All Roads Lead to WPATH
The leaks from WPATH mark the beginning of the end of "gender affirming healthcare". The question is why an organisation so rooted in pseudo-science was ever given the time of day by regulators.
No organisation has played a greater role in the adoption of the pseudo-science of so-called “gender affirming healthcare” globally than the World Professional Association of Transgender Health. That’s why this week’s release of leaked discussions between some of its leading figures suggesting possible medical malpractice could prove a pivotal moment in the Gender Wars. It’s been a long time coming.
The truth is WPATH has always been little more than a pressure group made up of a mixture of saucer-eyed trans activists and self-professed experts in disciplines like endocrinology, psychiatry and surgery. “Experts” who just happen to pocket huge profits from the mutilation and sterilisation of deluded people who are convinced they were born in the wrong body. Kerching!
Yet by a combination of external bullying and internal feeble-mindedness some of the world’s top medical authorities from the BMA to the American American Academy of Pediatrics have given WPATH the stamp of approval, citing its regularly updated Ethical Guidelines and Standards of Care as clinical best practise.
Once even the NHS was happy to genuflect to the organisation. No longer. The revelation that the latest version of the Standards of Care (SOC8) included a new chapter asserting that being a eunuch is a gender identity led the NHS to distance itself from WPATH last year. It didn’t exactly help that one of the key movers in adding eunuchs to the list of gender identities was revealed to be a member of an online group that shared porn fantasies about boys being castrated. I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation….
The leaked documents from WPATH’s own private message forum and a video recording of an internal panel discussion were released by the noted journalist and whistle blower Michael Shellenberger and his team at the campaign group Environmental Progress. The WPATH Files, as they’ve been dubbed, were refreshingly light on castration porn but when it came to medical ethics were almost as jaw-dropping.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the report by Mia Hughes I recommend. I’ve been chatting to Mia for the last two years and I’m delighted she’s produced such a fantastic piece of work. On twitter she has pinned her thread comparing gender identity affirmation to amputation affirmation and it’s a work of art. I’ve banged on about amnepotophilia (wannabe amputees) for years. She was the one to come up with a brilliant way to bring home the dangers of normalising it.
In the WPATH Files, clinicians are revealed to be allowing adolescents to dictate their own treatment plans such as hormone dose despite the fact they knew these kids had no clear goals and often changed their minds. Girls were effectively being encouraged to masculinise their bodies and boys feminise them in real-time experiments, even although cross-sex hormones have powerful effects on emotions and states of mind meaning these patients risked being trapped in a pharmaceutical maelstrom. One in which they could not possibly be expected to take rational decisions in their long-term interests. Nor meaningfully consent.
That was nothing compared to the fact that some young people were diagnosed as psychotic. In one discussion clinicians considered how to gain consent for life-changing surgery from a teenager with multiple personalities. The multiple personalities could not agree. Nor could the clinicians who weighed in with suggestions.
What’s clear is this is a level of unethical behaviour that would not be permitted in any other medical organisation. As I mentioned to Mia a few weeks ago when she and Michael Shellenberger gave me a heads-up that the Files would land soon, WPATH gives the impression that it is some sort of regulatory body. It isn’t.
They had enough to get on with in their magnificent report and didn’t have space to include my point. So you are getting it all to yourself here.
It’s about surgery and its oversight.