Last year, a whistleblower gave us a trove of leaked internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). They showed that the organization was violating basic medical ethics and knowingly causing harm to patients. These documents, which we called the “WPATH Files,” revealed that clinicians, while publicly touting the benefits of medical transition, privately admitted that children would come to regret losing their fertility through so-called “gender-affirming care.” Vulnerable patients, they acknowledged, faced a litany of severe adverse effects, including loss of sexual function and major psychological damage from supposed “treatments.” The WPATH Files thus exposed the leading authority on transgender healthcare as morally and scientifically bankrupt.
We were, therefore, thrilled to read President Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries for minors. The order uses accurate words, including “mutilation,” rather than euphemisms, to describe the systematic disabling and disfigurement of vulnerable young people. “Across the country today,” the order states, “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.” The order notes that WPATH “lacks scientific integrity” and directs all agencies to rescind or amend any policies that cite WPATH’s guidance.
