Note: I have an article out in The Free Press today documenting the chaos behind the scenes at the American Medical Organization over its statement in February siding with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons about youth gender surgeries. I encourage you to read that. You’ll be hearing more from me on that subject very soon.
At the 2023 conference of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s U.S. branch, USPATH, a top communication firm schooled attendees on how to combat misinformation in the media about pediatric gender medicine. Except, as is often the case in the intellectual battle over this controversial medical field, the PR mavens offered a cocktail of misinformation as an antidote.
The video is one of hundreds I obtained of WPATH and USPATH conferences spanning 2021 to 2023. I covered the videos applying to pediatric gender medicine for a feature article in Compact magazine earlier this month. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be publishing the most notable videos in my Substack. To see the full set of them (this is the fifth), visit this landing page, which I will update regularly:
As I wrote for Compact:
[USPATH president Dr.] Maddie Deutsch by 2023 flipped about speaking to the media. But by then WPATH was no longer merely defending the science. It had advanced to an active training mode, politically and rhetorically, and was coaching members to observe its rigidly prescribed terms. “The work that we do is important. It’s life-saving,” Deutsch said at the 2023 conference. “And because this charge does bring great responsibility, we have to be evidence-based. We have to be measured—measured in our approach, measured in dealing with the press, measured in dealing with conflict.”
Deutsch announced that WPATH had brought in experts from the prominent communications firm BerlinRosen to advise attendees on messaging.
The PR training was hosted by two representatives from BerlinRosen: Laura Brandon, who at the time was a senior vice president, and Kara Watkins-Chow, then an account supervisor at the agency.
Most notably, Ms. Watkins-Chow asserted that “the body of evidence” backing pediatric gender medicine “is strong.” This is categorically false, according to a slew of systematic literature reviews that started emerging in the late 2010s. Even Dr. Deutsch acknowledged at the 2022 WPATH conference that the supporting evidence was of low quality according to such reviews; although she was keen to emphasize that this did not mean “there was sloppy science.”
As was fairly typical across the WPATH conference videos I reviewed, the BerlinRosen reps barely made any explicit reference to minors, children or adolescents during their presentation. Instead, they just spoke more generally of “care” and did not often make age-based distinctions.
Ms. Watkins-Chow dismissed the idea that pediatric gender medicine was an “anomaly that’s completely different from all other health care.” This assertion ignores the fact that in no other branch of pediatrics do doctors change the appearance of the body to treat a psychiatric disorder. This field represents a three-way bridge between endocrinology, plastic surgery and psychiatry that is without parallel.
The BerlinRosen rep went into detail about how to vet—and potentially shun—a reporter, including by scanning the journalist’s previous reporting and social-media presence. “If you see that they’ve covered other nuanced health care or social issues in a way that kind of sends up red flags for you, that’s always a sign you can disengage,” she said. Ghosting was always an option, she said: “It’s fine to sort of pretend you didn’t get the message or just follow up with a polite ‘Thank you for reaching out. I’m not able to speak with you.’”
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