New from me in The New York Sun: "Leaked Files From Influential Transgender Medicine Group Cause Uproar, Could Imperil Liberal Efforts to Undo State Bans on Gender-Transition Treatments for Children"
I cover the implication to high-stakes litigation over pediatric and young-adult gender-transition treatment of the damning WPATH Files report from Michael Shellenberger's Environmental Progress.
I have a new article in The New York Sun today about pediatric gender-transition treatment. This article, my fourth on the subject for the Sun, examines The WPATH Files, which were published last week by Michael Shellenberger’s think tank, Environmental Progress. They are based on leaked files from the highly influential transgender-medicine and activism group, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. In particular, I look at how the damning report may impact litigation. This includes district-court battles over state bans of pediatric gender-transition treatment. And it includes medical-malpractice cases waged by so-called detransitioners, which I’ve reported about before.
I spoke with seven current or former WPATH members who were critics of WPATH, some of whom said that this public-relations crisis is of the organization’s own making, because WPATH:
Has expressed excessive confidence and certainty about the science backing pediatric gender-transition treatment, despite systematic literature reviews finding such science wanting and uncertain.
Is both a medical society and an activist group—imagine, for example, if the American Academy of Pediatrics merged with the Human Rights Campaign—and this blurring of lines has compromised WPATH’s ability to assess and communicate about science.
Click here to read the article.
And click here for a tweet thread if you’d be so kind as to share and comment on it.
Also, for those who are interested, below is an expanded quote from Dr. Marci Bowers, president of WPATH, from a phone call she and I had last month. On Sunday, I shared with her and WPATH leadership over email a detailed account of the contents of my New York Sun article draft, to give them the opportunity to respond and to correct any errors. On Monday evening, several hours after the 24-hour deadline I set for a response, she emailed me back to falsely accuse me of misrepresenting her words. I told her that I most certainly had not and gave her 90 minutes to be more specific about her accusation. I told her that I quite proudly have never had to publish a major correction in my over 20 years of reporting. (I did once, however, in 2015, confuse the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association in an article for The Nation and regret the error.)
As you can see, Dr. Bowers, who is a gender-affirming surgeon, does indeed consider gender-transition treatment and surgery to be a virtual panacea for mental-health concerns, as I report in my article:
“The vast majority of people when they’re through transition don’t really look back and don’t really need any kind of mental health care. This is the whole thing, it’s literally called transition. During transition, sure. But transition has an end point for most people. And when you get through that transition successfully, most people never access mental health care again. Because they don’t need to.”
—Dr. Marci Bowers, February 19, 2024
They found no evidence that cross-sex hormones or surgeries were associated with an improvement in mental health, based on rates of “mood and anxiety disorder health care visits, antidepressant and anxiolytic prescriptions, and hospitalization after a suicide attempt.” (Note that the original 2019 paper on the study did find such evidence. But the study was later corrected to indicate that there was, in fact, no such evidence.)
UPDATE: A few hours after my article was published, Dr. Bowers emailed me again, claiming, incorrectly, “Ben— am not trying to argue but you didn’t even spell my last name correctly.”
SECOND UPDATE: It turns out that I had left the s off of “Bowers” in a typo—in an email.
Also, below I’m pasting my entire correspondence with Dr. Dan Karasic that factored into my reporting for the New York Sun article on The WPATH Files. He reached out to me through my website on March 7 to falsely accuse me of misrepresenting his words in a tweet.
Here is the tweet in question:
Dr. Dan Karasic, who is a veteran psychiatrist at University of California, San Francisco, and specializes in trans care, emailed me to say he did not “scoff” at the nurse practitioner in the WPATH Files quote. I heard him out and told him that he did indeed scoff at her, just as he had scoffed at me as we discussed the same question: of whether psychiatric comorbidites are ever a contraindication for starting someone with gender dysphoria on cross-sex hormones, especially if there are myriad such diagnoses.
It has been my experience that when a man in the sciences holds a position that many people would consider an outlier, it is often difficult to get him to verbalize that position for the record. I recall a decade ago trying to get the head of the HIV charity amfAR to tell me what exactly he meant by “the end of AIDS,” which was a concept he was very fond of broadcasting. I pressed him and he just kept getting angrier. So I told him I was just going to print that he refused to define the term. Then he begrudgingly said that he defined “the end of AIDS” as the total eradication of HIV—which just about zero percent of epidemiologists believe will ever happen absent a vaccine (which even today is probably at least a decade away, as I reported for NBC last week), and even then the chance is extremely remote. Only smallpox has ever been eradicated.
So here are my emails with Dr. Karasic. I edited or cropped out any contact information for either of us.
Dr. Karasic did not respond to any more of my emails after that one, including the one where I gave him a chance to respond to what I would be publishing about him in particular and WPATH in general.
Really appreciating your articles and posts on this, Ben!
The mad scramble toward journalists to be first in front of the microphone to say “I distanced myself years ago” “I always had concerns “ “the other ones were the bad ones I have always been a good one none of this child mangling horrorshow can be pinned on meeeeee” is just beginning. It is the best sign possible that they are finally all going DOWN.