by Harold Hutchison
- WPATH avoided “evidence-based” reviews of child gender reassignment procedures by relying on advice from unidentified “social justice lawyers,” according to a motion for summary judgment filed Wednesday.
- Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall accused WPATH of allowing “patient advocacy concerns” to influence standards of care in those procedures.
- “WPATH’s failure to review the evidence was consistent with proponent concerns that motivated the work on SOC-8,” the motion states.
The case files show that the World Professionals Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) avoided an “evidence-based” review of gender reassignment procedures for children by taking advice from “social justice lawyers.”
Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall of Alabama filed on Wednesday filed a motion for summary judgment in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama seeking to dismiss a challenge to an Alabama law restricting procedures. The Alabama Attorney General’s office accused WPATH of putting “advocacy issues” at the forefront when creating the “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8” (SOC-8), which relied in part on the advice of attorneys for “social justice,” who advised the organization to avoid seeking evidence-based recommendations.
“Although the authors of SOC-8 did not seem to have much exploit for them, the Johns Hopkins Evidence Review Team produced systematic reviews of the evidence – ‘dozens!’ — for SOC-8,” the proposal says. “The results were disturbing. Team leader Dr. Robinson wrote to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at HHS: ‘[W]We found little to no evidence for children and adolescents. On September 1, 2020, HHS responded: “It is helpful to know that there is little to no evidence for children and adolescents.”
After President Joe Biden took office, the Justice Department took a different approach, joining a lawsuit against Alabama aimed at blocking the bill.
However, by slow July, it was clear that the SOC-8 guidelines WOULD CHANGE – solely because Levine and the Biden administration requested that the age restrictions be lifted. photo.twitter.com/qRBppRLhHg
— Do no harm (@donoharm) June 28, 2024
“That did not stop the United States from telling the Supreme Court on November 6, 2023, that “overwhelming evidence shows that…puberty blockers and hormones directly and significantly improve[] the physical and mental well-being of transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria,” Alabama’s application reads.
WPATH also blocked the publication of the results of “evidence reviews” that it believed “could negatively impact the delivery of health care to transgender people in the broadest sense of the word,” Marshall’s office said in the letter.
“Dr. Robinson also told HHS that she ‘has issues with this sponsor’ — WPATH — ‘trying to limit our ability to publish.’ “Several days earlier, WPATH denied the team’s request to publish two peer-reviewed manuscripts because the team had not complied with WPATH’s policy regarding the use of SOC-8 data,” the Alabama Attorney General’s office wrote. “Among other things, the policy required Johns Hopkins to obtain ‘final approval’ of the proposed paper from a SOC-8 leader and ‘at least one member of the transgender community’.”
“We sent the document to Admiral Levine. . . She likes[d] SOC-8 was very, very concerned that providing age (mainly for surgery) would affect access to healthcare for transgender youth and perhaps adults. Clearly, the situation in the US is dire, and she and the Biden administration were concerned that providing age on the document would make things worse,” the email was quoted as saying in attachment With Supplementary report by Dr. James Cantor, he says. “She asked us to remove them.”
The motion also states that “social justice” lawyers pressured WPATH to draft SOC-8 with an eye on prevailing in lawsuits like the ones Alabama is facing.
“WPATH’s failure to review the evidence was consistent with proponents’ concerns that motivated the work on SOC-8,” the motion states. “Some authors chose not to request an evidence review from the Johns Hopkins panel precisely so they would not have to report the results: ‘Our concerns, echoed by social justice lawyers we spoke with, are that an evidence-based review reveals little or no evidence and puts us in an untenable position in terms of influencing policy or winning lawsuits.’”
“The discovery revealed that WPATH: violated multiple international standards for the development of clinical guidelines, which WPATH itself claimed to follow in Standards of Care 8 (“SOC-8”); narrow the ability of the SOC-8 Evidence Review Team to publish systematic evidence reviews that found scant evidence for treatment transition; intentionally used SOC-8 as a political and legal document to expand treatment transitions and promote WPATH’s political goals; bowed to external political pressure from Admiral Rachel Levine and others to remove minimum age requirements for hormones and surgery in SOC-8; and “muzzle”[d]“WPATH members attempted to inform the public of their concerns regarding the treatment of children in transition,” the Alabama attorney general’s office wrote in a Wednesday letter.
Recently released documents from the AL case show that WPATH authors, advised by “social justice lawyers,” even avoided seeking evidence because doing so “reveals little or no evidence and puts us in an untenable position to influence policy and winning trials.”
— Attorney General Steve Marshall (@AGSteveMarshall) June 28, 2024
Marshall’s office also accused WPATH of creating “misleading” criticisms of Alabama’s law.
“WPATH’s public positions were also influenced by its ideological and political goals. When asked to support the critique of the Alabama law—authored by Plaintiffs’ ‘disinformation’ expert, Dr. McNamara, and cited by Plaintiffs at PI93—WPATH initially noted its opposition to the document’s strong implication that genital surgeries were not performed on minors,” the motion states. “The sponsor responded, ‘After consultation with those involved in the Alabama lawsuit, the consensus seemed to be that citing the standard of care’—and omitting the facts about the actual performance of surgeries on minors—‘would be most helpful to the case.’ WPATH supported the critique, which it knew was misleading.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained video material from Global Education Institute (GEI) WPATH in September 2022 and over 100 pages of documents in which some group members questioned SOC-8.
The videos featured some of the instructors insistence doctors disregard the standard of care requiring that mental health issues be addressed before any gender reassignment procedures are undertaken, even for patients suffering from schizophrenia. The other videos discussed may be potentially gruesome complications from certain surgical procedures.
“In short, neither the Court nor Alabama must treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has proven to be,” the motion said.
WPATH did not immediately respond to DCNF’s request for comment.
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Harold Hutchison is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Pediatrician with a child” by Pawel Daniluk.
