One of the most stunning revelations to come out of a tranche of subpoenaed internal documents from the world’s leading transgender-medical organization was the fact that they removed the age limits in their trans-care guidelines under pressure from outside individuals, including a Biden administration health official.
In 2024, a federal judge unsealed a raft of internal emails from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, that shone light on this tightly held secret. The following year, that judge further unsealed hundreds of WPATH conference videos, which I ultimately obtained and covered in a recent feature article for Compact magazine.
One of those videos, which I have published in full above, provides remarkable documentation of what transpired when a coauthor of the new adolescent chapter of WPATH’s guidelines, child psychiatrist Dr. Scott Leibowitz, presented the chapter to his colleagues at the organization’s September 2022 conference. During his presentation, Dr. Leibowitz made a series of claims about the removal of the age limits that the internal emails would later reveal to be false.
In this Substack, which is the sixth in an ongoing series I am publishing about the WPATH conference videos I obtained, I zero in on Dr. Leibowitz’s statements and measure them against the email documentation. You’ll see individual clips paired with screen shots of internal WPATH emails.
As you will see, these documents make clear that Dr. Leibowitz was uttering falsehoods in his presentation. The documents also raise important questions about what Dr. Leibowitz knew at that moment about what the truth actually was.
To see the other conference videos I have published thus far, visit and bookmark this page, where I will keep publishing links to each new installment:
WPATH’s big secret: Why they really removed the age limits
All these revelations about WPATH stem from a federal lawsuit over Alabama’s ban of gender-transition treatments for minors. The state’s attorney general wound up subpoenaing WPATH’s records. In June 2024, the judge overseeing the case unsealed the internal emails.
The emails demonstrated that a Biden health official, Admiral Rachel Levine, had pressured WPATH to remove the age limits from the draft of the 2022 revision to its trans-care guidelines, called The Standards of Care, Version 8, or SoC 8. Dr. Levine was explicitly motivated in this pressure campaign by political considerations, the emails showed. WPATH leaders resisted, but they ultimately caved to pressure after the American Academy of Pediatrics threatened to come out against the SoC 8 if they didn’t remove the age limits. WPATH leaders subsequently developed a cover story to tell inquiring journalists: that they had removed the age limits because they favored “individualized” care for young people.
As I reported for Compact:
When the guidelines were published online on September 15, 2022, the age limits remained. But WPATH took the document down that same day. When it was republished hours later, the age limits had vanished.
Four days later, Leibowitz, who then ran the gender clinic at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, presented the new adolescent chapter to the WPATH conference. Acknowledging the “risks associated” with “including or not including age minimums,” he enumerated various criteria he said should take precedence, such as a child’s maturity and ability to provide informed consent. He added that “currently the final document landed on protecting the criteria,” because “ages were serving as a distracter from those important criteria, and that would not have allowed for adolescents to access the care that they need.”
Here is where Dr. Leibowitz enumerated the criteria that should take precedence:
