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Mt. Sinai Health System in New York City, which until early this year operated a substantial pediatric gender clinic, has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which it will keep the clinic shuttered, pay a monetary penalty, and provide treatment to those who were harmed by gender-transition interventions they received as minors.

Given Mt. Sinai operates in a Democrat-led state with an attorney general, Letitia James, who is broadly supportive of gender-transition interventions for minors, this settlement serves as an ominous harbinger for what remains of the embattled field of pediatric gender medicine as the Trump admin has sought to destroy it.

According to an analysis of medical billing records conducted by the nonprofit Do No Harm, which opposes pediatric gender medicine, Mt. Sinai’s billing for related services was in recent years the highest in the nation.

While the precise details that triggered the settlement remain opaque, the Trump administration had apparently accused Mt. Sinai that it had violated federal law by submitting fraudulent billing codes for gender-transition interventions.

Mt. Sinai has agreed to pay an undisclosed monetary penalty and to dedicate $2 million to patients who, in the words of a Justice Department release on the settlement, have suffered “harmful consequences” of the gender-transition interventions they received as minors.

“In working towards this resolution,” the release states, “the United States acknowledged that Mount Sinai took significant steps entitling it to credit for cooperation with the Department in its investigation. At all times during the investigation, Mount Sinai remained cooperative, proactive, and solution-driven, as evidenced by its multimillion-dollar commitment to detransition care.”

“The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable medical providers that violate federal law and endanger children through so-called gender-affirming care,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “This agreement puts an end to these practices at Mount Sinai and provides meaningful relief for individuals who have already suffered harm.”

Just over half of U.S. states have since 2021 passed laws banning the provision of gender-transition treatments, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to treat gender dysphoria in minors. Such laws last year received the effective blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court; 25 of the state bans have ultimately gone into effect.

Otherwise, since day one, the second Trump administration has unleashed a whole-of-government assault on these controversial medical practices among adolescents, seeking to end them permanently in the blue states where they remain legal.

Following a January executive order from President Donald Trump, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in December sought to implement a rule that would bar Medicare or Medicaid funding from any hospital that provides gender-transition interventions to patients under age 19. In the face of such threats, a wave of major pediatric gender clinics in blue states have closed over the past 14 months. This included Mt. Sinai, which shuttered its Keith Haring Youth Gender Center in January. NYU Langone closed its own pediatric gender clinic the following month.

Ms. James’ office had in February 2025 issued a letter warning New York hospitals that denying gender-transition treatment to patients would put the institutions in violation of a state anti-discrimination statute. In February of this year, the attorney general demanded NYU Langone in particular restore its pediatric gender care services within 10 days. The hospital did not comply.

On March 1, Brad Lander, the progressive former New York City comptroller who in June won the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th congressional district, spoke along with other local politicos, transgender activists and their allies at a protest outside of an NYU clinic in Manhattan. They demanded the hospital reopen its youth gender clinic. While most Americans, including a majority of Democrats in many polls, oppose providing gender-transition medications to minors, most Democratic politicians remain in lockstep with transgender activists in supporting this medical field.

Above: Brad Lander at the March 1 protest outside an NYU Langone clinic

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Since May, three other major hospitals have reached settlements with the Justice Department similar to Mt. Sinai’s, including Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. The hospitals had faced accusations of billing fraud, including using billing codes for gender-transition treatments and surgeries that do not align with gender dysphoria treatment. All three hospitals made long-term commitments to refrain from providing such interventions to minors, paid a civil settlement and pledged to treat detransitioners or those who have been harmed by such treatment.

When an individual has undergone a medical gender transition and then reverted to identifying and presenting as their birth sex, this is known as detransitioning. The detransitioning rate among people who have undergone gender-transition interventions as minors remains unknown, in part due to insufficient long-term follow-up in studies of these interventions. One leading expert has estimated that the rate could be about 5 percent to 10 percent.

In January, the first lawsuit waged by a detransitioner to make it to trial, concerning a 22-year-old woman who sued her care providers over the mastectomy she received at age 16, resulted in a $2 million jury award. According to an analysis conducted in 2024 by Leor Sapir of the Manhattan Institute, in recent years about 1,000 natal girls underwent this gender-transition surgery annually. However, since the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in February issued a policy statement advising its members against performing such surgeries on patients under age 19, reports suggest this has all but ended them in the United States for this age group.

Supporters of providing gender-transition interventions to minors argue that they are vital to the well-being of youth who identify as a gender other than their birth sex. Delaying such interventions until adulthood, such supporters often argue, puts adolescents at extremely high risk of suicide. Skeptics and opponents have countered that the evidence backing these interventions is very poor. The only study to directly address the suicide question, based on Finnish health records, did not find evidence to support claims that cross-sex hormone treatment is associated with a lower suicide death rate in gender-distressed youths.

The Trump administration published a massive report on pediatric gender medicine last year that concluded that the risks and costs of these interventions, such as infertility and the removal of healthy body parts, outweighed any potential benefits. The report advocated psychotherapy to treat gender dysphoria in youths.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Aug. 13 released a report alleging widespread billing fraud in pediatric gender medicine, such as through the coding of gender-transition drugs for minors under “endocrine disorder, unspecified” rather than a gender-dysphoria-related billing code.

The report stated: “According to Do No Harm, Mount Sinai Medical Center in NY and Boston Children’s Hospital are cited as the top-grossing providers nationwide, with over $8.2 million and $6.5 million respectively in total billed charges for such services to minors during the 2019–2023 period.”

This figure represents what Mt. Sinai billed, not necessarily how much it was reimbursed for such services.

In June, Mt. Sinai received a subpoena from a grand jury demanding patient records from its pediatric gender clinic, as well as the names of staffers. According to reporting by Gothamist, the hospital told families at the time: “If we are ultimately required to produce records, our current plan is to provide only de-identified information, with all patient-identifying details removed.”

This followed a similar subpoena received by NYU Langone the previous month. The Justice Department has issued a raft of such subpoenas to clinics around the country, prompting lawsuits waged by the ACLU in particular.

ACLU attorney Chase Strangio recently warned in a video posted on social media that trans youth were the “canary in the coal mine,” and that if the Trump administration succeeded in gaining access to such patients’ records, this would open the door to myriad other violations of patient privacy.

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The ACLU and others filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York in June against NYU Langone and the Justice Department over the subpoenas. The plaintiffs included New York City patients of both the NYU and Mt. Sinai clinics. The suit has succeeded thus far in blocking any such subpoenas by the Justice Department in New York City. Mt. Sinai, however, is not blocked from voluntarily producing such records.

During his 2025 campaign, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to spend $65 million in taxpayer funds to provide gender-transition interventions, including to minors. After much consternation from activists over the delay to act, the city in June announced a plan to spend just $15 million over two years to care for transgender patients. But in the face of the defunding threats from the Trump administration, the city’s pilot clinic would only care for patients age 19 and older, the city indicated. This would not, however, prevent the city from funding medical providers who do care for younger patients.

The city’s age cut-off enraged leading transgender activists such as Harvard Law School clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo. In a Bluesky post, Ms. Caraballo stated: “Really damn tired of our ‘allies’ abandoning trans youth and then turning around saying ‘we see you, we hear you, we support you as long as you’re over the age of 19 to align with Trump’s policies!'”

A collection of 21 Democrat-led states plus the District of Columbia earlier this week sued the Trump administration in federal court in Massachusetts, seeking to block an HHS rule, slated to go into effect in October, that would bar Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from covering gender-transition interventions.

“A growing number of hospitals, like Mount Sinai, have recognized the medical scandal of sex-rejecting procedures,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in a statement about the settlement the hospital. “While we are grateful when we secure resolutions to end this discredited practice and protect children, we must not and will not rest in our pursuit of justice for the victims it has left behind.”

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

Hazard Ratio is a reader-supported Substack. Consider backing my work and becoming a paid subscriber today.

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During the 24 days between news breaking of Jason Arday’s alleged academic misconduct and serial lying and his death on Aug. 14, a blast radius extended across Cambridge University. In an apparent effort to respond to the mounting public outcry over Dr. Arday’s alleged plagiarism and academic fraud while containing the damage to the august institution’s reputation, Cambridge on Aug. 5 announced an investigation into Dr. Arday’s appointment.

In a statement on the expanding crisis for the university then issued Aug. 12, Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice said she shared the “concerns” about Dr. Arday’s appointment. But she insisted that his case was an “aberration.”

Or was it—at least where the quality of his scholarship was concerned?

The PhD thesis of a student in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education—in which Dr. Arday held a professorial chair, in the sociology of education, until he resigned hours after the investigation announcement—has been put under what British and Canadian academics have told us is a remarkably long embargo, shielding it from public view until 2031.

Crucially, among the panelists who reviewed the thesis was Dr. Arday himself.

The thesis, which we have obtained and which we review below, raises important questions about whether the Faculty of Education, including Dr. Arday’s own contributions, let down the basic standards of higher education.

The lengthy embargo raises further questions about what Cambridge, which is among the most elite universities in the world, and the paper’s author might have to hide where her scholarship is concerned.

Written by Damilola Folayan, the thesis is entitled Of, but not in: A poetic exploration of how Black women students respond to the coloniality of Oxbridge—referring to the portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge. It garnered her a coveted Cambridge PhD in 2025. Following what’s known as an autoethnographic style, it is in essence an epic poetry-slam interpretation of the plight of Dr. Folayan and three other black women at Oxbridge and their experiences navigating, with considerable ambivalence, these historically, and still overwhelmingly, white elite institutions.

The sprawling thesis unabashedly thumbs its nose at the rigors and demands of academia even as it demands in return an elite PhD and all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

The landing page for Dr. Folayan’s thesis was taken down on Aug. 14, just before news of Dr. Arday’s death broke. This followed our first submission via email of questions, earlier that day, to Cambridge and Dr. Folayan about her thesis. The landing page was put back online at some point in the subsequent weeks.

Dr. Folayan, who did not return requests for comment, submitted her thesis on Nov. 26, 2024, and it was published July 10, 2025. A source who monitored the thesis over this period informed us that the university placed the thesis under an initial one-year embargo. The particular type of embargo the thesis received, called embargoed access, permits the author to release copies upon request at their own discretion.

Various academics familiar with the British system told us it is not uncommon for a university to keep a PhD thesis initially under wraps like this, while, for example, its author seeks to publish it in book form.

But what happened next was more exceptional—and even an apparent violation of university policy—sources tell us.

At some point after July 27—the date when our source was able to freely download Dr. Folayan’s thesis, given it was not under embargo at that time—and before Aug. 9, the university placed a new, five-year embargo on the thesis. This shielded the document until July 10, 2031.

Various academics informed us that in rare cases, PhD theses may be put under lengthy embargos if they contain, for example, information that could violate an individual’s safety. But Dr. Folayan did not receive the type of stricter embargo that would be placed in those circumstances.

The embargo on Dr. Folayan’s thesis appears to violate Cambridge’s own rules for limits on such embargoes, which state: “The maximum embargo permitted is 6 years from the date of first deposit”—not from the date that the thesis was published, as is now the case for Dr. Folayan’s thesis. Given her deposit date, the university rules would appear to place the outer limit at Nov. 26, 2030, which is 226 days before the current expiration date on the embargo.

The records suggest that Dr. Folayan herself requested the embargo extension, given her thesis sits under “embargoed access.” Under this protocol, the thesis author completes an embargo extension form, which a university supervisor then signs (or if the supervisor disagrees, the degree committee weighs in). Or it could be that the university administration broke protocol and applied the embargo itself through this route.

Regardless, the length of the embargo raised eyebrows among our sources in British academia.

“I have never heard of a PhD being embargoed in the social sciences,” Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, told us in an email exchange that took place before Dr. Arday’s death. “Most students are keen to share their work.” She said that if a PhD thesis is shielded for many years, “it is unclear how it could count as a contribution to knowledge.”

A Cambridge spokesperson on Aug. 14 stated, on the contrary: “It is common practice for PhD students to request an embargo on their theses. There are a number of reasons why such a request might be made and in each case a standard protocol is followed.” The spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions about whether Dr. Folayan’s especially lengthy embargo violated university policy.

The Arday plagiarism scandal broke in the Substack of Nathan Cofnas, an American academic who is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, on July 21—11 days after Dr. Folayan’s embargo lifted. Dr. Cofnas told one of us that he first alerted Cambridge to his investigation on July 16. Retraction Watch followed Dr. Cofnas’ article on July 27 with even more explosive reporting about Dr. Arday’s alleged academic misconduct and his apparently aggressive—and temporarily successful—efforts to leverage the legal system to intimidate those who questioned his scholarship and honesty and keep the damning story under wraps.

This means that the new, especially long embargo was placed on a PhD thesis—a piece of scholarship for which Dr. Arday sat on the review panel—after Dr. Arday’s alleged academic misconduct became a major public scandal.

The intense public focus on such offenses and the purported poor quality of Dr. Arday’s academic publications threatened to tarnish Cambridge’s historically sterling reputation. In particular, the Faculty of Education, in which Dr. Arday became the university’s youngest black professor in 2023, found itself under withering scrutiny.

Dr. Sullivan, who, according to her bio, studies “social and educational inequalities in the life course”—similar to the domains of Drs. Arday and Folayan—said that there were academics “doing good work” in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education at large. “I feel for them, because they will now be tainted by association with the Arday scandal,” she said—albeit before Dr. Arday’s death instantly changed the tenor of the public debate over his life and work.

But Dr. Sullivan offered a scathing and unsparing appraisal of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, saying that “the department as a whole is surprisingly weak, particularly given the advantages of the prestige and perks of Cambridge, which should make it possible for them to hire the very best.”

Hilary Cremin, who heads the Faculty of Education and who in a 2023 BBC interview said that Dr. Arday was “the best in the world” in the research he did, was under particularly scorching scrutiny in the weeks before Dr. Arday’s death. Critics accused Dr. Cremin of pandering to Dr. Arday and overlooking what they asserted was his weak publication record in favor of leveraging his race to paper over Cambridge’s notable lack of diversity where black scholars are concerned.

Dr. Sullivan said that Dr. Cremin “is not someone of the calibre you would expect to head a department at Cambridge.” She suggested that Dr. Cremin was a linchpin in appointing someone with an academic background as thin as Dr. Arday’s, saying, “One of the most important roles of a head of department is to sit on all senior appointment panels and ensure that weak hires are avoided. This is one reason that having an intellectually credible head is essential to a strong department.”

“I am concerned that students at Cambridge have been badly let down,” Dr. Sullivan said. “They deserve better.”

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Dr. Folayan’s thesis: a poetic act of defiance

What is a PhD thesis supposed to accomplish? The answer can vary widely by discipline, but the basic expectation is that it is meant to represent a genuine contribution to or advancement of human knowledge. That knowledge doesn’t need to be timeless, like discovering the mass of a carbon atom. It can be narrowly focused. And research methods vary between disciplines. Formal experiments and statistical hypothesis testing are not appropriate or even possible in many fields. Social scientists, including anthropologists, sociologists and other qualitative researchers, often study highly subjective questions that can’t be answered with the tools and precision of the hard sciences.

Dr. Folayan’s thesis asks how black women students experience and respond to what she calls the “coloniality of Oxbridge,” which she describes as the persistence of colonial power, norms and racial hierarchy at Oxford and Cambridge. To answer that question, she relies on conversations she held with three black women who had attended or were attending Oxbridge, infuses their stories with her own experiences through so-called autoethnography, and ultimately spends 70,413 words analyzing the resulting material using so-called Critical Poetic Inquiry.

In other words, she sought a doctorate from one of the world’s greatest halls of higher learning by interviewing three people. Her contribution to human knowledge characterizes two social practices—leaving Oxbridge for London and gathering for potlucks—as forms of “marronage,” a term used to describe the practice of escaping enslavement.

This arguably undisciplined mode of inquiry is not unique to Dr. Folayan. It has spread widely across academia and is arguably one of the central dead weights that have brought down trust in higher education. Dr. Folayan’s thesis takes this already flawed method to an extreme by stirring poetry and political activism into the mix.

Dr. Arday’s own 2015 thesis, for which he was accused of plagiarizing another author, follows a similar approach. It is a lengthy exploration of the travails of just four student teachers in the physical-education discipline. (Specifically, Dr. Arday’s doctorate was in the teaching of P.E., not P.E. itself. Following an investigation Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded him his PhD, cleared him of the plagiarism charge in March. But Dr. Arday was also credibly accused of plagiarism and fraud in other papers he wrote while at other universities, according to The Times.) He otherwise employed autoethnography, which is a fancy word for writing about oneself, in his published work.

Methods should matter and require justification in every field. If a researcher makes claims about reality, there must be some disciplined means of determining whether those claims are true or plausible. Evidence and logic must, at least to some degree, guide one’s interpretation. Alternative explanations have to be considered. It must be clear how a researcher moved from their observations to their conclusions. And, at least in principle, they must stress test their argument by articulating the kind of evidence that would or could have caused them to arrive at a different conclusion. Without such constraints on interpretation, research can no longer be considered an investigation and instead becomes a mere subjective exercise—in expressing what the author already believes or desires to be true.

In short, absent rhetorical and epistemological standards, the academic project falls apart.

But that seems to be exactly what Dr. Folayan would rather. Which is quite convenient, since dispensing with any and all structure clears a much smoother path toward earning a PhD than a course that is bogged down by rigor and strict standards. The complete lack of constraint is what makes Dr. Folayan’s PhD thesis so astonishing. Her subject is remarkably narrow and would typically be considered extremely low-powered for any research project, let alone a PhD. And her thesis does not actually investigate the experiences of her participants in a way that meets even the lowest bar for academic rigor. Instead, the methods are structured in a way that permits her to interpret evidence through a predetermined ideological and political framework that, conveniently enough, pre-emptively shields it from challenges of falsification.

This thesis cannot be considered research in any meaningful, scholarly sense.

The Critical Poetic Inquiry, or CPI, method she uses is, in her words, “distinct from other forms of qualitative inquiry in that it prioritises justice.” What actually constitutes “justice” for the sake of research she leaves undefined. However, “justice” is a subjective moral and political pursuit. It is not a method for determining what is true, which is the ostensibly higher purpose of a PhD thesis. The slam-poetic nature of Dr. Folayan’s thesis causes her to describe her project with terms such as: “a lament, a war cry, a chant and a belly laugh” and “a joyful, painful rupture, a disruption, a deliberate transgression, a riff, and a drum beat… a prayer for all we have lost and for all that we can be.”

She describes her thesis as “a justice-centred project aimed at celebrating and memorialising the lives and experiences of Black women students of Oxbridge, past and present.” She also calls the project “an ode to the ebony women who maroon their way through the HEIs [Higher Education Institutions] they are traditionally shut out of or told to contort themselves to enter into.” Elsewhere it becomes a “love letter,” “poetry,” a “process of healing,” and an aspiring “performance.”

Dr. Folayan has served up a tribute to women such as herself, channeled through an amalgam of poetry and activism. She also inserts herself into the dataset through autoethnography, which in her case means mining her own journals and personal experiences at Cambridge as research material.

The three women she interviewed either volunteered via a social media open call or were acquaintances hand-selected by Folayan herself. Dr. Folayan also infused the interviews with personal bias by sharing her own experiences with the subjects in order to “affirm [the participants’] experiences” through their commonality.

Her methods provide an alternative to, she writes, the “taking up space” model in black feminism. Her alternative route is concerned with how black women at Oxbridge “create alternative spaces to help them remain part of the institutions.”

“Through this work,” Dr. Folayan writes, “I centre the experiences of Black women students who have chosen to be of, but not in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.” Elsewhere: “Through this research, I seek to synthesise a recent turn in the development of Black British Womanhood Studies marked by a refusal to play our counters in quiet and cry our tears in private.” She says she writes “because of the beautiful ebony butterflies who escape the oppressive terrains of UK HEIs and invent alternative modes of engaging with and existing in Oxbridge.” She also tells the reader: “This research is a love letter to the ebony beauties who have and are yet to navigate Oxbridge.”

She then offers this:

“In engaging in marronage, the Black women at the centre of this project contradict oppression and oppressive narratives of Black womanhood by forging alternate modes of decolonial existence that refuse to conform to the colonising onto-epistemic foundations of UK HE.”

What observation could even potentially determine whether this interpretation was accurate? What would distinguish “forging alternate modes of decolonial existence” from ordinary friendship, socializing, travel or seeking out people with shared cultural backgrounds? Dr. Folayan does not offer any answers or guidance. When you strip out all the academic jargon of “marronage,” “decolonial existence,” and “onto-epistemic foundations,” she’s simply saying: I feel out of place here.

Remarkably, Dr. Folayan even appears to sense the methodological shortcomings of her own work—and in so doing almost dares the reader to engage in exactly the sort of criticism we’re administering here. “Methodological conundrums have plagued this project since its inception,” she writes, in a moment of meta-analysis, of the genesis of her thesis. “Nothing quite seemed to fit this project and this project did not fit neatly into any methodological framework.” She reports having asked herself, “What is it I’m doing here?” and “Does this even constitute a PhD?”

Her supervisor, Tyler Denmead will, as of October 2026, earn the distinguished title of professor of education at Cambridge. Dr. Denmead, who is white, is the coauthor of the 2025 book Rethinking Critical Race Theory: Education Against Elimination in a Time of Genocide. He recently coauthored scholarly articles with titles that open with the words “White educability,” “White profitability,” and “Reckoning with white empathy.” His next book is at least tentatively entitled The White Rage Curriculum.

Dr. Denmead, who did not respond to requests for comment, apparently did not help Dr. Folayan develop a clearer and more rigorous research design. Instead, Dr. Folayan writes that he “urged me to keep writing poetry.”

The big picture: Dr. Folayan’s ascent through the ranks

According to her LinkedIn page (which was taken down at some point after Aug. 14), Dr. Folayan is a lecturer in equity, diversity and inclusion at Arden University and “a poet-researcher whose work sits at the intersection of social transformation and the sociology of education.” She asserts that she researches “race, gender, and institutional inequalities, with a particular interest in motherhood in higher education and fostering transformative change.”

In addition to receiving her PhD in education from Cambridge, in February 2025, she has worked at the universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Cambridge. She asserts on LinkedIn that she has worked on “projects including Generation Delta, Decolonising the Social Sciences and the Black Professors Project.” While earning her PhD, she also worked in HR and sustainability at Niyo Group, a Birmingham-based tech and training venture that describes itself as “a global technology company that empowers, educates and enables the most under-represented communities.”

Niyo sponsored her PhD, at least in part, and is thanked in the acknowledgements, as is Dr. Arday.

Dr. Folayan is also a poet, having received poetry commissions from the University of Sheffield, from which she received a masters of science in international social change and policy in 2019, and the Royal Academy of Arts, per LinkedIn. She earned her bachelor of science in sociology and education studies from Oxford Brookes University in 2018.

Her ultimate goal is to become a professor and “impact evaluation consultant.”

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“Inspired poetry”

Curiously, Dr. Folayan’s “Inspired Poetry” approach does not routinely attempt to reproduce verbatim the words her participants uttered in her interviews. Instead, she funnels those words through a creative process that communicates the women’s “thoughts, patterns and feelings” and captures what she subjectively felt constituted their “essence.” She draws on other scholars’ research and her interview transcripts and then crafts poems around the elements she “felt were important.”

The poems born out of this process then become a new research text that can supposedly reveal even greater intellectual insights.

At no point during this exercise is there an independent check capable of determining whether anything true or useful had actually been discovered—or if it’s pure projection on her part.

But Dr. Folayan did indeed face an independent check: her thesis viva, as the PhD oral examinations are called in the U.K. The review panel included Dr. Arday. We don’t know what went on beyond those closed doors except that they granted her a PhD and validated this thesis as her final product.

And then the thesis was sealed in a vault guarded by the author herself—minus a little over two weeks earlier this summer when the embargo lapsed—for what is now set to be six years all told. Is this the sort of transparency Vice-Chancellor Prentice spoke of when she sought to reassure the Cambridge community about the investigation into Dr. Arday? Will Dr. Arday’s approval of this thesis be a part of that investigation? Or will the embargo thwart such an inquiry?

In her thesis, Dr. Folayan also notes her “somewhat noble motivations,” while revealing, remarkably for someone seeking a doctorate, that writing a thesis was not her preferred medium. She says she underwent the academic task “because of the requirements of the institution in which I hold space.” She states, “If I had it my way, this thesis would be a performance, and all my academic prose would be pauses and platitudes in poetry, but Cambridge does not afford me such privilege, so I opt for Critical Poetic Inquiry.”

Dr. Folayan herself seems incredulous that she’s getting away with writing activist poetry for her education PhD thesis, saying that “yes, this is a thesis, and somehow poetry is an acceptable form of academic inquiry and theorisation.”

She even explains that she was initially drawn to Critical Qualitative Inquiry (of which, according to her, Critical Poetic Inquiry is a subset) because it was a form of “activist research” that was, in part, “concerned with perceived academic rigour.” In other words, she did not prioritize actual academic rigor, just the perception of it in order to achieve her activist goals.

Dr. Folayan is brazenly candid about her rejection of such rigor. She opens with a so-called positionality statement—academic throat clearings that have become de rigueur in social-justice-oriented academia in which the author lists their various racial, gender, socioeconomic and sexual identities—quoting other scholars that her project “does not align with notions of ‘neutral’ research or ‘objective’ researchers.”

She rejects what she calls the “fantasy of objectivity,” and makes evident she believes the utter lack of objectivity resulting from her positionality actually makes her work more, not less, credible. This is because she rejects what she refers to as “Coloniality’s Epistemic Regime,” which is the “colonial power dynamics [that] permeate societies to repress epistemologies that exist outside of coloniality’s frame of reason and rationality.” This repression manifests as “marking criteria, rubrics and journal requirements that favour written knowledge over that which is communicated creatively (i.e. through painting or performance)” and also as “notions that knowledge must be scientifically tested and proven to meet coloniality’s contorted standards of fact.”

While it’s important and valid to acknowledge researcher bias in qualitative research, acknowledging such bias is not the same thing as controlling for it to help establish whether one’s interpretation is true.

Undergirding the thesis’s ideological framework is Dr. Folayan’s proudly defiant rejection of conventional scholarly standards and constraints. She shields her work from criticism by aligning herself with scholars who refuse “to privilege contemporary epistemic modes [of knowing] over Indigenous sciences and epistemes” and favors methodologies that are not “dictated by coloniality’s standards of knowledge production.” She claims the “ambiguity around this project’s status as an acceptable academic work” is a result of it being situated in a colonialist institution. She says her project is “conscious of the confines created by institutional expectations and academic assumptions yet refuses to adopt them.”

Perhaps her clearest effort to reject academic standards while having her academic cake and eating it too, so to speak, comes in her assertion: “Project and product thus remain unsegregated, and my method has not been determined by rigid academic definitions as being an acceptable form of research. My mode of research has been characterised by a refusal to give into the knowledge standards of coloniality which, as noted by Sriprakash et al. (2022), function to uphold White-dominance and hierarchical social orders.”

This thesis produces a paradox: Cambridge is awarding its highest academic credential to a project whose author openly presents accepted academic standards as oppressive constraints to be undermined and resisted. To paraphrase her thesis title, Dr. Folayan wants to be of Cambridge—receive her doctorate—but never adhere to this elite academic institution’s epistemic standards, even as she complains that she feels out of place in this very institution.

Dr. Folayan’s purported “contribution to knowledge” is the discovery of two previously unexplored forms of “marronage”: traveling to London to find community and holding potlucks. London becomes a “historic foothill of escape,” while potlucks are theorized to be an extension of “the maroon tradition of seeking protection in the landscapes of territories ruled by European powers.”

There is good reason to believe that black women at Oxbridge can feel isolated. Blacks comprise only an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the undergraduate students accepted at Cambridge and just under 1 percent of the academic staff (actual black professors are even rarer)—a disparity that Cambridge apparently sought to rectify by hiring Dr. Arday, his subpar qualifications notwithstanding. And it’s entirely likely that spending time with friends in London or eating familiar foods with likeminded individuals would make such women feel more at home. Those certainly seem like resonant emotional experiences, potentially worthy of documentation in some forum. But Dr. Folayan devotes tens of thousands of words in a PhD thesis saying that she feels out of place at Cambridge and likes leaving campus to find her place elsewhere and enjoy comfort food.

Simply attaching the vocabulary of slavery to the most ordinary of human interactions does not constitute an argument, analysis, or a new empirical discovery.

As an institution, Cambridge appears to have been incapable of distinguishing between scholarship and a literary act of self indulgence. And astonishingly, the university has sanctioned an exceptionally long embargo that has permitted the contents of this thesis to remain out of view into the next decade.

If there is to be a true reckoning at Cambridge to understand what internal rot Dr. Arday’s interrupted tenure signified, breaking the embargo and taking a hard look at this thesis might be a good place to start.

But that might prove inconvenient to the vice-chancellor’s preordained conclusion that the Arday affair is a mere isolated incident.

Reality’s Last Stand

Holding the line on free speech, science, and reality.

By Colin Wright

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

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The American Academy of Pediatrics has sought to distance itself from a Washington state ballot initiative that would restrict girls’ and women’s school sports to those born female. The executive director of the Washington state chapter of the AAP this week contacted members of a citizens committee associated with the initiative and requested they delete from a pending official voter’s guide any mention of the AAP’s care guidelines in connection with doctors verifying the sex of children during routine exams.

The citizens committee ultimately refused to edit the text, even amid the specter of legal action against by the AAP. On Thursday, Darren Littell, the executive director of LGW issued a statement insisting upon the accuracy of the reference to AAP guidance.

In June, the Supreme Court effectively gave its blessing to laws, passed by legislatures in just over half of U.S. states, that restrict biological males from participating in girls’ and women’s sports. The court found that such policies violated neither the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment nor Title IX, which governs access to sports in schools and demands that girls and women maintain equal opportunities compared with their male counterparts.

The AAP was a coauthor, along with 12 other medical organizations, of a friend-of-the-court brief filed when one of the two sports cases ultimately decided by the Supreme Court faced the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief argued: “Barring transgender girls and women from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity frustrates the treatment of gender dysphoria by preventing transgender girls and women from living openly in accordance with their true gender.”

The AAP has been out front in supporting youth who identify as transgender in their efforts to live and be treated as the opposite sex. In 2018, the AAP published a foundational policy statement endorsing what’s known as the gender-affirming method of caring for youth who identify as transgender. The document asserts caretakers should defer to the child’s sense of their own gender and essentially let them lead the way in their care with respect to a social or medical transition. The statement is highly controversial for, in part, having made unsupported and otherwise erroneous claims. In August 2023, the AAP nevertheless reaffirmed the policy statement. The organization asserted at the time that it would commission a systematic literature review of gender-transition treatment for minors. However, there have been no signs since then that such a review is underway.

Washington, which is an especially liberal state overall, albeit with more conservative pockets in the eastern part of the state in particular, has on its November ballot an initiative known as IL26-638, or I-638, that would bar biological males from participating in girls and women’s school sports. The opposition to the bill has focused in particular on the notion that it would demand genital checks of girls before they participate in sports.

The ballot initiative notes that existing state law and school policies already require that students undergo a routine physical exam before participating in interscholastic sports and that this includes documenting each student’s biological sex. The initiative’s proposed sex-based restrictions on school sports read as follows:

Hallie Herzberg, a spokesperson for Let’s Go Washington, told me that health care providers would have discretion under the proposed law regarding the means by which they could establish a patient’s sex. This could include a cheek swab rather than a genital exam, she said.

According to an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court for the two sports cases decided in June—a brief that included Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, as a signatory—cheek swabs are noninvasive and can verify the eligibility for sports of 99.9 percent of females. They can be expensive, however.

As for genital exams, in an official voter’s guide that is set to be published for Washington state residents by September 19, a segment that a six-person citizens committee prepared that argues on behalf of I-638 makes the following reference to the AAP:

“Students would compete in the category that aligns with their sex, verified during routine, medically necessary primary care recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. During a private, consented visit, a licensed medical professional would verify sex based on the student’s birth records, medical history and/or a standard, non-invasive physical examination.”

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This is a reference to the AAP’s “Bright Futures” guidelines for middle childhood visits, covering ages five to 10. For visits of seven and eight year olds as well as for nine and 10 year olds, the guidelines recommend a physical exam, including, for “breasts and genitalia”: “Assess for sexual maturity rating.”

Among the members of the citizens committee is Dr. Erica Li, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington State University. Dr. Li was also the liaison who connected the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, or SEGM, to WSU to have a continuing medical education course expressing skepticism of pediatric gender medicine credentialed by the university. After an inquiry from the public about the courses, the governing body that oversees such accreditation compelled the university to suspend accreditation of the courses last year. The governing body ultimately voided the accreditation and the university decided not to contest the decision.

Among the authors of the pending voter’s guide statement against I-638 are representatives from the Washington State Nurses Association, Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, and the League of Women Voters of Washington.

On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Lelach Rave, executive director of the AAP’s Washington state chapter, contacted members of the citizens committee supporting the initiative to “request that the American Academy of Pediatrics be removed from the ‘Argument for’ voter’s guide statement pertaining to IL26-638,” according to an email thread that Let’s Go Washington provided me.

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“The AAP was not consulted prior to the inclusion of this reference,” Dr. Rave wrote in the email. “Furthermore, the statement does not accurately portray AAP guidance regarding pre-sports participation exams. Because the statement attributes a position to the AAP that was neither reviewed or approved by the organization and does not accurately reflect its guidance, I request, on behalf of the Washington Chapter of the AAP, and in consultation with the National AAP, that you remove the stricken phrase below from the guide: ‘Medical clearance is already required to participate safely. Students would compete in the category that aligns with their sex, verified during routine, medically necessary primary care recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.’”

The AAP did not return my request for comment.

Mr. Littell responded late Tuesday evening, saying the passage in question did not claim that the AAP had endorsed or approved of the statement. “The guidelines state that routine annual adolescent physical exams (well-child visits) include a genital exam as standard of care and are medically necessary at specific primary care visits,” Mr. Littell wrote.

Dr. Rave in turn stated that the AAP guidelines “do not state or infer that verification of sex is needed for medical clearance to participate safely in sports.” She otherwise confirmed, however, that genital exams “are standard for annual well checks in all boys and in all pre-pubertal girls.”

Dr. Rave continued: “After girls begin menstruating, there is no further tanner stage change (‘sexual maturity rating’ in the Bright Futures guidelines) to observe on genital exam, so it is often deferred if there are no concern/complaints. There is no indication for sex verification to obtain medical clearance to participate safely in sports.”

In a subsequent email, Katie Johnson, general counsel for the AAP, asserted to Let’s Go Washington officials and members of the citizens committee that readers of the passage “could reasonably conclude that AAP recommends or supports sex verification in that context.”

“Accordingly,” Ms. Johnson wrote, “we respectfully request that all references to the American Academy of Pediatrics be removed from the statement. We believe that is the most straightforward and appropriate way to resolve the issue.”

Mr. Littell initially said in an email on Wednesday to Ms. Johnson and others at the AAP that the group intended to revise the statement.

A representative from the Washington secretary of state’s office subsequently called Alesha Perkins, the head of the citizens committee, and told her that the AAP could use legal action if the organization felt it was necessary, according to Ms. Herzberg.

Mr. Littell ultimately decided to stick to his guns. “The statement isn’t being changed – it’s factually accurate, so there’s no need to alter what has already been submitted by supporters of fairness in girls’ sports,” he said in the statement released on Thursday.

Mr. Littell referred to a dispute Let’s Go Washington had had the previous week over language in the opposition’s argument in the pending voter’s guide regarding a separate ballot initiative the organization supports related to state taxes. When Let’s Go Washington confronted the secretary of state’s office with complaints about that language the state office, per the organization’s Thursday press release, “stated that they do not fact check claims made in the voter pamphlet, and no new material is accepted.”

By contrast, the release pointed out, the Voters Pamphlet Team from the secretary of state’s office had stated in an email this week to Let’s Go Washington: “Our expectation is that you will remove the AAP reference and revise the sentence minimally.” They gave a deadline of Thursday morning.

Helen Smith, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, told me that the office was not instructing the citizens committee to edit the text. Rather, they expected the committee to work out the matter with the AAP and to limit any edits they would make.

In the Thursday release, Let’s Go Washington stated: “This double standard is not only dangerous for democracy, it makes no logical sense.”

“If it’s illegal to quote from the AAP about what they wrote in their own Bright Futures Guidelines, but it’s acceptable for con pamphlet writers to lie about the effects of the initiatives, what is the point of the pamphlet statements?” Mr. Littell said in his statement. “There seem to be two competing ideas of fairness, and when it comes to the facts, we believe voters have a right to know the truth. The no campaign was allowed blatantly lie about what one initiative requires, yet the yes campaign on another initiative is asked to remove cited, factual sources.”

“The Office of the Secretary of State does not fact-check or edit the content of statements,” Ms. Smith stated. “The American Academy of Pediatrics asked for the opportunity to discuss the statement with the argument for committee, which the argument for committee agreed to, and we allowed time for that conversation to take place.”

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardianand The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

The central thrust of the meeting was that these academics, who were predominantly white, but who also included a substantial cohort of South Asians, was that there was a racist right-wing conspiracy to hound black academics out of their jobs in the United Kingdom. This notion was short on specifics.

The only person they clearly identified as behind this conspiracy was , the American academic and “race realist” who on Friday was suspended from Ghent University in Belgium after his July 21 exposé about Arday’s alleged academic misconduct started a chain reaction—including an explosion of scathing press coverage, Cambridge launching an investigation into Arday, and his subsequent resignation—that ultimately saw Arday found dead in London on August 14. But this theory was evidently grounded in the belief that the same forces that heavily scrutinized black academics in the United States, and which pushed Claudine Gay out of her Harvard presidency over plagiarism charges, was perilously crossing the Atlantic.

Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, said at the meeting that the goal in this conspiracy was to make cynical and bad-faith use plagiarism-detection software. He said that “it’s leveraging existing algorithmic tools, and of course you could do it in a targeted way. You target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters, and I think we have to recognize the nature of what’s going on right now.”

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Led by Wallis, who is a major UCU organizer (and who, on Oct. 7, 2023, retweeted an approving post about the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023), the group sought to lay the groundwork for an action plan that could leap to the defense of any black academics who were targeted in Britain with accusations of academic misconduct.

As I wrote for the Free Beacon:

Wallis…said, “I am convinced that’s already happening”—in Britain—”because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Jason is not the only person who is being targeted right now,” Wallis said, claiming that a purported Substacker had put an unnamed academic’s thesis through plagiarism-detection software. This, Wallis said, evidently “found some overlap with some other PhD’s, which had been written a few years previously.”

I covered the following section about Wallis’ effort to redefine plagiarism to exclude “textual overlap” in this Substack. Here’s that compilation reel again:

Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, was among those at the meeting who falsely asserted that Arday had been cleared of all accusations of plagiarism. Liverpool John Moores University did investigate Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis and, despite substantial textual overlap between the thesis and the work of another scholar, they cleared him of the charges in March. However, an Aug. 5 investigation in The Times found considerable evidence that Arday had committed plagiarism and data theft in multiple papers he published while at multiple other universities. The members of the UCU meeting seemed overwhelmingly unaware of this.

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Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday held his prestigious professorship, was especially eager to hear Wallis shift the focus of the definition plagiarism away from textual overlap and toward the stealing of ideas (as if this would exonerate Arday, who was accused of that too). She gave Wallis an enthusiastic thumbs up when he did that.

As I wrote for the Free Beacon:

Hartmann…decried that Arday “was cleared from the plagiarism by his degree-awarding institution.” And yet, she said, “there was nothing from the academic profession saying, ‘Stop there. This is an academic judgment, and this is what needs to stand.’”

Hartmann was the only academic named in this report who responded to a request for comment. She said the quotes of her from the meeting that the Free Beacon ran by her via email were “inaccurate and completely taken out of context.” The union group, she said, “discussed the methods” that plagiarism-detection software “uses when we talked about text comparison.” She added, “I encourage you to look for facts, not opinions.”

One of the only other names that the meeting heard uttered as a clear racial antagonist was James Orr. As I wrote for the Free Beacon:

At least one of the meeting’s attendees envisioned a counteroffensive against James Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge and the head of policy for Reform UK. Orr has been accused of racism, including for expressing negative attitudes toward Palestinians.

Talat Ahmed, a senior lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, said if she were a student at Cambridge, she would want “a mass student insurgent campaign to get rid of that racist fucker from my institution.”

Megan Povey spoke to the elusiveness of racism within the academy, and yet a kind of “I know it when I see it” smell test.

As I wrote for the Free Beacon:

The meeting’s attendees also argued that Arday was egregiously held to a higher standard because of his race. Megan Povey, a professor of food physics at the University of Leeds, said that, by comparison, "you see these white academics getting away with murder, literally."

Povey, who is transgender, further drew a parallel to the darkening climate surrounding trans issues in Britain. "You know the right is going for trans because it’s a wedge issue," Povey said. "They’re trying to pull back gains that have been made over the years by Black Lives Matter and so on."

Wallis offered a scathing assessment of people who believe in race science, comparing them to flat earthers.

Wallis was especially keen to lambast right-leaning Telegraph and the more centrist Times as culpable of targeting Arday with harassing coverage. But he admitted that he did not read either publication. This could perhaps explain why he and others in the meeting seemed unaware of the accusations against Arday that were more serious than mere textual overlap.

Wallis wondered aloud why in the world the British press even considered Arday a news story. It was one only because they said so, he said.

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardianand The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

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When I was in the 7th grade in 1991, my terrific social studies teacher, Mr. Corkran, taught us what plagiarism was and why it was to be avoided at all costs. And importantly, he taught us strategies—which I still use today—for how to avoid even inadvertently plagiarizing, such as taking notes from another text only in paraphrase. That way you don’t later forget that what you jotted down was someone else’s verbatim text.

I wish everybody had had Mr. Corkran as a teacher. It would’ve saved, perhaps, left-wing pundit from getting fired from New York magazine after they found 67 columns of his had citation problems, and also from having Penguin announce this week, per the Washington Post, it was shelving his upcoming book about his longtime friend Zohran Mamdani. When Mr. Barkan was first found out in the spring, he tried to make out like it didn’t matter if he had clearly lifted verbatim passages from another writer absent quotation marks around the text, so long, he said, as he cited them explicitly or hyperlinked to them. Mr. Corkran would tell him that is not a loophole in the plagiarism rules!

The Jason Arday affair is much more complicated and ethically fraught, given, in part, that I find it hard to believe any of the sweeping overlap in the text between his work and other scholars’ papers was ever inadvertent—Liverpool John Moores University’s baffling decision to clear him of plagiarism charges on his 2015 PhD thesis notwithstanding.

As everyone takes sides in the aftermath of Dr. Arday’s August 14 death—an apparent suicide—it seems that multiple academics in good standing have missed the message that plagiarism, by definition, can include, absent the stealing of ideas, the mere lifting of someone else’s words if that verbatim text is not put within quotation marks.

Take , a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. To my amazement, Dr. Stanley wrote the following in his rambling and poorly informed piece about the late Dr. Arday this week (bolding of text is mine, the italics are his):

Plagiarism is the stealing of ideas or research programs. But in recent years, AI has enabled malignant actors to target people in academia for overlap of sentences, even when the overlapping of sentences has no bearing whatsoever on the stealing of ideas or research programs. The original meaning of plagiarism does not cover mere overlap of sentences.

You know who disagrees with Dr. Stanley? His employer, the University of Toronto. The university defines plagiarism in its Code of Behavior for Academic Matters like this (bolding mine): “It shall be an offence for a student knowingly: …to represent as one’s own any idea or expression of an idea or work of another in any academic examination or term test or in connection with any other form of academic work.”

The “work of another” refers, at least in part, to the mere words someone uses, without the need to have stolen their ideas, per se. (I do find it odd, mind you, that the university’s code of conduct requires that the student knowingly plagiarized; this seems to leave the door open for sloppiness leading to inadvertent plagiarism. Mr. Corkran would not approve.)

The University of Toronto’s “How Not to Plagiarize” guidance for students advises (bolding mine): “If you use the author’s exact words, enclose them in quotation marks, or indent passages of more than four lines.” And: “If you record a phrase or sentence you might want to quote, put quotation marks around it in your notes to remind yourself that you’re copying the author’s exact words.”

Mr. Corkran would approve!

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Another false claim by a professor: “Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article.”

Additionally, I obtained a video recording of a fraught and impassioned planning meeting, held Tuesday, of the UCU Solidarity Movement—an activist collective of the University and College Union, the largest higher-education union in Britain—in which two professors claimed a similarly narrow definition of plagiarism that excluded the mere overlap of text. And yet none of the other dozens of academics on this Zoom meeting objected to this narrow definition. Instead, one Cambridge professor seemed delighted that they were at least moving the plagiarism conversation away from textual overlap and recentering it on the stealing of ideas. (Dr. Arday stood credibly accused of stealing both the words and the research of other academics, mind you, per a devastating investigation by The Times. No one in the meeting specifically acknowledged that his accused offenses were this broad in scale.)

I reported on this nearly two-hour UCU planning meeting, which was meant as a response to Dr. Arday’s death and to prepare the activist members to defend any other black scholars who might be accused of academic misconduct, in an article published in The today: “Frankly, He Has Been Killed’: Angry Scholars From UK’s Top Academics’ Union Blame Jason Arday’s Death on Racist Mob, as ‘Race Realist’ Who Ignited the Firestorm Is Suspended.” I encourage you to read the piece.

Sean Wallis, who organized the meeting, is a principal research fellow in the University College London’s English department, the UCL branch secretary of the UCU, and sits on the union’s national executive committee. So he is no slouch. The most astonishing single thing Dr. Wallis said about plagiarism during Tuesday’s planning meeting was: “Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article.”

See this quote in the video below:

For a broader selection of videos from the meeting, see:

Dr. Wallis and Lyes Kahouadji, who researches chemical engineering at Imperial College London, had a more extended exchange during the meeting about what plagiarism is and isn’t that I summed up in my Free Beacon article like this:

Wallis appeared to defend Arday by offering a narrow definition of plagiarism. He brought up plagiarism-detection software (which Cofnas used to identify similarities between Arday’s thesis and the work of another scholar) and noted that such programs detect “textual overlap.” But, he said, “textual overlap is not necessarily plagiarism. Plagiarism is the theft of ideas, theoretical research ideas. It’s the theft of intellectual work.”

A number of attendees then nodded their heads. Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday served until resigning August 5, smiled and gave a thumbs up in response.

“Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article,” Wallis continued. He cited Galileo (who was prosecuted for heresy), saying the Renaissance scholar had his students copy his texts to teach them to craft scientific prose. “And actually, that’s been a long-standing way of teaching for quite a long time,” Wallis said. “So it’s not surprising that people will do more textual overlap than they realize.”

Plagiarism-detection software, Wallis said, has “substituted a proper understanding of what plagiarism is—that is, the passing off of other people’s research ideas as your own, stealing them and publishing them for something else—which is, like I say, textual repetition or paraphrasing, failing to cite adequately. They’re not the same sin. Deliberate stealing of ideas is not the same.”

Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, who is non-white and whom Wallis appointed to chair the meeting, later replied to Wallis that “it’s really important what you mentioned about textual overlap and plagiarism.” Kahouadji insisted that plagiarism is “completely different, and academics are supposed to come forward and say, ‘No, this is not plagiarism.’” Regarding Arday, he continued: “It’s really a shame that people who are supposed to protect from this plagiarism fantasy didn’t speak up.”

All of the academic institutions where Wallis, Kahouadji, and Hartmann work, as well as Liverpool John Moores University, from which Arday received his Ph.D., clearly and explicitly define plagiarism as including the lifting of text without clear attribution.

Cambridge defines plagiarism as “using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement.” UCL’s guidancestates: “Plagiarism is the presentation of another person’s thoughts or words or artefacts or software as though they were your own.”

In a statement to the Free Beacon, a representative for UCL—the only institution other than Ghent named in this report to return a request for comment—said, “Academic misconduct, including plagiarism, is taken seriously and is addressed through established university procedures. Alongside these policies, UCL provides research integrity training for research staff and students across all disciplines.”

I rest my case.

Here is a video of the full exchange:

And here is the full transcript of this video (which is a complication of several exchanges but which includes all necessary context):

Sean Wallis (UCL branch secretary, UCU national executive committee)

“Turnitin is a plagiarism detection software, but it doesn’t actually detect plagiarism. It detects textual overlap. Textual overlap is not necessarily plagiarism. Plagiarism is the theft of ideas, theoretical research ideas. It’s the theft of intellectual work. Right? That’s what plagiarism is? Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article.”

Sean Wallis

“We have to be absolutely clear. We will support them [black academics accused of academic misconduct], oppose any kind of trial by media, trial by social media, any kind of attack of that kind, and we will defend their right to a due process within the university, and we will distinguish between genuine plagiarism and accidental textual overlap. Right? It happens all the time. And here’s the thing: I’m not going to defend plagiarism. I fought, you know, I fought for intellectual academic freedom for all my life, right?”

“I tell you what, though, I was reading about Galileo, and you know what Galileo did with his students? He got them to copy his texts to teach them how to write in a scientific way. And actually, that’s been a long-standing way of teaching for quite a long time. So it’s not surprising that people will do more textual overlap than they realize.”

“And the point is, what’s happened with these technologies is that we’ve substituted a proper understanding of what plagiarism is — that is, the passing off of other people’s research ideas as your own, stealing them and publishing them for something else — which is like I say, textual repetition or paraphrasing, failing to cite adequately. Yeah, they’re not the same sin, okay? Deliberate stealing of ideas is not the same, and we have to fight to re-establish basic principles.”

Lyes Kahouadji (Imperial College; chairing the meeting)

“It’s really important what you mentioned about textual overlap and plagiarism. It’s completely different, and those academics who [are] supposed to come forward and say no, this is not plagiarism. We know even the referees who read his work — or something — they should have come forward.”

Lyes Kahouadji

“I never heard about Jason, Professor Jason Arday before. I’m working in engineering. He was in different uni and different topics. I never heard of him until this week, and through social media, and then someone has resigned because of plagiarism, and then when you see it has been cleared of all plagiarism, and the campaign continued. I had the graphic that I found — the amount of articles, the harassment. Frankly, he has been killed. For me, it’s not the suicide. It’s the society who killed him, by abandon him, by all the harassment. Even he thought resigning, it will be the end of it. It becomes worse.”

Lyes Kahouadji

“It’s really [a] shame that people who are supposed to protect from this plagiarism fantasy didn’t speak up, and for people who has nothing to do with science — speak up, spoke up.”

“What a shame. I think this is one of the darkest times in history of UK academic.”

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

For the past two years, it has been a matter of public record that in 2022, when leaders at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health were finalizing the eagerly-awaited revisions to their transgender-care guidelines, they caved to pressure from outside entities to remove the age limits on almost all gender-transition interventions. This revelation came from internal records the Alabama attorney general, Steve Marshall, subpoenaed from WPATH as a part of his defense in the Boe v. Marshall lawsuit against the state’s ban on gender-transition interventions for minors.

In particular, the records showed that Dr. Rachel Levine, a high-ranking health official in the Biden administration and a transgender woman herself, pressured WPATH to remove the age limits, citing political reasons…

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Jason Arday, who resigned from his professorship at Cambridge last week amid a torrent of accusations of plagiarism and serial fabulism, in 2012 was showered with prizes for his lies about his charity fundraising by the television show Surprise Surprise.

In a clip from the ITV show, which I obtained and which is posted above, Mr. Arday sits in a fit of bashfulness as his then-partner (later wife, and then ex-wife) Debbie McKenzie sings his praises. She recounts the story of his triumphing over adversity that he would continue to tell until his world came crashing down last month: that he had severe autism, which led to major developmental delays, and that he’d come out of it and become a thriving academic and a master fundraiser for charity.

Neither Arday nor ITV returned my request for comment.

The clip from the show is one of the earliest documented examples available of the myth Mr. Arday spun around himself. Other such documentation dates back another two years, to 2010, when Mr. Arday claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days. According to the January 2026 proof of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, which Simon & Schuster will publish in the United States tomorrow, two PR agents, David Tutin and Mick Thorburg, approached him in 2010 and asked to publicize his marathon challenge. Messrs. Tutin and Thorburg, who for reasons unknown are given pseudonyms in the final U.K. edition of Mr. Arday’s memoir, arranged for a big to-do in Piccadilly Circus when Mr. Arday asserted that he had finished his final marathon. (I was unable to reach the two men.)

A local news article at the time accurately reported that Mr. Arday, then 25, had raised about £6,000 for charity through his running, and yet credulously reported that he had raised £100,000 since he was 17.

Last month, Mr. Arday admitted to The Times that his recent claims that he had raised £5.5 million across his adult life were not correct. He instead claimed that he had raised money as a part of larger teams. But when The Guardian asked him to name some of the team members, he demurred, claiming to be under NDAs.

(A personal aside: The Times appears to have lifted liberally from my reporting on Substack and for the without crediting me, in an article published Saturday—an ironic offense given what we’re all writing about. I wrote about this on X. I have not heard back from The Times.)

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Surprise Surprise was a popular British variety show that ran from 1984 to 2001 and again from 2012 to 2015. It was a jaunty blend of feel-good and stunt television that did things like track down long-lost relatives and grant wishes to people going through hard times.

In the clip I obtained, the host, Mark Wright, approached Mr. Arday and Ms. McKenzie in the studio audience. Ms. McKenzie, who had been with since his teens and is the mother of his two children, recalled his awe-inspiring story. She said: “Jason’s just an amazing guy. He has epilepsy. He learned how to speak when he was 11, and he couldn’t read or write until he was 16.”

This is remarkable, because Mr. Arday has long claimed, including in his memoir, that he learned to read and write at age 18. And yet he did not correct Ms. McKenzie during the show, which aired in November 2012 but was apparently taped previously.

According to Mr. Arday’s memoir, he met Ms. McKenzie at age 18. She became instrumental in his then starting to read and write. The following year, he writes in his book (for which he required a coauthor), he had “just about learned to read and write, albeit at the level of a five-year-old.” The year after that, he started college, he asserts in his book.

Ms. McKenzie continued in the TV-show clip: “And he found school quite challenging and quite tough. But he always was so grateful to the people that helped him along the way. So he decided to give back, and he has dedicated the past 10 years to fundraising for people who are in need. And so this has been alongside going to college, going to uni, getting a master’s, becoming a uni lecturer.”

Then came the signature achievement. “Just the age of 27, he has raised almost £250,000 for charity,” Ms. McKenzie said in the clip.

This claim was a lie, we now know; although we don’t know what Ms. McKenzie knew at the time. (I was unable to reach her.) But that did not stop Mr. Arday from welcoming adulation on TV and receiving valuable prizes—an exchange which was arguably fraudulent on his part.

Ms. McKenzie continued, asserting: “He ran 30 marathons in 35 days, which is crazy.”

Asked by by Mr. Wright why he engaged in this fantastic feat, Mr. Arday said, “Sheer stupidity!”

Mr. Wright wasn’t having that. “It’s just generosity and a kind heart,” he said. “That’s what it is.”

Continuing to spin the web for the cameras, Mr. Arday said, “There’s people that do amazing things day in, day out. And I’m just fortunate enough that I’m surrounded by people that appreciate it. So I’m very fortunate.”

Mr. Wright, not noticing that Mr. Arday had just said he was fortunate to have people appreciate him (for doing things he lied about), said, “Well, what an amazing attitude to have.”

Mr. Wright said the show wanted to do something nice for him in return.

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Jason Arday, the apparent serial fabulist who resigned from Cambridge University last week amid credible accusations of academic plagiarism, shares the title of his upcoming memoir, Great and Difficult Things, and a key element of the origin story he recounts in its prologue, with the 2010 television show Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

The news about Arday apparently plagiarizing from a TV show came to my attention thanks to the remarks below in the comment section of an article about Mr. Arday in The Daily Telegraph. This commenter appears to have gleaned these remarkable insights from a report on Thursday in Just the News.

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Season 1, Episode 7, of Spartacus is entitled “Great and Unfortunate Things.”

From Spartacus’ first episode comes dialogue that overlaps with not one but two prophesies about his destiny uttered in the prologue of Mr. Arday’s book. In the TV scene, Spartacus’ wife, Sura, utters a prophesy:

SURA: The gods came to me last night, in my sleep.

SPARTACUS: What did they show you?

SURA: My husband on his knees, bowing before a great red serpent, the life draining from his veins.

SPARTACUS: What meaning did you take from it?

SURA: A warning. If you go to war you are destined for great and unfortunate things.

SPARTACUS: The Geti worship the mountain wolf. They place no faith in snakes. It was just a dream.

SURA: And if it isn’t?

(Also check out the film clip I obtained of Mr. Arday lying on TV to gain major prizes. See below.)

Spartacus was part of the memoir’s own origin story. Daniel Engber reported in The Atlantic, the following about the contents of Arday’s original book proposal, which Mr. Engber obtained:

Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”) “Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” this town elder asks, before telling him his fate in minute detail. “Every event she described,” Arday writes in the proposal, “has since come to pass.”

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Below is how the prophesies about Mr. Arday appear in the prologue of his book, per the final UK edition, typeset in June. Instead of citing Spartacus explicitly, the characters in the book merely appear to effect dialogue from the show.

First there is the scene of Mr. Arday’s birth in 1985, in which the midwife pronounces to his mother, called Giff: “This boy is destined for great things.”

Then comes the scene in Brazil, where Mr. Arday claims he went to aid in providing fresh water to children. There, a local prophet says to him in Portuguese through a translator: “I can tell you’re destined to do great things. But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”

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As over the past week I’ve lived and breathed the imbroglio over Cambridge’s hiring of Jason Arday, who resigned in disgrace on Wednesday amid an avalanche of credible accusations of plagiarism, academic fraud and serial fabulism, the one person whose thoughts on the matter I’ve wanted to hear more than anyone is John McWhorter.

McWhorter, a New York Times Opinion columnist, is a professor of linguistics at my own alma mater, Columbia. So he’s had a front-row seat to the rather curious direction elite higher education has taken in recent years. Five years ago, when I was lying around recovering from cancer surgery, I read his treatise on progressive ideology, Woke Racism. The book solidified for me the constellation of observations I’d been having about how certain belief systems on the far left had calcified into a rigid and unforgiving pseudo-religion.

As a black academic,…

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Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday, who has been accused of considerable plagiarism in his academic work, gave an interview to The Times at the end of a scandal-plagued week in which swirling questions about his professional integrity have turned him into the next Stephen Glass. Arday, who became the youngest black professor at Cambridge at age 37 in 2023, insisted to the British news outlet that “what I am not is a liar.”

A key foundation to the lore surrounding Arday, which he has repeatedly stoked in interviews and other public statements dating back at least 16 years, is that at a young age he established lofty ambitions about raising money for charity and then beat even his own expectations by raising millions of pounds. By 2024, multiple sources, including a university that gave hi…

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There is an interesting undercurrent beneath the World Professional Association for Transgender Health conferences wherein presenters might never question the basic tenets of pediatric gender medicine itself, but they are more than willing to vocally undermine and challenge WPATH as an institution. Among the more radical of the pediatric gender medicine advocates, those who have been pushing colleagues to liberalize their practices even as the field at large has been subject to an onslaught of criticism and political scorn for allegedly being reckless, this often means openly criticizing WPATH’s treatment guidelines as egregiously cautious and conservative.

You see this in Canadian transfeminine jurist Florence Ashley, who has been the most outspoken and radical force in the movement to deconstruct gatekeeping around gender-transition interventions for minors. Despite presenting at a WPATH conference (in which she railed against gatekeeping), she has since made abundantly clear that she loathes the institution itself. “Half of us hate WPATH,” she posted on Bluesky earlier this year in opposition to the notion in my reporting that the presenters are at least de facto representatives of the organization.

The conference presentation in this particular Substack, posted above, is from the 2022 WPATH conference. It was inspired by the presenters’ collective concern about the adolescent chapter in WPATH’s Standards of Care, Version 8, known as SoC 8, which had emerged in draft form earlier in the year and was published just days before the conference.

It is abundantly clear that the team was pushing the field toward treatment on demand for minors. Like Ms. Ashley, they are suspicious of anything that reeks of gatekeeping and that mighty delay access to gender-related medical interventions. In a telling turn of phrase, they expressed disdain toward what they labeled as “adultism bias,” lamenting that restrictions that have been removed from adult trans care of late have since been placed on minors. This term appears to advocate for the legal notion of the mature minor—that people under 18 are capable of making life-altering medical decisions.

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Given this team is on the bandwagon of disparaging psychosocial assessments for minors seeking gender treatments, it should come as no surprise that they routinely advocated for conceiving of these treatments as in service of young people’s “embodiment goals,” rather than to treat gender dysphoria or related mental-health problems. Some version of the term was uttered two dozen times during the hour-long conference session.

Treatment, they said, could be paused or stopped at any time. They did not acknowledge that these treatments nevertheless can cause permanent changes to the body, such as a deepened voice among natal girls.

The session was prerecorded, so the presenters were working under the assumption at the time, based on the pre-released draft of the guidelines, that the SoC 8 would retain all age limits on gender-transition interventions. Those limits were controversially removed the day the guidelines were published. But the authors did maintain a recommendation against minors receiving phalloplasties. On that point, the team in this video still scoffed at such an obstacle. Meanwhile, this is a disfiguring operation that requires taking a substantial sample of flesh from the forearm and thigh to make a faux phallus that lacks much of the basic form and function of a genuine penis. It has a remarkably high complication rate. But for this team, it’s a-okay to give one to a minor.

The session

The session featured:

• Laura Kuper, a psychologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a coauthor of the WPATH trans-care guidelines’ nonbinary chapter

• G. Nic Rider, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Minnesota

• Amelia Brewer, an Oklahoma counselor

• Sean Moundas, a psychologist

• Dr. Colt St. Amand, who has an MD and a PhD, and is a licensed psychologist and family medicine physician in New York State.

This team, which is part of a larger collective, was later behind a 2023 conference presentation in which they furthered similar arguments about preparing minors for gender treatments, including the notion that a single assessment session “may be sufficient” for some youth.

This is the broader membership of their collective:

Given the group’s concerns about SoC 8’s adolescent chapter, Dr. St. Amand said, “We wanted to make sure we could create our own assessment that would follow the guidelines, but still be rooted in our particular values and principles.” He cast shade on the authors of the chapter for, he said, not having a “personal connection to the work” like everyone in their collective does.

Taking the decolonizing stance that is so in vogue in academic circles these days, Dr. St. Amand said, “We acknowledge the gender binary as a project of colonialism, as a product of colonialism, with a focus on pathologization and diagnosis.”

The field, he said, has seen “incredible strides to decrease restrictions on access to gender care for adults. However, unfortunately, we are seeing these same restrictions that were lifted for adults now being placed on youth that could also be seen within the context of adultism bias.” He never did define the term, although its meaning was indeed self-evident enough to suggest to the observer that the team conceives of minors as small adults, as opposed to individuals who have not yet attained full cognitive maturity.

Following a common theme among leaders in pediatric gender medicine, such as UCSF child psychiatrist Dr. Jack Turban, Dr. Kuper emphasized that it is problematic for care providers to presume “they have an ability to discern someone’s true gender identity beyond what that person is articulating.”

Addressing arguments that many youth who believe they are, or should become, the opposite sex are merely misinterpreting their homosexuality for a transgender identity, Dr. Kuper challenged what he said was another problematic belief: “And then also this idea that someone can’t understand their gender if they first don’t understand their sexuality.” Such a “focus on identity,” she cautioned, “can take away the focus on embodiment goals.” Care providers, Dr. Kuper said, “can help youth articulate and navigate their gender. But it’s only appropriate when it’s aligned with what the youth is desiring.”

Dr. Kuper further advocated against providers seeking to identify a “root cause” of the youth’s identity, suggesting that it as not possible for there even to be such a thing. She disparaged the notion that being transgender is a disfavored outcome, without acknowledging that living as the opposite sex and undergoing gender-transition interventions nevertheless come with a litany of risks and burdens that living as one’s natal sex does not.

It is wrong, Dr. Kuper said, for providers to presume that they can anticipate whether a patient will later experience regret over their gender-transition interventions. “Instead of focusing on predicting regret,” she said, care providers should focus “on helping the client articulate their goals and supporting them with affirmed informed consent.”

“And keeping in mind that treatment can be paused or discontinued at any time,” Dr. Kuper said. “So it’s not an all-or-nothing kind of forever decision.” She made no mention of the fact that gender-transitions can have permanent impacts that are not altered by simply stopping the treatment.

Dr. Moundas expressed his concern that the adolescent chapter of the SoC 8, compared with other chapters, was particularly colored by language expressing “fear and anxiety.” For example, he said, the chapter advocated a “careful assessment.” He was leery of the suggestion that if concerns about the patient arose during an assessment that the response from care providers, under the aegis of the SoC 8, should be to simply provide more assessment. This, he said, is “by its nature gatekeeping.” Gatekeeping, if it wasn’t clear, is bad in the minds of these youth gender advocates.

(I myself noticed a similar phenomenon in a presentation by the lead author of the chapter, child psychiatrist Dr. Scott Leibowitz, in which his only recommendation for ethical quandaries when weighing whether to put a child on gender-transition drugs was to provide more informed consent. He described no scenario in which treatment would simply be unethical.)

A better option than gatekeeping, Dr. Amand said, would be “more understanding and more support.”

Ms. Brewer addressed what the team saw as a contradiction: the fact that the SoC 8 said that gender dysphoria was not a requirement to access gender care, while having gender dysphoria does not mean someone requires care. “The way that these statements are written communicates that though the absence of dysphoria should not preclude them from accessing treatment, it is required for treatment, so it lends to confusion,” she said.

“This is a larger systemic issue that there’s still a heavy focus on classification, rather than the validity of a wide range of individual experiences of gender identities, as well as embodiment goals,” Ms. Brewer said. The group’s proposed solution was to drop the focus on dysphoria entirely in favor of addressing embodiment goals.

Dr. Moundas expressed unease with the SoC 8’s suggestion that youths needed to have “several years of persistent” cross-sex identification. This, he said, reeked of the foundational, conservate concept from Dutch researchers of youth needing to be “consistent, insistent and persistent” in harboring a transgender identity before they could get gender treatments. “Not everyone’s gender journey follows that path,” he insisted. “Requiring a sustained identity experience before suppressing puberty can be a harmful practice.” Acknowledging youth who come to realize that gender-transition interventions are not for them, he said: “We affirm that gender development is a journey and can certainly evolve over time.”

“The collective also wants to reiterate our recommendation that the focus of assessment for medical interventions be more on embodiment goals than identity,” Dr. Moundas said, as if the point wasn’t already abundantly clear.

In an interesting Freudian slip, after noting that the SoC 8 advised care providers get patients to consider “the level of reversibility” of gender treatments, Dr. Moundas truncated the expression and said, “We agree that the reversibility of interventions should be communicated.” He seemed to emphasize how reversible, not how irreversible, the treatments are. He continued: “However, as said before, consideration of what the youth’s embodiment goals are is more important than their particular gender identity.”

Addressing concerns about the intersection of trans identity and neurodivergence, Dr. Moundas cautioned against favoring caution over action when working with autistic patients. “So we appreciate that executive functioning and varying mental health experiences are mentioned,” he said. “However, we imagine that these ideas could lead to disproportionate delays in access to care for neurodivergent youth and youth with other mental health difference.”

Dr. St. Amand expressed considerable disdain toward age limits on gender treatment and surgery, including phalloplasty. An age limit of 18 for that surgery, he said, would put youth “in college and away from parents who’d be willing to help with a more able to help with recovery from surgeries.”

Getting to the meat of the presentation, Dr. Kuper described how to address a patient’s embodiment goals. Given the term may be new to youth, she said, “I think the most basic 101 way to describe this is what primary and secondary sex characteristics a person is desiring. More hair, less hair, larger boobs, less boobs, no boobs, hips, voice changes, etc.”

Presuming that a youth simply wants the precise body of the opposite sex, Dr. Kuper warned, is “incredibly problematic.” She said: “Historically, we have over focused on stability and certainty of identity, and then just made the assumption that if they’re saying they're a boy, then they’ll want, quote unquote, a boy’s body. Which is by its nature an endocisheteronormative framework.” She advocated providing youths with the space to “open up that creativity and imagination” about the body they desire.

Dr. Rider addressed the importance of counseling patients and their families about fertility preservation. “A lot of the times there’s a lot of adults that are involved in those conversations, and the adolescent doesn’t get much say and what they want for themselves or their bodies,” Dr. Rider said. “And so that is very important for informed consent and assent. And I really want to emphasize that assent piece.”

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I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

Unreported Truths

On the disaster of transgender medicine

Note: For three-plus years, Benjamin Ryan has offered readers top-notch investigative reporting on transgender pediatric medicine — or what might more accurately be called the trans pediatric medical industry…

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2 months ago · 287 likes · 108 comments · Benjamin Ryan

During our conversation, I got a chance to reflect on the famous debate between Ezra Klein and in 2018 after Harris had Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, on his podcast. The podcast triggered an avalanche of debate and controversy over Murray’s belief in the association between race and IQ and what many thought was the egregious platforming by Harris of this controversial figure.

During the contentious debate between Harris and Klein, which I listened to for the first time the other day, Harris argued that we have to be able to dispassionately discuss difficult scientific research topics that might have findings that could cause harm to certain groups. Censoring science accordingly, he argued, could set a precedent that might have any number of harmful impacts in other contexts. (There is an obvious comparison to scientific inquiry about treating gender dysphoria in minors, as I see it. I related to a lot of Harris’ gripes over the illiberalism that had slapped him in the face for taking on a forbidden subject.)

An exasperated Klein insisted that it wasn’t possible to divorce this particular scientific debate from its larger, incendiary context, namely the use of race science to justify harmful racist policies and eugenics.

I personally wish each of these two very smart men had listened to the other more during the debate, as I think they both had a point! It raises the question of what responsibility journalists have when covering scientific findings that might be misused, so to speak, by people motivated by animus. Should a journalist selectively edit what they report accordingly and just never cover inconvenient truths? Or is their responsibility simply to report the truth, whatever it may be, and to do so with the least amount of inflammatory rhetoric and bias as possible?

I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.

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Hazard Ratio is a reader-supported Substack. Consider backing my work and becoming a paid subscriber today, which will gain you access to all the WPATH conference videos I have published and will publish going forward.

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I want to devote a mini-series of my ongoing analyses of World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference videos to examining the pivotal role that Dr. Madeline Deutsch has played in shepherding WPATH through the most recent era of political turmoil. Dr. Deutsch, who is a transgender woman herself and goes by Maddie, was the president of WPATH’s U.S. arm, USPATH, during the crucial period when Republican state lawmakers were blanketing the nation with bans of gender-transition interventions for minors.

As I explored in my investigation for Compact magazine of the WPATH videos I obtained, Dr. Deutsch’s response to these threats was to double down on the organization’s mission of expanding access to gender-transition treatment. Given she served her term in the immediate wake of the 2020 so-called racial reckoning, she also spent a lot of her energy on what appeared to be a futile effort to get WPATH to diversify its overwhelmingly white ranks. Rather than examining whether, say, the field of pediatric gender medicine might moderate in the face of extreme sociopolitical scrutiny, she zeroed in on racial-equity concerns.

Dr. Deutsch, who is the medical director of the University of California San Francisco’s gender clinic and whom sources have told me can be extraordinarily abrasive in private, is best known for the crucial role she played in alienating her predecessor as USPATH president, psychologist Erica Anderson. In October 2021, journalist published an article in ’s Substack (which ultimately became ) in which she quoted Dr. Anderson, who is herself a trans woman, deriding what she characterized as “sloppy” practices in the field of pediatric gender medicine. This article triggered a paroxysm among USPATH’s leadership, who confronted Dr. Anderson.

Dr. Deutsch led the charge to censure Dr. Anderson and pushed for the organization to put a moratorium on USPATH leadership talking to the press. Dr. Anderson warned them that such a move would only cause a backlash that would harm the field. Dr. Deutsch won the argument and Dr. Anderson left WPATH in dismay, becoming one of a tiny coterie of pediatric gender medicine dissidents.

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As I reported for Compact:

At the 2022 conference, Dr. Maddie Deutsch, then USPATH’s president, discouraged colleagues from referencing too many potential harms of treatment in public-facing materials, for fear they will be leveraged against the field.

Maddie Deutsch by 2023 flipped about speaking to the media. But by then WPATH was no longer merely defending the science. It had advanced to an active training mode, politically and rhetorically, and was coaching members to observe its rigidly prescribed terms. “The work that we do is important. It’s life-saving,” Deutsch said at the 2023 conference. “And because this charge does bring great responsibility, we have to be evidence-based. We have to be measured—measured in our approach, measured in dealing with the press, measured in dealing with conflict.”

Deutsch announced that WPATH had brought in experts from the prominent communications firm BerlinRosen to advise attendees on messaging. Other panels at that conference would counsel attendees on interweaving the transgender and abortion rights fights and would provide a crash course on “practical resistance” to “criminalization of gender-expansive communities.

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USPATH 2023 Opening Remarks

The video featured in this Substack documents Dr. Deutsch’s opening presidential remarks from the 2023 USPATH conference, when she was the outgoing president. The speech betrayed her ambivalence over scaling the roles of an advocate of science and a political actor fighting what amounted to a losing battle in a raging culture war.

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Transfeminine jurist Florence Ashley sits comfortably at the front of the pack of the most radical intellectuals in the transgender-theory space. From her perch as a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Alberta, she has churned out a fusillade of academic articles that stretch the bounds of what is considered ethical, legal and possible where gender-transition interventions, in particular as they apply to minors, are concerned.

Her papers lend an academic veneer to some astonishingly radical ideas, which, given they are published in legitimate journals, have routinely been laundered through the wider corpus of respectable academic and medical literature about pediatric gender medicine. I can always tell when a paper makes a truly eyebrow-raising ethical claim that the footnote at the end of the sentence will refer to an Ashley paper. It is probable that her theories lay at least part of the foundation for—or otherwise they are very much in keeping with—Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Andrea Long Chu’s astonishing claim in a 2024 New York magazine cover article that minors should be able to medically transition at any age for any reason.

Much of Ashley’s writing concerns mental health care, or at least the philosophy, policies, practices and structures that undergird that discipline’s contribution to pediatric gender medicine. This despite the fact that Ashley is not herself any sort of mental health professional or trained in psychology. One wonders: If she had any training in developmental psychology, might she think twice about expressing some of her more astonishing claims about the rights of adolescents to make decisions about irreversible modifications to their bodies?

Ashley has insisted that the decisional authority with pediatric gender-transition interventions should lie with the minor and not with adult authority figures. To wit, it may astonish many Americans to know that in some provinces in Canada, there is no specific age of consent for medical interventions. Patients are considered capable of consenting by default. A doctor can otherwise determine that they are incapable.

This fact came up in my recent reporting about the Ontario pediatrician Dr. Natasha Johnson, who, one mother recalled to me, told the mom that her (highly mentally ill) child was “competent” simply because she was 14 years old. The child’s mental health steadily declined during her testosterone treatment and following her mastectomy at age 16. She nearly died of anorexia. Then she detransitioned at 17. Dr. Johnson then dropped her as a patient.

Ashley has railed against gatekeeping of gender-transition treatment for minors and insisted that demanding so-called exploratory therapy as a condition of approving youth for gender-transition drugs is de facto conversion therapy. She also has flipped the burden of proof for a gender dysphoric adolescent’s path into puberty, insisting that those who argue against a minor receiving blockers must prove their case, not the other way around.

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Ashley’s WPATH Conference Appearance

The video featured above includes a scantily clad Ashley giving a short speech about medical gatekeeping for trans care at the 2021 conference of the U.S. branch of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, known as USPATH.

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Canadian pediatrician Dr. Natasha Johnson’s appointment as the new president of the Canadian Pediatric Society has alarmed three families I spoke with for a new investigation I’ve published today in The New York Sun. I hope you will take the time to read it.

Each of these families shared strikingly similar stories with me. They all had children who suffered from severe mental illness and who, after a short period of cross-sex identification during their adolescence, wound up in Dr. Johnson’s pediatric gender clinic at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. They were all fast tracked to receive gender-transition drugs absent an assessment by a mental-health professional. And all the parents reported strikingly similar stories about how their concerns about this treatment path we…

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King’s College London on Friday announced that, after a period of reflection and regrouping amid outcry from all sides, the leaders of the much-debated, much-ballyhooed National Health Service clinical trial of puberty blockers for gender-distressed youths would continue largely as planned.

The study’s design has received just a few tweaks, most notably the addition of new minimum ages for participants: 11 years old for natal girls and age 12 for natal boys.

Otherwise, it’s full steam ahead for the £10 million, or $14 million, study.

But anyone who understands even the basic parameters of how pediatric gender medicine works—and what the central purpose of this medical field is—can see that this clinical trial, which if designed properly might have afforded the world some desperately needed insights into these controversial medical practices, is headed straight into the scientific abyss.

Multiple observational studies, including one conducted by the NHS itself and published in 2021 and another, long-delayed study out of the United States that finally emerged in preprint last year, have already found that minors who take puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria or gender incongruence see essentially no change in major mental health metrics. Such disappointing conclusions stood in contrast to the more glowing findings of the foundational cohort study out of the Netherlands that was published in 2011 and helped spark global excitement and launch the pediatric gender medicine field worldwide.

The authors of the U.S. puberty-blocker study, led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, formerly of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, rationalized the lack of apparent benefit from taking puberty blockers by suggesting that the mental health of youths on these drugs would have worsened absent the medication.

That may very well be true, and such a premise points to the fact that these medications have only ever been meant to tee up treatment with cross-sex hormones. A coterie of pediatric gender medicine advocates, in fact, wrote an amicus brief for last year’s U.S. Supreme Court case over Tennessee’s ban of gender-transition treatments for minors in which they criticized Britain’s Cass Review for conceiving of blockers and hormones as anything but part and parcel of one another.

The fact is that almost all youth who take blockers for gender dysphoria go on to take hormones, according to multiple studies, including at the NHS. As British journalist Hannah Barnes wrote in her seminal investigation of the NHS’s doomed pediatric gender clinic, Time to Think, it is essentially unheard of in psychology to have any sort of test that has a close-to-perfect accuracy rate. In other words, gender-clinic providers haven’t simply succeeded brilliantly at selecting all the right kids to put on this treatment pathway, especially given how cursory, rushed or non-existent the assessment process can be at these clinics.

Considering all this, it is abundantly evident that gender-dysphoric adolescents have never conceived of the period they must spend on blockers as a “time to think” about their gender, as leaders in pediatric gender medicine long misled the public to believe (that is, before at least some of them conducted an about-face and started insisting, accurately, that blockers and hormones are simply part of a continuum). These youths quite clearly view the blockers as a waystation, a temporary burden they must satisfy on behalf of adult authority figures before they get what they actually want: hormones.

Given the planned NHS study, called PATHWAYS, has a randomized element—youths will be randomly assigned to go on blockers immediately or following a one-year delay—there was at least some hope that the study could have produced higher quality evidence than the critically flawed collection of studies that have been produced to date.

None of the past or ongoing studies of gender-transition treatment for youths have been randomized controlled trials. Instead, they are largely a messy and compromised collection of prospective cohort studies that for the most part have no comparison groups and typically have short follow-up times of 12 to 24 months. Or, in the case of Kristina Olson’s study out of Princeton, there is an ever-lengthening follow-up time, but the cohort is not at all representative of the typical youths presenting at a gender clinic these days, given the participants typically socially transitioned very young, by age six or seven.

So the whole world has turned its eyes Britain in hopes that, being an island nation that in 2024 passed a strict legislative ban of puberty blockers for minors outside of a clinical trial, the NHS might manage to recruit and retain a sizeable population of youths seeking gender-transition drugs. Denied other (legal) means of obtaining these drugs (hormones are blocked for those under 16 and are increasingly hard to get even for older minors in the UK), British youths might stay in the study even if they aren’t randomized to receive blockers immediately.

But if youths in PATHWAYS aren’t provided hormones after starting blockers, it is highly likely that all we will learn from this lengthy and expensive clinical trial—youths are set to receive blockers for up to two years and the study is slated to run for five-and-a-half years overall—is more of what we already know: that not much happens psychologically when these kids take blockers.

Furthermore, there isn’t much puberty actually to arrest among the youths who present at gender clinics these days. Recent research out of the United States, including one analysis of national insurance data and a comparable analysis focusing on Oregon, have suggested that only a fraction of the minors who receive gender-transition interventions actually take puberty blockers. And an even smaller minority start such treatment when they are young enough to be in puberty’s early stages.

The typical youth who presents at a gender clinic in the Western world these days, including in England, is a 14- to 16- year-old biological girl who only began exhibiting gender-related distress after puberty’s onset. PATHWAYS will only accept youths who are under age 16 when entering the study. So, given the age and sex breakdowns of youths upon their referrals to Britain’s since-shuttered gender clinic (see the chart below, from the 2024 Cass Review), that means that the bulk of the youths eligible for this new study will likely be 14- and 15-year-old natal girls.

Such youths are likely either in the final phase of puberty or are entirely finished with the developmental process. PATHWAYS, per its inclusion criteria, welcomes youths who are in any of the so-called Tanner stages of puberty, from Tanner 2 (the earliest phase) to Tanner 5 (meaning puberty is finished). So by the study authors’ own admission, they are perfectly willing to give puberty blockers to minors with no puberty to block.

Given that natal females have no physiological need to take blockers in advance of starting testosterone (for natal males, blockers can help suppress their natural testosterone production and thus supplement estrogen treatment), for these youths, starting blockers amounts to all risks with no clinical purpose.

Representatives for King’s College London, which is leading the trial on behalf of the NHS, did not respond to my brutally frank request for comment. Otherwise, in their press release announcing the slight revisions to the trial, they stated: “We will always welcome scrutiny of research involving children and young people because their health and safety is paramount. Our priority remains to safely, and robustly, investigate the benefits and risks of puberty suppression for young people with gender incongruence to improve the evidence base and inform NHS healthcare.”

The PATHWAYS study does have an important element in which some of the youths will receive a series of brain scans. This is perhaps the only part of the overall research endeavor that could yield vital results that could help inform worldwide care of gender-dysphoric youths. According to a 2024 review paper, scientific knowledge of the impacts of puberty blockers on the brain remains woefully thin. And there are concerns that the powerful drugs might have deleterious impacts on neurocognition.

Blockers are supposed to be the warm-up act to the main event, in which, at least in theory, people who identify as transgender spend a lifetime on cross-sex hormones—or, in the case of natal females in particular, they stay on testosterone long enough to permanently deepen the voice and prompt the permanent growth of facial and body hair.

Considering all this, why in heaven’s name isn’t the NHS planning to study cross-sex hormones in youths?

Is this study simply an expensive charade to kick the political can down the road?

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News, The Free Press and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net

After spending the better part of two months this past winter watching conference videos from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, I concluded that the most mind-scrambling paradox in transgender medicine emerged from sessions concerning the care of Native Americans who identify as two-spirit.

First off, as I learned from one particular conference session, the full recording of which I’ve published above, the term “two-spirit” wasn’t even coined until the 1990s. One presenter in this session said that the term was cooked up to differentiate from traditional Western approaches to the sex binary the means by which Indigenous populations experienced identities that fall outside of the sex binary. So one can’t help but wonder if the very idea of being two-spirit was shoehorned into what became the contemporary Western LGBTQIA+ identity politics.

But more striking was this conference session’s baffling suggestion that, above all else, healthcare for two-spirit Native Americans needed to be decolonized, and yet in the process these patients ought to receive Western medicine’s approach to transgender identity: cross-sex hormones and gender-transition surgeries.

This glaring contradiction remained under the surface and unacknowledged throughout this session; the speakers never made any direct effort to square the circle.

Nevertheless, as they uttered streams of what I call publichealthspeak (word salad that says little of actual substance but accomplishes the central goal of signaling the virtue of the speaker) and made lots of references to the vital importance of honoring intersectionality, they left me pondering the following two questions:

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The use of gender-transition drugs among insured adolescents in Oregon soared between 2016 and 2023, charting a nearly 10-fold increase among biological girls and a 14-fold increase in natal boys. Across this period, about 1 in 100 insured youth ages 8 to 17 in the Pacific Northwest state were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a psychiatric condition involving distress stemming from a conflict between an individual’s natal sex and their gender identity.

By age 17, about 1 in 240 insured natal girls were taking testosterone and about 1 in 630 natal boys were taking estrogen in Oregon. These figures are nearly three-fold higher for natal girls and nearly twice as high for natal boys as figures from a study published last year that analyzed national data on commercially insured youth from 2018 to 2022.

Oregon is among the most famously liberal states and is home to the notably progressive Oregon Health and Science University. Consequently, it is perhaps unsurprising that the state should have what appear to be disproportionately high rates of prescribing of gender-transition treatment to minors.

The new details about pediatric gender medicine in Oregon come from a study published in Research Connections on May 7. The study authors analyzed data on both publicly and commercially insured Oregon residents age 8 to 17 between 2016 and 2023. (They chose the age 8 for the lower end, because that is the earliest that puberty can begin and not be considered precocious puberty. ) The insurance database the authors relied upon covers about 80 percent of all insured Oregonians.

The investigators were keen to examine the rates of prescribing of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat pediatric gender dysphoria in a state that has a policy environment that is particularly supportive of pediatric gender medicine. Oregon’s Medicaid program started covering these treatments for minors in 2014. In 2023, the state passed a so-called shield law to protect youths’ access to gender-transition treatment.

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Out of 868,740 insured Oregonian youth in the data set, 0.98 percent were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, including 1.5 percent of natal girls and 0.5 percent of natal boys. This lopsided sex ratio is quite common across the Western world these days; whereas before the 2010s, the sex ratio of youth presenting at gender clinics was heavily slanted toward natal males. Few of the ardent supporters of pediatric gender medicine have expressed interest in thoroughly exploring the reasons for this dramatic flip in the sex ratio.

The new study’s authors noted that the gender dysphoria diagnosis rate in Oregon was lower than estimates of the population of youth identifying as transgender in the state, which range between 1.2 percent and 3.2 percent.

Of the group diagnosed with gender dysphoria in Oregon, 23 percent were ever prescribed gender-transition drugs, including 8 percent who received puberty blockers and 20 percent who received cross-sex hormones. Natal boys were much more likely to get puberty blockers (including 17 percent of those with gender dysphoria) compared with natal girls (including 5.5 percent). But their rates of cross-sex hormone prescriptions were similar, at 22 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

Youth with gender dysphoria had a higher rate of prescriptions of puberty blockers if they had commercial insurance, at 10 percent, compared with their publicly insured peers, at 7 percent. But the respective rates of cross-sex hormone prescriptions were about the same, at 20 percent and 19 percent.

Here are prescription patterns broken down by age and year and by type of insurance:

The median age at which youth were first diagnosed with gender dysphoria was 14 for both those with both commercial and public insurance. The median age at which youth received their first gender-transition treatment prescription was 15 for commercial insurance and 16 for public insurance. The median number of days between a gender dysphoria diagnosis and a first prescription of gender-transition treatment of any kind was 250 days for commercial insurance and 325 days for public insurance.

The earliest age at which any youth, natal boy or girl, received puberty blockers was 9. The earliest age at which any natal boy received estrogen was 10. And the earliest age at which any natal girl received testosterone was 12.

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Puberty blocker prescriptions were never particularly common in Oregon during the study period. They peaked at about age 14 for natal girls and at age 15 for natal boys—in both cases at a rate of about 75 prescriptions per 100,000 such youths, or 1 in 1,333 youths.

Cross-sex hormone prescriptions, on the other hand, began to inch up at age 13 for both natal sexes and then shot up dramatically through the mid-teen years for natal girls in particular. By age 17, about 414 in 100,000 natal girls were taking testosterone, or 1 in 242; while about 158 in 100,000 natal boys were on estrogen, or 1 in 632.

Note how similar the findings broken down by age from new study from Oregon (the first graph) are compared with the recent study looking at national data on commercially insured youth (the second graph). The rates of usage are much higher in Oregon, mind you. But the rates of increase of hormones and the overall pattern of the use of blockers broken down by age are very similar, lending confidence that these patterns represent a real-world phenomenon across the country, regardless of insurance type.

I recently reported in The New York Sun that from 2019 to 2023, Medicaid spent more than $100 million nationally on gender treatments and surgeries for minors. This was according to a recent government analysis. The particulars of the analysis suggested that a recent analysis by the nonprofit Do No Harm, which opposes pediatric gender medicine, finding that some 14,000 youths received gender-related treatments over a recent five-year period, was likely a considerable underestimate.

Across the eight-year study period in the Oregon study, the rate of testosterone prescriptions for all natal girls age 8 to 17 increased steadily from 28 per 100,000 girls in this age range in 2016 to 252 per 100,000 in 2023—a nine-fold increase. The rate of natal boys taking estrogen increased from 7 to 97 per 100,000 during this period—a 14-fold increase. The rate of increase for girls was particularly steep between 2022 and 2023.

Given this steady rate of increase in the use of gender-transition drugs over the study period, and given the fact that the prescription rates broken down by age represented an average over time, it is likely that by 2023, the rates of youth receiving cross-sex hormone prescriptions by age 17 was even higher than the 1 in 242 natal girls and 1 in 632 natal boys found in this paper. The study did not provide such granularity in its figures, however, including in the supplementary tables.

Over time, the proportion of youth diagnosed with gender dysphoria who received gender-transition drugs remained constant in Oregon, the study authors found. They suggested that this likely reflected “a combination of factors, including persistent structural and sys­temic barriers (e.g. access, insurance, provider availability, and consent requirements), variation in adolescents’ readiness for interventions, and the fact that not all [transgender] adolescents seek or require treatment.”

The interval between diagnosis and treatment, the study authors theorized, “may reflect a com­bination of factors, including guideline-concordant assessment, the variable timing of gender identity development, readiness for medical interventions, and, in some cases, barriers or delays in accessing care.”

Cross-sex hormone use, the authors wrote, “increased steadily across adolescence, reflecting guideline-recommended individualized initiation based on readiness and clinical judge­ment. These patterns reinforce that [gender-affirming care, or GAC] provision emphasizes ongoing assessment and individualized care rather than uniform uptake across adolescents.” I cannot see how they can know any of this based on simply looking at these data, however.

As for the reasons for higher use of gender-transition treatment among commercially-insured youth, the investigators wrote that “families with commercial insurance may, on average, have advantages in navigating complex care systems, reflecting differences in soci­oeconomic resources, caregiver advocacy capacity, geographic access, and provider availability. In contrast, publicly insured youth may encounter structural barriers—including limited avail­ability of trans-affirming providers, clinicians with less experience in GAC, transportation challenges, or financial constraints—that could limit access.”

The study is limited, in part, the authors wrote, by the fact that it does not cover uninsured youth and those insured by health plans that are not covered by the data set. This may limit the generalizability of the study findings, the authors stated.

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News, The Free Press and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net