning. As Buttons explains, many studies which purport to find benefits for “affirming care” are plagued by methodological limitations, like confounding variables, which make it impossible to isolate the reason for improvement. A new retrospective follow up study from Hong Kong, however, aimed to control for confounds like social support and coping style which might influence outcomes. Although some patients reported improvements in “appearance congruence” this did not translate to improvements in mood, and the authors concluded that “gender-affirming treatments did not reduce depressive or anxiety symptoms significantly, after controlling for coping and social support.”
The Daily Wire’s Megan Brock explains the significance of the Affirming Families First Act, a bill introduced in the Ohio legislature which would protect the rights of parents who affirm their child’s biological sex. More specifically, the bill would prohibit courts from considering a parent who raises their child in accordance with their sex as contrary to the best interests of the child. The bill would also prohibit state funds from being used for training, education or programming that maintains that raising a child in accordance with their sex is abuse or neglect. “The Affirming Families First Act restores common sense to our child-welfare and family-law systems by making clear that affirming biological sex is not abuse, neglect, or contrary to the child’s best interest — it is a protected parental right” said bill co-sponsor and Ohio Rep. Josh Williams.
Last week, Utah’s House of Representatives voted 54-16 in favor of HB174, which would make a 2023 moratorium on prescribing medical transition procedures to minors permanent. Moreover, the bill would also require that patients currently receiving these interventions are weaned off by the end of January 2027. Notably, Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services released a controversial report which claimed to find evidence for the benefits of pediatric medical transition, however, the report clashes with the findings from systematic reviews of evidence. A recent report by Do No Harm explains how the Utah report fails to meet the criteria for a systematic review. The bill now heads to the Utah Senate.
Joseph Figliolia
Policy Analyst
News
