The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescent, and Vulnerable Adults

ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS | BY MIA HUGHES | MARCH 4, 2024

World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) members demonstrate a lack of consideration for a long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) enjoys the reputation of being the leading scientific and medical organization devoted to transgender healthcare. WPATH is globally recognized as being at the forefront of gender medicine.

However, throughout this report, we will show that the opposite is true. Newly released files from WPATH’s internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrate that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.

While there is a place in medicine for risky experiments, these can only be justified if there is a reliable, objective diagnosis; no other treatment options are available, and if the outcome for a patient or patient group is dire.¹ However, contrary to WPATH’s claims, gender medicine does not fall into this category. The psychiatric condition of gender dysphoria is not a fatal illness, and the best available studies show that in the case of minors, with watchful waiting and compassionate support, most will either grow out of it or learn to manage their distress in ways less detrimental to their health. ^2,3,4

As such, this report will prove that sex-trait modification procedures on minors and people with mental health disorders, known as “gender-affirming care,” are unethical medical experiments. This experiment causes harm without justification, and its victims are some of society’s most vulnerable people. Their injuries are painful and life-altering. WPATH-affiliated healthcare providers advocate for the destruction of healthy reproductive systems, the amputation of healthy breasts, and the surgical removal of healthy genitals as the first and only line oftreatment for minors and mentally ill people with gender dysphoria, eschewing any attempt to reconcile the patient with his or her birth sex. This report will show that this is a violation of medical ethics and, as is revealed by its own internal communications, WPATH does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine. It will further show that the ethical requirement to obtain informed consent is being violated, with members admitting that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of sex-trait modification interventions, and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.

Given the extent of the medical malpractice WPATH endorses, our report will conclude by calling on the U.S. government to oversee a bipartisan national inquiry to investigate how activists with little respect for the Hippocratic Oath could have risen to such prominence as to set the Standards of Care for an entire field of medicine, leading to the medical abuse of minors and vulnerable adults.

1 – Earl, J. “Innovative Practice, Clinical Research, and the Ethical Advancement of Medicine.” [In eng]. Am J Bioeth 19, no. 6 ( Jun 2019): 7-18. https://doi. org/10.1080/15265161.2019.1602175.

2 – Singh, D., Bradley, S. J., & Zucker, K. J. (2021). A Follow-Up Study of Boys With Gender Identity Disorder [Original Research]. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 287. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784

3 – Steensma, T., & Cohen-Kettenis, P. “Gender Transitioning before Puberty?”. Archives of sexual behavior 40 (03/01 2011): 649-50. https://doi. o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 0 7/s 1 0 5 0 8 – 0 11 – 9 7 5 2 – 2 .

4 – Green, R. The Sissy Boy Syndrome the Development of Homosexuality. Yale University Press, 1987. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1ww3v4c. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt1ww3v4c.

PREFACE TO THE WPATH FILES

By Michael Shellenberger, Founder and President, Environmental Progress

Readers may rightly wonder why an environmental organization is publishing a report on what is known as “gender medicine.” The short answer is that we are pro-human environmentalists, and our mission is to incubate ideas, leaders, and movements for nature, peace, and freedom for all. We thus work on a wide range of issues, from climate change to homelessness to freedom of speech, all of which constitute important aspects of our “environment.”

The longer answer is that I felt the WPATH Files needed to be analyzed and put in a broader historical context than possible through a series of news articles. I received the WPATH Files from a source or sources who contacted me because they had seen my work on the Twitter Files.

We are releasing all of the unedited files precisely as I received them. Nothing has been removed or added by our team, but we have organized the files to improve accessibility. We have included dates where available in the files. All discussions in the files occurred within the last four years. We are leaving only the names of the president of WPATH, most surgeons, and other prominent members unredacted. While everyone aware of the information revealed by the WPATH Files is, to some extent, responsible, we did not feel that everyone in the conversations needed to be named. The files are preceded by a report that summarizes, analyzes, and draws implications from the information they contain.

The WPATH Files are semi-private conversations inside WPATH’s internal online forum for discussing specific medical cases. This forum runs on software provided by DocMatter. I made clear to the source or sources that while I welcomed all or any information they chose to share, I would not and did not solicit or encourage anyone to retrieve any information from WPATH or any other organization. All information came to me unsolicited.

We are well within our legal rights to publish the WPATH Files. Like any publisher, Environmental Progress is governed by what’s known as the Pentagon Papers Principle, established by the Supreme Court in 1971. Under the Court’s ruling, interpreting the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Americans can publish information, even if it was obtained illegally, so long as we do not encourage anyone to break the law in obtaining the information.

At a moral level, we feel duty-bound to publish the WPATH Files and do everything within our power to encourage as wide an audience as possible to access them. We believe they show that WPATH is neither a scientific nor medical organization and should not be treated as one.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge, first and foremost, the source or sources of the WPATH Files. They behaved nobly in their effort to protect children and vulnerable adults from harm.

Second, she would like to acknowledge Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger; their contributions to this report went far beyond editing.

Third, she would like to thank Lily Markle and Phoebe Smith for their fact-checking, proofing, and general assistance.

Finally, the author would like to thank the Environmental Progress Board of Directors and financial supporters. Thank you for thinking outside the box of “the environment” to extend your concern to vulnerable people everywhere.

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