The WPATH Files – Transgender Interventions Are ‘Unethical Medical Experiments’

by Jeff Johnston | March 8, 2024 | Culture

Environmental Progress released a devastating exposé of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) and its recommended medical interventions for children and adults with sexual identity confusion.

WPATH supports dangerous, experimental and body damaging “gender-affirming care” for children and adults, including puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones and surgeries.

The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults features leaked internal files and video footage from WPATH. The report clearly demonstrates that “the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care.”

The report was written by journalist Mia Hughes, who covers gender issues for Environmental Progress, founded by author and investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger. The organization works “on a wide range of issues, from climate change to homelessness to freedom of speech, all of which constitute important aspects of our ‘environment,’” Shellenberger explains.

WPATH regularly publishes “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People,” purporting “to provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming people with safe and effective pathways to achieving lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, in order to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment.”

The Standards of Care are then used by medical groups like the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to promote harmful interventions. Insurance companies, courts, and federal, state and local governments have also relied on the so-called Standards of Care.

In short, WPATH’s influence is wide and far-reaching – the organization’s harmful impact upon individuals, families and our society cannot be overstated.

But The WPATH Files demonstrate, as Hughes’ Executive Summary states:

[S]ex-trait modification procedures on minors and people with mental health disorders, known as “gender-affirming care,” are unethical medical experiments. This experiment causes harm without justification, and its victims are some of society’s most vulnerable people. Their injuries are painful and life-altering.

Here are five key take-aways from The WPATH Files:

“WPATH knows children do not understand the effects of hormone therapy.”

A transcript of video footage shows “panel members admit to the impossibility of getting proper informed consent for hormonal interventions from their young patients.”

The transcript exposes doctors who admit children and adolescents cannot “grasp the effects of the treatment because it is ‘out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.’”

“WPATH Knows Children Cannot Consent to Iatrogenic Fertility Loss.”

“Iatrogenic” refers to harmful complications caused by a treatment. Children, adolescents and adults subject to transgender medical interventions are placed on a trajectory which results in sterility. Children, teens – and even some adults – do not understand “the gravity of the decision” to begin these treatments; “young patients don’t yet understand what they are sacrificing.”

“WPATH Is Not a Scientific Group” – and “does not respect the well-established scientific process.”

Hughes explains that WPATH is an activist organization that ignores the scientific method, which involves “observing a medical condition requiring intervention and formulating a hypothesis regarding a potentially effective treatment”; putting the hypothesis to the test through rigorously controlled trials”; and monitoring patients with long-term care and follow-up.

Instead, as Hughes reports, “There have never been any properly controlled trials in the wider field of gender medicine, which also consistently lacks long-term data.”

Regarding puberty blockers for children, she adds, “There is also no good-quality scientific evidence to support the use of puberty blockers as a remedy for this poorly defined disorder, and there are no long-term outcome studies demonstrating that the benefits outweigh the risks; in fact, there is mounting evidence to the contrary.”

“Doctors are Improvising and Experimenting” and “Causing Surgical Harm.”

The WPATH Files document shows one thread about “the debilitating reproductive organ pain experienced by both male and female patients due to hormone therapy” where “the advice is consistently anecdotal and little more than

guesswork.”

One doctor describes the teenage patients leading “when it comes to their hormone doses,” rather than the physician. He adds that “putting 13-year-olds on cross-sex hormones” is “’like a journey,’ with the child’s doctor ‘coming along for the ride.’”

Hughes adds, “WPATH members are also causing surgical harm to their patients, including minors and those suffering from severe mental illness.”

Given the wide variety of serious harms caused by WPATH, the Daily Citizen concurs with The WPATH Files conclusion: “[W]e are currently witnessing one of the greatest crimes in the history of modern medicine.”

As Hughes emphatically states, it is time for medical groups like the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics “to set politics aside and condemn the pseudoscientific, unethical medical practices of WPATH.”

Related articles and resources:

Focus on the Family:

Environmental Progress: