An influential transgender activist group known as the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health” (WPATH) incorporated policy language deeming “gender transition” procedures “medically necessary” into its official standards of care as a “tool” to pressure insurance companies to cover them rather than as an objective medical conclusion, according to recently-publicized court documents.
Released as part of a court filing in the ongoing lawsuit over Alabama’s ban on “transitioning” gender-confused minors, the emails include discussion of how to put WPATH’s 2016 declaration that “transitioning” is “medically necessary” to better advantage, the Washington Free Beacon reports.
“We needed a tool for our attorneys to use in defending access to care [i.e., “sex changes”],” one official wrote in January 2022. “The original Medical Necessity Statement was specific to the US because this was where we were experiencing the problem […] I have long wanted this (and many of our other policy statements) to become part of the [standards of care] because that gives them greater force.”
Further, despite public insistence that WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8) was formed with the “most rigorous protocol in the world,” the emails show that WPATH refused to publish the findings of Johns Hopkins researchers who concluded there was “little to no evidence” supporting WPATH’s desired conclusion.
“It is paramount that any publication based on the WPATH SOC8 data is thoroughly scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender healthcare [sic] in the broadest sense,” another email read.
Previous disclosures from the same lawsuit revealed that cross-dressing Biden administration assistant Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Richard “Rachel” Levine “strongly pressured WPATH leadership to rush the development and issuance of SOC-8], in order to assist with Administration political strategy,” specifically by pushing for the elimination of minimum-age guidelines.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including full “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
So-called “gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
The Biden administration’s own Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report last year acknowledging that “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Yet the White House refuses to retreat an inch from any major aspect of the LGBT agenda: reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage “transitions” as “close to sinful,” promoting underage “transitions” (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.
