Concerned parents and health professionals have declared war on the world’s most prominent organization that advises professionals on how to help children and others who struggle with gender identity.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has failed to address concerns about “experimental” medical treatment of gender-dysphoric adolescents, according to 1,700 people who signed an online petition.
This hotly debated issue raises implications for society at large even though it directly affects only a small, but growing, percentage of the global population.
“WPATH’s neglect of safeguarding issues for children, its adherence to ideological views unsupported by evidence, its exclusion of ethical concerns, and its mischaracterization of basic science all make its standards a fundamentally unreliable guide,” the declaration says.
Signatories include parents, doctors, lawyers, counselors, and professors.
The petition effort is believed to be the first organized opposition to WPATH’s standards, which have been heavily relied upon since they were first published in 1979.
Attempts to Silence Dissent
The association’s website says its guidelines were carefully crafted. A lengthy, multi-step process included a public-comment period.On Sept. 15, WPATH heralded the document: “The Standards of Care 8 represents the most comprehensive set of guidelines ever produced to assist health care professionals around the world in support of transgender and gender diverse adults, adolescents, and children who are taking steps to live their lives authentically.”
Scott Newgent, an outspoken activist who regrets medically transitioning from female to male, said “it’s a huge deal” for people to publicly oppose the association’s approach to the treatment of children.
In a Nov. 15 interview with The Epoch Times, Newgent said people who share concerns about “medicalization” of transgender-identifying children often are censored, ridiculed and labeled “homophobic” or “transphobic.”
The effort to criticize WPATH was hit with “a malicious fake signature and malware attack” within 24 hours of the website’s launch, forcing organizers to temporarily shut down their website and beef up its security features, according to several Twitter posts.
‘Greed Being Sold As Love’
While WPATH and other groups assert that hormones and surgery improve quality of life for transgender people, Newgent knows of very few people who have remained content with their gender-transition decision many years later.Newgent, who underwent the procedures as an adult, has amassed $1.2 million in medical bills and has struggled with repeated infections and other complications.
Newgent thinks profit motives are fueling the medicalization of trans-identifying people, especially easily-influenced teens.
“We are witnessing greed being sold as love,” Newgent said. “And society is so ignorant, because of cancel culture, they are promoting the butchering of an entire generation of children without having a clue what they are doing.”
People are buying a fantasy: That their problems will evaporate if they change their outward appearance to conform with who they believe they are inside, Newgent said.
Yet many people end up realizing, post-transition, as Newgent did, that they aren’t doing well emotionally, physically, or spiritually.
Newgent is adamant that children should never be allowed to undergo medical gender transitions.
While many transsexuals have kept their regret to themselves, a number of young people have become outspoken in their opposition to medical transitions of minors.
These “detransitioners” almost universally claim that they were not fully informed of the potential consequences.
Thus, Newgent said, transgender treatments for minors ought to be considered “the biggest medical scandal in modern history, hands down.”
But WPATH has repeatedly opposed efforts to regulate or curtail medical gender-transition treatments of children.
Instead of following WPATH’s guidelines, Florida officials “have chosen politics over science,” WPATH said.
Europeans Skeptical
Joe Burgo, a psychotherapist, launched the petition against WPATH in late October, his Twitter account says.The declaration says several groups have raised concerns about the so-called “gender-affirming care” model of treatment for minors, which can include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries such as breast removal.
Those groups are now coming together to denounce WPATH’s “deeply flawed” standards and support of that treatment approach, the petition website says.
The declaration faults WPATH for “continuing to endorse widespread medical treatments [drugs and surgery] for trans-identifying youth despite rising scientific skepticism that has led Sweden, Finland, France, and the United Kingdom to retreat from that approach.”
Those countries are now advocating “psychosocial support as the first line of treatment,” and delaying drugs and surgeries until adulthood, except in extreme cases, the critics’ declaration says.
Earlier drafts of the latest WPATH guidelines for minors had previously included suggested minimum ages for specific medical and surgical treatments. But those were removed from the final version, along with a chapter on ethics, the petition says.
Children May ID As Eunuchs
The critics also take issue with WPATH for including “eunuch” as a new gender identity, referring to a male whose testicles have been removed.The standards document, which says that children may identify as eunuchs, includes a hyperlink to an internet site that “incorporates graphic and sexual fantasy stories portraying the castration of adolescent males,” the declaration points out.
Further, WPATH’s definition of “detransition,” a term used for people who regret going through transition procedures, “invalidates the traumatic experience of many who feel harmed by gender-related interventions and subsequently revert to living as their biological sex,” the declaration says.
WPATH’s standards are promoted as evidence-based. Yet, according to the declaration, the association fails to acknowledge that studies on treatments for transgender youths are “of very low quality and subject to confounding and bias, rendering any conclusions uncertain.”
“For these and other reasons, we believe WPATH can no longer be viewed as a trustworthy source of clinical guidance in this field,” the declaration says.
Lastly, the declaration asserts that WPATH is not living up to its claim to represent a global professional consensus regarding healthcare for transgender people.
“WPATH and its standards are actually outliers on the international stage and deaf to the alarms being sounded within the scientific community concerning the use of experimental treatments on children,” the declaration says.
Critics recommend that parents and professionals ignore WPATH and seek other expertise that is ethical, minimizes the risk of unintentional harm and “respects the limitations of our current scientific evidence base.”
