Leaked Files Expose Influential Transgender Healthcare Group That Pushes Pseudoscientific Sex Change Experiments on Children and Vulnerable Adults
Newly leaked files from a leading transgender “healthcare” organization show that doctors are aware that children and adolescents do not always comprehend and thus cannot consent to the hormonal and surgical transitions they champion. They also admit privately that the experimental procedures often have devastating and permanent side effects, including cancer and sterility.
The files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) were obtained by journalist Michael Shellenberger, who posted the entire cache online. They include conversations from a WPATH internal messaging board and video from an Identity Evolution Workshop.
Why I Am Publishing WPATH Files And How I Got Them
The written WPATH Files come from WPATH’s member discussion forum, which runs on software provided by DocMatter.
Ninety seconds of the 82-minute video was made public last year. We are making the full video available for the… pic.twitter.com/3AP0pVUTxy
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 4, 2024
The internal communications suggest that the organization is controlled by gender ideologues who routinely conduct experimental hormonal and surgical procedures on minors and vulnerable adults despite legitimate medical and ethical concerns.
These shocking findings come after members of WPATH were credibly accused in the media of “rubbing shoulders with pedophiles and fetishists.”
After a months long investigation in 2022, the news and opinion website Redux found that WPATH was involved with a fetish forum that hosts and produces fictional child pornography and extreme sadomasochistic content, including graphic child sexual torture fantasies.
In 2022, Reduxx released the findings of a months-long investigation into WPATH’s connection to a “eunuch” forum hosting graphic child sexual torture fantasies.
Despite being fully aware of the contents of this forum, WPATH revised its guidelines to accommodate recommendations…
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) March 5, 2024
Despite serious concerns about the radical organization, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and every major American medical and psychiatric association all turn to WPATH for guidelines on how to treat gender-confused youth, the New York Post reported.
A number of doctors in the group admitted that their patients often did not understand the ramifications of hormone treatment or surgery – such as developing facial hair, the files showed.
A child psychologist said in a leaked email: “[It is] out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.
“They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair.”
During a May 2022 internal workshop titled “Identity Evolution,” Daniel Metzger, a British Columbia endocrinologist said, “I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”
Metzger noted that many adolescents are unable to grasp the lifelong consequences of infertility. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old,” he said, “but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ‘ew, kids, babies, gross.’ Or, the usual answer is, ‘I’m just going to adopt.’ And then you ask them, ‘Well, what does that involve? Like, how much does it cost?’ ‘Oh, I thought you just like went to the orphanage, and they gave you a baby.’ . . . I think now that I follow a lot of kids into their mid-twenties, I’m always like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, right?’”
Part I: Children and Adolescents
“We’re explaining things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school…”
“I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,”… pic.twitter.com/eCjNbkVuOT
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 4, 2024
WPATH tells the public that surgical and hormonal treatments are tested and safe, but what members say amongst themselves is an entirely different matter.
In 2022, for instance, Marci Bowers, WPATH’s transgender president and a pelvic and gynecologic surgeon based in California, made the disputed claim that puberty blockers are “completely reversible.” In the internal forum however, she acknowledged that such treatment is “in its infancy.”
Bowers also told her colleagues the “fertility question has no research.”
There is an emerging body of scientific evidence that point to the potential harms of hormonal treatments and puberty blockers, including lower bone density, and infertility in patients.
The leaked emails also show that WPATH doctors discussed the risk of developing cancer following hormone treatment.
In once case, a 16-year-old girl who had been on puberty blockers for several years and testosterone for one year developed two liver tumors that an oncologist concluded were caused by the hormones.
One doctor discussed a transgender colleague who died of cancer after being on testosterone for years.
“I have one transition friend/colleague who, after about eight to 10 years of [testosterone] developed hepatocarcinoma [a form of liver cancer],” the doctor wrote.
“To the best of my knowledge, it was linked to his hormone treatment … it was so advanced that he opted for palliative care and died a couple of months later.”
WPATH adopted its current Standards of Care in 2022 after scrapping a draft chapter about ethics and removing minimum-age requirements for children starting puberty blockers or undergoing sexual-modification surgeries.
It had initially recommended 16 to start hormones and 17 for surgery.
The WPATH files also demonstrate how the activist doctors cavalierly approach critical questions such as when to begin the radical treatments on minors.
In one conversation, a member asked for advice about a 14-year-old patient, a boy who identified as a girl and had begun transitioning at 4.
The child insisted on a vaginoplasty, a surgery that removes the penis, testicles and scrotum and repositions tissue to create a nonfunctioning pseudo-vagina. It requires a lifetime of dilation. Was he too young at 14?
Bowers didn’t recommend the surgery, explaining “the tissue is too immature, dilation routine too critical.”
In lay terms, that means boys who are too young do not have enough penal tissue for the surgery and the surgeon must harvest intestinal lining to build the faux vagina. Even Bowers admits that can lead to “problematic surgical outcomes.”
She would know since she has performed more than 2,000 vaginoplasties. Her highest-profile patient is 17-year-old Jazz Jennings, the transgender star of reality TV show “I Am Jazz.”
Three corrective surgeries were required to fix problems from the original vaginoplasty.
“She had a very difficult surgical course,” Bowers admitted in a 2022 appearance on the show. “We knew it would be tough — it turned out tougher than any of us imagined.”
Knowing this, Bowers still told colleagues in the internal discussion forum that the best age for an adolescent to undergo surgery was “sometime before the end of high school does make some sense in that they are under the watch of parents in the home they grew up in.”
Christine McGinn, another transgender plastic surgeon from Pennsylvania, agreed. McGinn has performed “about 20 vaginoplasties in patients under 18” and thinks the “ideal time in the U.S. is surgery the summer before the last year of high school. I have heard many other surgeons echo this.”
McGinn said waiting until teens are older than 18 and in college is problematic because “there are too many stressors in college that limit patients’ ability to dilate.”
The members also discussed common complications for phalloplasty in which a nonfunctioning pseudo-penis is fashioned from a female patient’s forearm or thigh tissue.
The surgery, which requires a full hysterectomy and surgical removal of the vagina, often has serious consequences, including “pelvic inflammatory disease, vaginal atrophy, abnormal pap tests and incontinence.”
Several colleagues described patients struggling with debilitating bowel problems, bleeding and excruciating pain during sex (“feeling like broken glass”).
They said vaginal estrogen creams and moisturizers as well as hyaluronic acid suppositories “can be helpful.”
The files also expose WPATH’s embrace of even more disturbing sex “nullification” surgeries for patients who do not feel either male or female and identify only as nonbinary.
Doctors have performed horrific “de-gendering” surgeries in an effort to create a sexless and smooth cosmetic appearance in these people “that is unknown in nature,” The Post reported. These surgeries result in bodies that “resemble department-store mannequins.”
There is even an experimental “bi-genital” surgery that attempts to construct a second set of genitals.
In 2017, when tabloids reported a 22-year-old man had spent $50,000 to surgically remove his sex organs so he could “transform into a genderless extra-terrestrial,” it seemed a one-off oddity.
But WPATH has enshrined that concept in its Standard of Care — the same document in which the group endorsed for the time first time chemical or surgical castration for patients who identify as eunuchs. (WPATH even linked to the Eunuch Archives, where men anonymously share castration fetishes.)
These science-fiction-like surgeries are not only reserved for adults.
“How do we come up with appropriate standards for non-binary patients?” asked Thomas Satterwhite, a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon who has operated on dozens of patients younger than 18 since 2014. “I’ve found more and more patients recently requesting ‘non-standard’ procedures.”
What are nonstandard procedures? They include “non-binary top surgery,” a mastectomy without nipples. There are brutal procedures for girls that eliminate all or part of the vagina and for boys that amputate the penis, scrotum and testicles.
One San Francisco surgical clinic proclaimed on its website that the goal here “is a smooth, neutral body that is cosmetically free of sexual identification.”
Meanwhile, WPATH members mostly dismiss the mounting number of disgruntled detransitioners who regret the choices they made as youths after they reach adulthood.
One case involved a 17-year-old boy, just graduated from high school, who had been on testosterone for two years. He was reported to be “very distraught and angry. He reports he feels he was brainwashed and is upset by the permanent changes to his body.”
A self-described “queer therapist” argued that young people cannot be brainwashed. “In my experience, those stories come from people who have an active agenda against the rights of trans people.”
Bowers said that “I do see talk of the phenomenon [detransitioners] as distracting from the many challenges we face.”
A detrans subreddit currently has over 53,000 members.
Rachel Levine, the transgender assistant secretary for health, is a WPATH member who has nothing but praise for the organization.
According to Levine, WPATH “assesses the full state of the science and provides substantive, rigorously analyzed, peer-reviewed recommendations to the medical community on how best to care for patients who are transgender or gender non-binary. It is free of any agenda other than to ensure that medical decisions are informed by science.”
In contrast, Shellenberger said “transgender healthcare,” which he calls “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people,” is comparable to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, or “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains.”
“It is a medical travesty playing out in real time, and the casualties are our children,” investigative journalist Gerald Posner concluded at the Post.
