Unmasked At Last: The 9 Authors of the Trump Administration Report On Pediatric Gender Medicine. So Who Are They?
The authors, all of them skeptics or opponents of pediatric gender medicine, were finally revealed today after HHS published the final, peer-reviewed version of the controversial report on this field.
Substacker and transgender activist
has a busy day ahead of her.The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this morning published the final, peer-reviewed version of its controversial, highly critical report about pediatric gender medicine. A new 240-page supplement to the report includes peer reviews and responses to those reviews from the coauthors.
Importantly, the supplement for the first time reveals the identities of all nine coauthors.
The report, which was initially published May 1 and included a so-called umbrella review of all previous systematic reviews of pediatric gender medicine, suggested that even limiting providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender-transition surgeries to minors only to clinical trials would be unethical. Instead, it suggested that providing psychotherapy to minors with gender dysphoria would be an evidence-based way at least to treat the psychiatric comorbidities that are so common in this population.
Transgender activists and their allies acted with swift fury to the report in the immediate aftermath of its springtime publication. In particular, they dismissed its findings as unreliable given that HHS had kept the report’s authorship anonymous. Following a common train of thought about what place psychotherapy should hold in pediatric gender medicine (ie: preferably little to none), such avid supporters of this field accused the report’s authors of promoting so-called conversion therapy.
The report is the product of an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Jan. 28, demanding “within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”
I have an article out today in The New York Sun about the new iteration of the report, including an examination of the peer reviews. I encourage you to read it.
Otherwise, in this Substack, I want to take a closer look at who the nine HHS report coauthors are. These individuals—doctors, academics and researchers—are sure to be subjected to extreme scrutiny in the coming days from trans activists and others in the left-leaning media. In particular, I expect Ms. Reed to point to the many connections that the coauthors have to the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, the small and quietly influential nonprofit devoted to scrutinizing pediatric gender medicine’s evidence base. SEGM has become the bête noire of trans activists. So expect theories, likely unsubstantiated, that SEGM was the engine behind the whole report. (Another, perhaps more reductive way of looking at the matter is to observe that in a niche academic discipline such as pediatric-gender-medicine skepticism, the major players generally know each other and commonly assemble and present at the same conferences, including SEGM’s.)
I can confirm previous chatter that HHS tasked a contractor for the gender-medicine report, a company called Guidehouse. Guidehouse then hired the report’s nine coauthors as subcontractors. Canadian transfeminine jurist Florence Ashley (aka Florence Paré) in May reported the connection between Guidehouse and the report on her Facebook page—a revelation based on data related to the report that she unearthed. Ashley suggested that two Guidehouse employees, John Koenig and Blake Sanchez, as the “compilers” of the report, were out of their depth, given their lack of proper relevant academic training:
Leor Sapir, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and is an HHS report coauthor, told me that Messrs. Sanchez and Koenig assisted “with formatting and performed final typo-checks before submission,” but said they otherwise played no substantive role in the development of the report. So Ashley’s points about their education are moot.
After Ashley unmasked M.I.T. philosophy professor Alex Byrne as an HHS report coauthor in May, he published an editorial in The Washington Post about his coauthorship.
All nine coauthors told me that HHS promised them independence as they developed this report and that the Trump administration kept to its word. Thus, absent Mr. Trump’s request for the report in the first place, all responsibility for its contents lies squarely with the coauthors, they suggested.
All the HHS report coauthors have a detailed public track record of being either skeptics or outright opponents of medicalized gender-transition interventions for minors. They have published widely on the subject, including in academic journals, the mainstream press and in books. Some have provided paid testimony to statehouses in support of Republicans’ widely successful efforts to ban these practices. I met some of them at SEGM’s 2023 conference in New York and have otherwise interviewed many of them multiple times over the past few years.
I have found them all to be highly academic in their assessments of pediatric gender medicine and rarely political or ideological. These are not the fire-breathing types who use wild, incendiary rhetoric such as psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman. Overall, they are concerned about the ethics of providing to minors powerful, life-changing drugs that pose a risk of rendering them infertile and burdened by sexual dysfunction, in particular when there is no means of determining whether any individual child’s gender dysphoria and cross-sex identity will be permanent.
I polled the contributors about their personal politics and found they fall across the political spectrum, with the median tilted toward the left. They all told me that notwithstanding differences they have with the Trump administration, they felt it was vital that they personally contribute to and publish this report.
None of the coauthors have conducted primary research in treating gender dysphoria in minors. Expect critics of the report to seize upon that fact.
Here are the nine HHS report coauthors:
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