WPATH leaks provide compelling evidence of the cynicism behind transgender surgery
Leaked files from an international medical organisation setting guidelines for transgender care have been described as uncovering “pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents and vulnerable adults”.
Leading Irish psychotherapist, Stella O’Malley says the files leaked by a whistle blower – or whistleblowers – from the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) reveal that “clinicians are carrying out medical malpractice” – and that “WPATH is neither a scientific nor medical organisation”.
Social Democrat TD Róisín Shortall recently asked Minister Stephen Donnelly about the Department’s promised “transgender model of care” and whether “the new model will adhere to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards.”
Donnelly kicked to touch on this one, as he also did on related questions about transgenderism from Shortall including querying about the pretty widely held view, including that of the National Gender Service here, that “transgenderism is a mental health disorder.” It even has a name – gender dysphoria.
In the leaked files published this week by Michael Shellenberger’s Environmental Progress group: a political activist is seen advising doctors; while a number of doctors discuss sex-change hormones causing cancer, and it is also acknowledged that informed consent is often not possible to obtain when working with children; and that adolescents do not understand the lifelong consequences of gender modifications.
The report The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents and vulnerable adults by Mia Hughes is based on a large body of WPATH internal messages published as part of the report in “slightly redacted” form.
Both the messages themselves and Hughes’ analysis provide devastating proof to back up her claim that WPATH is “neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care.”
Don’t let anyone tell Róisín, or indeed Paul Murphy who on January 17 was demanding to know why the National Gender Service was “actively advising GPs not to provide blood tests and prescribe hormone therapy to trans patients,” and “whether in line with the WPATH SoC v8 statement (details supplied) that all GPs should be providing blood tests to trans people who are self-medicating.”
Murphy and Shortall are not unique. If you read back over Dáil and Seanad records over the past number of years you will find numerous references to WPATH and either assurances or questions about its role as the putative model for “best international practise.”
So what do the WPATH documents tell us about how “best international practices” impacted and continues to impact on vulnerable people – the patients who are the raw material for what is a fad that might one day be consigned to the medical Black Museum along with leeching, lobotomies, rhinoplasty and lithotomy: and believe me you do not really want to know what the last one consisted of.
What the files do strongly suggest is that much of the transition sector is “consumer driven” and backed by “political activism, not science”.
The first point is crucial as it relates to the direct interest of “WPATH-affiliated healthcare providers” who, the report claims, are promoting surgery as the “first and only line of treatment” rather than “any attempt to reconcile the patient with his or her birth sex.” (p.3)
That point regarding the economic incentives to promote surgical transitioning is crucial as it transcends and trumps the “cultural factors” which the report explains are not a focus of their analysis.
They do form a convenient reference in much of the internal discussions when decisions to perform expensive procedures are defended on such grounds.
Those cultural factors as we know are very important as they have made transgenderism one of the central focuses of the liberal left, and indeed the far-left.
The introduction to the report recommends that readers first look at the raw evidence from WPATH itself, and it makes for stark and sometimes chilling reading. One email from September 2021 sought opinions regarding a practitioner’s experience of recognising trauma and dissociative disorders “common among trans clients.”
Despite most of the responses recognising that this was indeed an issue, and that there was a need for more research and “more training,” there were references to subjective judgements related to cultural and social perceptions of persons seeking or who have had surgery.
What is also evident is that none of the obvious concerns have been reflected in WPATH’s own guidelines, which have been adopted as “best practise” across many health services, and which are the byword for expertise in this area according to much of the establishment in this country.
In another exchange a named doctor, Dan Karasic, who is described on a University of California San Francisco site as an “activist psychiatrist,” raised concerns about whether he ought to follow psychiatric advice that he hold back on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) because the patient was giving evidence of “schizoid typical traits.” (p.85.)
One of the responses was almost belligerent, and demanded to know “why you are perplexed. Does the mental illness impair the ability to give informed consent?”
Most people, and presumably most doctors would have no hesitation in saying that of course it does. Not in this case, as Karasic was advised to ignore his “internal struggle as to the “right thing to do.”
Doctors in the leaked message boards chats also discussed how they knew transgender patients who had, they believed, developed cancer owing to the effects of hormone treatment – something Stella O’Malley described as “Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the Files”.
One doctor said: “I have one transition friend/colleague who, after about eight to 10 years of [testosterone] developed hepatocarcinoma [a form of liver cancer].”
“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.”
Another doctor discussed going ahead with a ‘top surgery’ (a double mastectomy for gender reassignment purposes) on a 16-year-old girl even though it was known that the sex-change hormones had likely given her liver cancer.
“The oncologist and surgeon both have indicated that the likely offending agent(s) are the hormones,” the doctor wrote. “We are prepared to support the patient in any way we can (e.g. top surgery when medically stable, etc).”
A recent study showed that the risk of developing breast cancer increases by 46 times for men who underwent sex-change surgery.
WPATH has led the way in insisting that ‘gender affirming care’ – where a patient’s desire to change sex is not challenged but affirmed – should be standard, yet it’s clear from the leaked files that some of these doctors know that trans patients may not always understand the consequences of the gender treatments on offer.
At a leaked internal WPATH panel titled Identity Evolution Workshop held on May 6, 2022, panel members discuss how it is often impossible to get proper informed consent for hormonal interventions from their young patients.
During the panel, Dr. Daniel Metzger, a Canadian endocrinologist, reminded those assembled that gender doctors are “often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” adding that even adult patients often have very little medical understanding of the effects of these interventions, the report reveals.
In relation to discussing fertility loss due to treatment, the doctor says: “it’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall,” adding, “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.’”
This remark was met with smiles and nods from the panel, the report reveals.
And another child psychologist said that in regard to adolescents, “it was 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,” she said.
Shellenberger said that: “Activist members of WPATH know that the so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ they provide can result in life-long complications and sterility and that their patients do not understand the implications, such as loss of sexual function and the ability to experience orgasm.”
“These leaked files show overwhelming evidence that professionals within WPATH know that they are not getting consent from children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, or their caregivers,” he said.
And there is more, but space and time precludes me providing it here. Read it yourself if you get the chance.
It is an excellent forensic analysis of the presented and legitimately captured evidence of what is at issue here.
It is also a concise and persuasive summary of the reasons why the lives and health of vulnerable people – often children and adolescents pressured by people and groups who attempt to exclude parents and other responsible adults from any role in life-altering decisions – can not be surrendered to fanatics.
Will the HSE and the Health Minister be issuing a statement distancing the authorities in this country from the WPATH guidelines? Is a question they should be required to answer.
I shall leave the last word to the authors of the report.
“Political activism and medicine should never mix. An organization in pursuit of political goals is one not in pursuit of patient health. The WPATH Files contain abundant evidence that the organization is an activist group, not a scientific one.
From the Alberta professor stating that trans health care is about challenging cisnormativity to Satterwhite and his supporters ignoring the ethical concerns of non-binary surgeries and focusing on the importance of using politically correct language, it is clear that WPATH prioritizes politics over science.”