Thanks so much to Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported for having me on Substack Live today. Their show has been such an inspiration to my reporting and to my general intellectual development and awakening over the past few years. Y’all should subscribe to their podcast if you don’t already.
Katie and I discussed how I got into gender reporting, the historic $2 million verdict in the detransitioner civil trial that I covered for The Free Press and my coverage of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, or ASPS, coming out against pediatric gender-transition surgeries for UnHerd.
I wore a hoodie in honor of Katie and the Pacific Northwest lesbian aesthetic. I am, after all, a Seattle native.
Hypocrisy Alert: Dr. Blair Peters, aka “Queer Surgeon” Is Livid Over How the New ASPS Policy Came Into Being
Meanwhile, some other gender news, which I tweeted about earlier:
Dr. Blair Peters, aka “Queer Surgeon,” who is a gender-transition surgeon at Oregon Health & Science University, responded on Threads yesterday with withering disdain to the ASPS’s new policy on gender surgeries for minors. He said the broader ASPS membership was never polled about this.
It’s interesting that Dr. Peters should make this complaint, because what he’s describing is the same dynamic that has transpired at the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, but going in the other direction. No matter how hard AAP dissident Dr. Julia Mason has pushed, the AAP’s 2018 policy statement supporting the gender-affirming care method, including gender surgeries for minors, has never been up for a vote by the broader membership.
All of the major medical organizations that have led the way in establishing pediatric gender medicine’s broader credibility, including the AAP and the Endocrine Society in particular, have supported these practices in minors based on the decisions of small committees. The AAP’s 2018 policy statement was written by a single person, Dr. Jason Rafferty, who was a resident at the time.
All of the other medical societies’ little committees have followed these other groups’ lead, along with WPATH’s. This has given the illusion that all medial providers support these practices in minors.
But I’ve spoken to pediatricians who are too afraid to express their concerns about gender medicine at the AAP’s annual conference for fear this will destroy their careers.
In 2024, Dr. Peters spoke with the then president of the ASPS and they had the following remarkable exchange about whether doctors can be trusted to self police. The ASPS president, Dr. Steven Williams, brought up Tuskegee:
Dr. Williams was adamant that he was opposed to lawmakers’ efforts to impose criminal penalties on doctors for providing gender-transition treatment to minors, as the laws that have been passed in some red states do. However, he left the door open for supporting non-criminalizing bans of such treatment—if new research were to emerge that suggested that such bans were, as he saw it, necessary.
“We’ve seen what criminalization looks like in terms of overall patient health: women, mortality when it comes to abortion,” Dr. Williams said. “Those types of things aren’t effective in terms of regulating health care. That’s not to say that if the data comes in and says—Oh my gosh, adolescent gender-affirming care is the worst thing ever, and we need to stop it!—there are ways that you could restrict that without criminalizing.”
Should such damning research findings about pediatric gender-transition treatment ever come to the fore, Dr. Peters said, “the physician groups providing it are going to be the first ones to raise the alarm and stop it.”
But Dr. Williams pointedly disagreed with Dr. Peters’ suggestion that physicians can necessarily be trusted, absent any and all state intervention, to self-correct in the event that they are providing egregiously harmful care.
If you want to see a video of Dr. Peters talking about conducting surgeries to fashion genitals that don’t exist in nature, check this out:
Also, in August, amid the roiling debates over the McMaster University systematic review of pediatric gender-transition treatment, Dr. Peters posted an Instagram video in which he said that “it is the patient’s autonomy and their well being that is paramount and most important.” Given the larger context, he was quite evidently referring when he said this to minors, who cannot consent to the type of body-altering surgeries he performs. I’ve spoken with many evidence-based medicine experts who argue that such an attitude woefully shortchanges a doctor’s obligation to non-maleficence—meaning, not to harm the patient.
Here’s my reporting on the McMaster brouhaha:
Here’s more of Dr. Peters lamenting the ASPS’s new policy:
