The World Health Organization is under fire for choosing a group of trans activists to develop its first global guide to “gender-affirming care,” with particular concern surrounding an appointee who advocates for halting children’s puberty. Florence Ashley, a Canadian “transfeminine activist, academic, and slut” has argued for “unbounded social transition” along with “ready access to puberty blockers” for children to be made “the default option” within healthcare systems.
On December 18 of 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally announced the individuals who had been selected to make up its guideline development group (GDG). According to the global health body’s website, the GDG will create “implementation guidance on health sector interventions” for “trans and gender diverse people.” Among them are academics, trans activists, and former leaders and financial backers of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The WHO said the 21 appointees will meet at its headquarters in Geneva next month to collaborate on the guide.
Yet the appointee who has sparked perhaps the most controversy for his continued focus on advocating for childhood ‘transition’ is Florence Ashley, currently an assistant professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Canada. Since 2018, Ashley has repeatedly written and spoken about “transgender youth” and has called for pubertal suppression to be mandated as a “default option” for “gender creative youth.”
In a 2019 paper titled “Thinking an ethics of gender exploration: Against delaying transition for transgender and gender creative youth,” published by Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Ashley claims that allowing children to go through “unmitigated” puberty constitutes a larger risk to children than placing them on drugs which suppress their natural development.
“Although taking puberty blockers is a form of medical treatment, it certainly facilitates exploration significantly more than letting puberty run its course; whereas puberty strongly favours cis embodiment by raising the psychological and medical toll of transitioning, puberty blockers structurally place transgender and cisgender hormonal futures in approximate symmetry. Youth who take puberty blockers have their options wide open, their bodies unaltered by either testosterone or oestrogen,” Ashley states.
He continues: “The neutrality of puberty blockers as opposed to unmitigated hormonal puberty should evacuate any hesitancy towards initiating gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues for youth who desire them. From the premise that facilitating exploration should be our starting point in caring for trans and gender creative youth, puberty blockers must be seen as the default position, to be readily prescribed since they leave the largest space for future identity development and negotiation.”
Ashley has also called for parents who oppose transitioning their children to be subjected to “publicly-funded education and counselling” in order to combat “parental hostility.”
In his 2019 article “Puberty Blockers Are Necessary, but They Don’t Prevent Homelessness: Caring for Transgender Youth by Supporting Unsupportive Parents,” Ashley writes: “Any measures seeking to promote access to puberty blockers must be accompanied by harm-reduction measures targeting parents of trans youth who have difficulty accepting their child’s gender identity and transition. Both supervised parent support groups and narrative ethics-inspired counselling should be considered as primary means of addressing parental hostility and rejection of their trans child.”
In addition to his advocacy for halting children’s puberty, Ashley has boasted of sneaking jokes of a sexual nature into his academic articles.
In a blog post dated August 2020, titled “Scholarly Shitposting: A Florencian Compendium,” Ashley writes that it is his “great pleasure” to compile a list of innuendos he has inserted into academic publications.
In an article titled “Genderfucking Non-Disclosure: Sexual Fraud, Transgender Bodies, and Messy Identities,” which argues that “gender identity is a private matter and people should not be forced to communicate it to others to have an intimate life,” Ashley has placed a remark which suggests his use of sex toys. “Dildos usually feel very different from penises,” reads one passage, which contains a footnote stating, “author’s personal experience.”
Other innuendos or “easter eggs” added by Ashley include references to the number 69, a slang term for a sexual position, and sexualized terms for estrogen used by trans-identified males, such as “titty skittles” and “breast mints.”
In another apparent outburst of exhibitionism, Ashley has written about disrobing in front of nurses while hospitalized following his genital surgery in 2018. Shortly after undergoing the procedure, Ashley claims to have been “trading nudes” on social media and going “fully topless” in front of hospital staff. In his blog post, Ashley incorporates post-operative photos of his genitalia.
“I’m well enough to take topless pics and trade nudes with a lovely cutie over Facebook. I’ve been topless all day due to my moral qualm with clothes. Nurses probably find me weird especially as I’ve proclaimed out loud that I dislike clothes and made them pass my IV through the arm hole to go fully topless, even though they have to pass it back in and out for walks,” he wrote.
“I’m a bit sad because I don’t have a penis any more, putting me in the normal competitive market instead of being a hot, rare commodity to sugar daddies,” Ashley added.
Ashley continued to fantasize about deceiving men into sexual encounters with him by pretending to be female.
“I wonder if once I’m healed I’ll start having sex with cis men without telling them I’m trans. On one hand it’s hard for me to hide I’m trans given that it’s all I talk about. On the other hand, it’s definitely easier that way for a quick fuck… I can’t wait to have sex with a cishet guy and ask him: ‘Oh babe, how does it feel fucking a penis with your penis?’”
Most recently, Ashley has been promoting his book, “Gender / Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body,” which, according to its description, “invites the reader into the intimate world of academic smut to ask what it means to be horny on main in a sex-negative world.” In a TikTok video, Ashley highlights an editor’s comment on a passage detailing a “sex scene” that entailed “wax play,” resulting in “Crayola jizz.”
@floralashes #greenscreen For those wondering, the chapter is about how sex negativity in academia and law is probably a way of promoting capitalist exploitation by labelling ‘having a body’ lowly and animalistic. #trans #law #academia #university #capitalism #lgbt #lgbtq #transgender #queer #lesbian #wlw #sapphic ♬ original sound – Florence Ashley
Other academics appointed by WHO’s GDG committee include three sexologists and former presidents of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a US-based lobby group, as well as several other former board members or contributors to WPATH’s formal guidelines. A petition calling for WHO to “go back to the drawing board” and re-evaluate the “biased panel” has currently gathered over 4,000 signatures.
As previously revealed exclusively by Reduxx, WPATH has multiple ties to academics involved in either pro-pedophilia activism or pedophilia apologism. The organization’s most recent Standards of Care were developed in collaboration with members of a castration fetish forum, the Eunuch Archive, which produces and hosts grisly written erotica on the theme of castrating children, both surgically and chemically, for an adult man’s sexual gratification or to halt puberty and keep the victim in a childlike state. One lead academic who worked closely with WPATH, Thomas Johnson, had shared a video of a transgender surgery as pornography within the forum.
Additionally, Reduxx discovered that a prominent Norwegian psychologist with connections to WPATH was previously associated with multinational pro-pedophile groups which lobbied for lowering the age of consent. Thore Langfeldt, who wrote extensively about “child sexuality” and positively conveyed case studies of pedophilic relationships, assisted in the organizing of a 2009 WPATH conference in Oslo which focused on gender identity and children.