Below, an article by Leor Sapir, a Manhattan Institute researcher, on the lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission alleging consumer fraud in the practice of “gender affirming care.” While WPATH claiming their published “Standards of Care” are merely opinions might seem inconsequential, this is actually a very significant development. They are shifting around in the glare of scrutiny, after jettisoning the results of more than one study, when the results were not their preferred flavor. WPATH has conflated their words with “settled science” for decades.

This reminds me so much of Neddy, as long ago as 50 years, when he’d suddenly claim during a disagreement that he never said what I’d just quoted from him verbatim. Fifty years ago, I was 20, and yes, engaged to Neddy. I called him “King of the Hyperbole” to his face. We married the next year, and I recall having regret that long ago when I realized I’d possibly trapped myself in a marriage to a narcissist. But we were both working our way through college and often passed like ships in the night. When the crossdressing adventures surfaced in 1992, Neddy’s hysterical threats to self-harm and his quotes from his therapist regarding WPATH’s “protocols” and “The Blanchard Protocols” made the treatments sound very official and codified. How will the adult side of the recommendations be affected by the exposure of the medical malpractice in youth “gender care?”

My notes will appear in this italic script after the paragraphs I must comment on.

I ask, why do I feel I’m one of the few who see this current scene as an all-of-a-piece blend of events indicating the same truths about the immutability of sex? The Sophie Cunningham defense of women’s sports, the HHS scrutiny of risky hormones consumption and surgeries on the urinary tract and the ejection of men from women’s prisons in the UK are all puzzle pieces in this medical misadventure labelled “gender expression.” Other pieces include “birthing bodies,” murderous “trans” criminals and my data on trans widows. It is all connected. Most likely, Jennifer Sey and Colin Wright are annoyed that I keep on beating the drum about trans ideology’s abuse of the wives in their Substack comment sections. I’m not going to stop, because it is all of a piece and children are being told to swallow snake oil by educators who think they’re “being kind.”

Meanwhile, I seek information from more trans widows, and find very few are contacting me. The Heggen Survey is having a surprising dry spell, considering all of the above. And of course, anyone with Enes Kanter Freedom or Royce White’s contact information, please cough it up! Thanks~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Leor Sapir, August 29, 2026

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) now claims that its “standards of care” are merely one opinion in a debate over youth gender medicine. This marks a dramatic change for WPATH, which spent years promoting its approach as the only ethical one to help youth and adults who experience distress associated with their sexual embodiment.

WPATH makes this claim in a legal filing submitted in a lawsuit brought against it by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The federal agency alleges that WPATH has engaged in consumer fraud, specifically listing ten “deceptive claims” made by the defendant about the benefits and safety of medical interventions. According to WPATH, however, the claims in question “are non-actionable opinions about subjects on which there is medical and scientific uncertainty,” and as such protected under the First Amendment and not subject to FTC jurisdiction.

Assuming the FTC overcomes WPATH’s First Amendment defense, it has ample evidence to support its fraud allegation, much of it drawn from internal WPATH emails subpoenaed by the state of Alabama and published in 2024.

(Ute’s note: once I brought up trans widows’ experiences to Peter Boghossian during a live stream, asking him and a former New York Times writer if they believe men like my ex-husband have the right to name themselves ‘mother’ as Neddy did. The writer said, “It depends what they’ve agreed on.” What a cop-out! Actually, in 1997, a Kings County New York judge wrote into the divorce document that he was to stop doing exactly that. He never did. No trans widow in New York and other blue states has the right to be the claimant as the sole mother now, because crossdressing men “have the right” to claim this in state statutes. Boghossian said, at the time, “well we have to help the kids,” meaning that the issues of transitioning children are more important in his mind than protecting mothers and protecting the children of crossdressing men. Perhaps he’s modified his stance. Once in a while he “likes” a comment I make in his Substack blogs.)

Sapir continues:

When developing its eighth and latest “Standards of Care” (SOC-8), WPATH commissioned systematic evidence reviews but then prevented their publication after learning that the results were disappointing. The published SOC-8 guideline asserts, however, that a systematic review for adolescent outcomes is “not possible.” WPATH also eliminated age minimums for hormones and surgeries for political reasons, ignored conflicts of interest among guideline authors, and admitted that its recommendations were designed to secure insurance coverage for expensive procedures and win lawsuits. (See Chapter 10 of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report, of which I was a coauthor.)

The group’s decision to call its recommendations “Standards of Care” was likely no accident, either. In the American context, “standard of care” is a medical-legal concept defined in court, typically in the context of medical malpractice cases. In essence, the standard of care is how a reasonable clinician would act in similar circumstances. WPATH intended for its recommendations to be viewed as the ultimate authority to which judges, policymakers, insurers, and medical providers defer.

In April 2022, five months before WPATH published SOC-8, Admiral Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health, told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals . . . about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.” Noting that other groups also make recommendations on this front, Levine emphasized that the “evidence-based standard of care . . . is set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.”

Major medical and mental-health groups have deferred to WPATH as the authority in the field, and SOC-8 has shaped health care at nearly every level in the United States. Oregon adopted SOC-8 as the minimal basis of Medicaid coverage in the state, and major commercial insurers, including Kaiser, Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare, rely on its recommendations for determining coverage benefits.

(Ute’s note: one reason I wish female athletes like Sophie Cunningham would speak out about the trans movement’s recruitment of girls into the “trans men” delusion is the medical malpractice on girls by these doctors, therapists and teachers. I do recognize it’s not fair of me to expect this of her, just as she could not possibly expect me to even land a free throw on the basketball court. Of course, complicating the sports scene are the males with disorders of sexual development in female competitions, like Castor Semenya and Imane Khelif, who apparently both have a congenital disorder known as 5-ARD, and though they’re male, they are technically “not trans.” Perhaps this issue is shared by basketballer Brittney Griner. These individuals have smaller than normal male genitals and are identified as female at birth, but they hare male levels of testosterone, male organ and skeletal development and musculatur. There are pockets around the world of male clusters with 5-ARD. How can I expect busy professional athletes to know all this? But still—how do I? A simple cheek swab test would clarify, hello, WNBA. By the way, I’ve never watched so much basketball in my life!)

Mr. Sapir continues:

WPATH’s new framing, that SOC-8 is merely one perspective in a debate marked by “scientific and medical uncertainty,” implies that it has always seen debate over the medical pathway as legitimate and has been willing to engage with, or at least tolerate, critics. Nothing could be further from the truth. WPATH has long maintained that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries constitute “medically necessary” and even “life-saving” care for some (and potentially “most”) kids with gender dysphoria. For years, WPATH and its allies went to great lengths to tarnish the reputation of critics—external and internal—while aggressively maintaining that the “science is settled” on the necessity of medical interventions.

WPATH has relied heavily on bona fide medical groups to launder its own credibility and enforce its dogmas. As recently reported in The Free Press, when Karla Solheim, a doctor who served as chair of the Iowa section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, raised concerns about the trustworthiness of WPATH SOC-8 to ACOG’s leadership, the organization’s vice president called her in for a meeting and told her that she must either be silent on the matter or resign from her position. (She resigned.)

WPATH’s shifting attitude toward the U.K.’s Cass Review is especially revealing. In the new legal filing, WPATH frames its engagement with the Cass Review as one of good faith debate. “WPATH is on one side of that debate and provides guidelines on how to best provide transgender healthcare. Others, such as Dr. Hilary Cass . . . fall on the other side of the debate and disagree with how to, or if one should, provide transgender healthcare to adolescents.”

(Ute’s note: the term “transgender health care” is an oxymoron. No wrong sex hormones and urinary tract surgeries or mastectomies on healthy breasts should be in the same sentence with the word health. I propose a phrase like pro-active mental health practices: 1. Remove all mirrors from the home. 2. Withdraw from internet social media addictions. 3. Reconnect with nature through outdoor activities in preserves and through gardening. 4. Reconnect with responsible and purposeful living through donations of time and money to qualified charitable endeavors to end clean water scarcity, hunger and educational neglect in needy parts of the world. No USAID-style charlatan programs to bring drag shows to Burkina Faso. 5. Of course, healing therapy to recover from childhood abuse/trauma/grief.)

Leo Sapir continues:

But when the Cass Review came out, WPATH issued a fiery denunciation, insisting that Cass and the NHS were bringing about “a devastating situation for transgender youth and their families, whose rights are breached as they are being denied medically necessary care.” WPATH’s peer-reviewed journal published an article titled “The Cass Review: Cis-supremacy in the UK’s approach to healthcare for trans children,” which accused the Cass Review of harboring “anti-trans prejudice” (by “adopt[ing] a position where all views are welcomed and valued”), “cisnormative bias,” a “pathologizing” attitude toward trans identity, and a “double standard” in the assessment of evidence.

Interestingly, in acknowledging “medical and scientific uncertainty” in youth gender medicine, WPATH cites United States v. Skrmetti, a lawsuit filed by gender-medicine advocates that unsuccessfully challenged Tennessee’s age minimum law on constitutional grounds. The Biden administration, which intervened in that case on behalf of plaintiffs, explicitly cited WPATH SOC-8 when claiming that Tennessee was depriving youth of “medically necessary” care. The Biden DOJ did not frame SOC-8 as merely one opinion in a debate. Instead, it claimed, falsely, that “[t]he SOC 8 is based upon a rigorous and methodological evidence-based approach. Its recommendations are informed by a systematic review of evidence and an assessment of the benefits and harms of alternative care options, as well as expert consensus.”

(Ute’s note: Reporters, please explain about captured language. “Cis” is a made up word from pedophile proponent, Volkmar Sigusch. Women are female, men are male and “cis” is meaningless and unnecessary. This is exactly the kind of verbiage I expect from Neddy, whose hyperbolic tendencies preface this article. Why are we “kind” to these exaggerations?)

More from Leo Sapir:

WPATH also cites Chiles v. Salazer (2026), in which the Supreme Court held in an 8–1 ruling (Justice Ketanji Jackson dissenting) that states could not ban talk therapy by classifying it as “conversion therapy.” As the Court reasoned, the fact that state authorities consider such talk therapy outside the “standard of care” (which WPATH has helped define) does not authorize them to violate a therapist’s First Amendment rights. Citing Chiles, WPATH now argues that the FTC’s “disagreement with WPATH’s speech does not make it ‘deceptive.’ The Supreme Court has recently rejected the proposition that state governments can prohibit professional medical speech they regard as ‘substandard care.’”

For years, skeptics of youth gender medicine within the medical and scientific community have had their viewpoints silenced when they challenged WPATH’s approach. In presenting itself now as the victim of speech suppression, WPATH is giving a masterclass in DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender).

For example, it asserts, “The government does not get to silence one half of a scientific debate,” adding, “If the government wishes to refute the science underlying WPATH’s Standards of Care, its remedy must be more speech, not censorship.” More speech! And where previously WPATH and its allies stood athwart state efforts to regulate medicine in the area, insisting that politicians should not practice medicine, WPATH now emphasizes “the need for [state] legislative flexibility,’ not FTC action that seeks to usurp states’ longstanding authority.” Federalism!

(Ute’s note: all right, WPATH! Ute’s got more notes in here than any blog yet!)

Doctors, of course, always bear individual responsibility for their patients and cannot claim to have been forced to treat patients according to some group’s recommendations. But WPATH now seems to want to shift responsibility even more to doctors, and away from itself. “The current version of those Standards of Care (‘SOC-8’) has a sixty-nine-page bibliography citing over 1,500 scientific studies to support its guidance,” WPATH writes in its filing. “The fundamental premise of Plaintiffs’ lawsuit is that doctors cannot review this evidence for themselves.”

(Ute’s concluding note: So, WPATH, how about you criticize The Trans Journalists’ Association for publishing a Style and Reportage Guide telling everyone what to say?)

https://styleguide.transjournalists.org/

Leor Sapir is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Spicebush is the larval food of the spicebush swallowtail butterfly. I’m going to order a couple! Spicebushes are understory, shade-tolerant shrubs. When you see some holes in the leaves, be glad. Perhaps a female butterfly laid her eggs there. I will never miss Kingston NY, the location of my last home and butterfly gardens, (and that unbalanced blue haired radicals hotbed) but I admit that I miss the wide range of butterfly visitors I noted in my established gardens. After I’ve set this old house to rights (it needed new everything, from furnace to A/C to basement windows) I will try very hard to encourage everyone in my new town to grow flowers and larval foods for butterflies.

Below, the concluding paragraphs of Dr. Karla Solheim’s treatise on her disillusionment with WPATH, the AMA and especially, the Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) after realizing a “non-binary” young woman, her patient wanting a hysterectomy, should be turned down just like any other young female seeking this radical surgery. Solheim stopped her affiliation with the gender center, with the convenient excuse of time limits. The center is pretending to be LGB aligned women’s health care. In reality, it’s for the TQ.

The pharma driving these surgeries involves the pain killers. The doctors know they can put you in a fog to blunt the extreme pain after. I had a fibroid surgery to remove a (thank goodness benign) tumor the size of my fist from my uterus. Before the 5 hour surgery, laparoscopic, my doctor had me sign a form permitting him to perform a hysterectomy if complications indicated there was no other choice. I also signed that I know I could die from complications as well. Why would WPATH encourage young women who may later want to become a mother more than any other wish in her life, to make a sudden, rash decision to end her ability to do so, while taking on risk to life?

My mother had a hysterectomy when I was about 15. It was a rough summer. It wasn’t a laparoscopic surgery; she had a long scar from stem to stern. She was in pain for weeks. We all took turns cooking. Like many in her generation, she never told me the symptoms prior. I don’t know if she had fibroids that caused flow through bleeding, like me, or if it was something else. I’m still annoyed at my niece, Kate, who insisted to Mom that there’s a new “non-binary” thing going around and “that’s what I am,” when her grandmother was 93. My mother copiously called her granddaughter Kai until I told her when its just the two of us, she’s Kate—I’ve had enough shoveled onto my plate from this group. We kept our little secret until Mom died. Kate is still involved with a dude, “Vivienne” who squeezes his linebacker behind into pencil skirts to do the real estate job he claims pays his rent in Kate’s co-op. It doesn’t end, people!

Why, Dr. Ray Blanchard? I mention Blanchard because for decades he’s promoted the idea that a patient expressing cross-sex ideation, even as a response to watching Bugs Bunny pretend to be a human female, in bonnet, with falsetto voice, to avoid Elmer Fudd and his musket, must be experiencing such trauma to be in the “wrong body” that we have to believe in this diagnosis and the treatment path, because we who don’t have these thoughts “will never understand.”

So the sexologists became the great anthropological translators. Unfortunately, some “feminists” of long ago thought that these crossdressing men could further our struggles to be taken seriously, to be respected and to achieve our highest ambitions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Transsexual and transgender are umbrella terms, gathering in (as they do with graphics literally showing a huge umbrella) every kind of kink fetishist, crossdresser, drag performer, autogynophile into the same cohort as teen girls who are shocked to find that first spot of blood in the underpants at the onset of first menses. Megan Rapinoe and her ilk fascinate me, with their constant demonization of we who want girls to be protected from sexual predators. Can someone tell her about hypno sissy porn, please? Can someone tell her about the perverts who go into the women’s lavatory to scavenge used tampons? This is real, this happens. It is an obsessive fetish. Perhaps they all know better than to do it around Ms. Rapinoe, because she’s such a great spokeswoman for selfish men.

And now, the conclusion of Dr. Solheim’s article:

Dr. Karla Solheim, The Free Press, Aug. 5, 2026, part 3

Whenever WPATH’s proponents are asked to defend their guidelines, they don’t cite the weak scientific evidence. Their strongest argument is always that all major medical associations in the United States have adopted them. That’s hard to argue with. And it was true until this past February, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to no longer endorse medicalization of minors dealing with gender dysphoria.

(Ute’s note: this is because plastic surgeons who are not involved in reconstructive surgery but are instead shooting botox into women’s lips and performing abdominal muscle surgery on characters like Ellen Page to give her a “sixpack” have a bad reputation, made worse by the ones who say they are “reconstructing” a “vagina” from a male patient’s penis and testes, male body parts that react to testosterone and weaken in response to estrogen exposure. As I said to my plumber recently as we discussed the many little fixes my house pipes need, doctors should not mess with the plumbing! I have never met a plumber who would call himself “pro-trans.”)

Dr. Solheim continues:

I always thought once the leaders of our medical associations learned the truth, they would seek to change our guidance. But I continue to be disappointed. The reality is that these medical associations have now become overrun by a small, loud group of activists. The leaders who we expect to guide us and hold us to the highest standards have succumbed to them out of cowardice, or even ignorance, to what is best for our patients. They’re now more interested in silencing critics than they are in standing up for what is best for our patients. I know this because it’s exactly what I witnessed at ACOG.

Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest medical authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility and makes people less likely to trust us for their care.

It’s not hateful to tell the truth and to want to keep young people from experiencing these grave harms. In fact, it is our duty as doctors to do so. I hope my medical organization one day finds the courage to admit this.

A week after resigning from ACOG, I signed on as the lead medical adviser of the LGB Courage Coalition, a lesbian, gay, and bisexual advocacy group seeking to restore evidence-based care in gender medicine. My hope is that by reaching out to physicians one by one, I can help them understand how our position isn’t hateful like the mainstream leads them to believe; it’s based on the truth.

(Ute’s concluding note: I do believe that doctors will, one by one, start recognizing the truth, admitting this is medical malpractice. We’ll see who else is brave enough to go public. Dr. Solheim is in Iowa, where a solid center/right political contingent exists. I spoke once to a doctor at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, a pediatrician. She said she agreed with me that trans world is off balance and assured me she does not take young patients away from their parents to ask if they really want this name, these pronouns and all that. But she said she’d be fired faster than you can say Jack Rabbit—or Bugs Bunny—if she spoke openly at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the malfeasance of gender surgeries, because they do them there. Please share and memorize in preparation for the Labor Day BBQs with family!)

The giant swallowtail visited my former home in Kingston a few years ago. I hope I’ll have some in the new gardens. I’ve seen a half dozen monarch butterflies so far, a hopeful sign for their populations. I inherited quite a lot of milkweed here and will let you know if the caterpillars show up!

Below, the middle section of Dr. Karla Solheim’s article in The Free Press about quitting the enterprise of surgical body modifications in service of “gender transition.” The L of LGB has been gaslit and manipulated by the TQ, with special award for most malfeasance to WPATH, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, with their always over the top misrepresentation and constant hysterical accusations. See under: Admiral Richard Rachel Levine testimony before Congress in the last administration.

Dr. Karla Solheim was associated with an LGBTQ health center in a small town in Iowa for a year, in addition to her other obstetrics and gynecology practice. Like many lesbians who didn’t read Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond, a lesbian who saw from the start how this movement would bulldoze into lesbian groups, Solheim is waking up to the nonsense.

Because my former husband, Neddy, insisted we’re lesbians and I’m a bigot for seeking the divorce, I’m uniquely aware of this co-optation of lesbian expression by therapists, crossdressing men, autogynophiles and trans allies for the purpose of shoehorning men with a fetish into every kind of lesbian meet-up group, be it book clubs, hiking associations or knitting circles.

I apologize in advance for the paragraphs in color. I could not figure out how to get back out of the purple rabbit hole.

Dr. Karla Solheim, in her own words, The Free Press, Aug 5, 2026~

The clinic, I learned quickly, didn’t predominantly serve the needs of lesbian or gay patients. It was, by and large, a gender clinic, there to provide medical pathways toward transition for those with gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy and surgery.

I didn’t mind this at the time.

In fact, I enjoyed feeling like I was providing much-needed care for an underserved community. I left the clinic after a year due to scheduling conflicts, but it continued to refer patients to me.

I performed over a dozen “gender-affirming” hysterectomies—surgery to remove a uterus—on patients who, in some cases, had traveled hundreds of miles to see me. It’s a major medical procedure, which comes with risks as serious as death.

By this point, all of the gender-affirming hysterectomies I performed were on biological women who were seeking to transition to men and who had plans to be on lifelong testosterone treatment.

I thought the medical basis for these procedures was plausible: lifelong testosterone treatment could cause uterine complications, and in addition, it made sense to me that seeing menstrual blood, or even knowing they had a uterus in their bodies, could cause these patients profound anguish.

I presumed that the benefits of a hysterectomy in these cases outweighed the risks.

(Ute’s note: First of all, I can’t seem to get out of this print color mode! I call the above sentiment an episode of “shocked doctor syndrome” which Ray Blanchard, originator of the fake 2 year “Blanchard Protocols” included in almost every published interview. “No one can understand the feelings of the trans patient” is my paraphrase of his excuse for sending patients down a dangerous path of socially inept narcissism. He and his mental health provider cohort demonstrated complete lack of comprehension of the inevitable family collateral damage and financial abuse of wives and children of men with crossdressing proclivities. “Oh the wives don’t like it,” is Blanchard’s famous response to the inconvenient fact of the existence of trans widows; the wives, ex-wives, ex-partners.)

Dr. Solheim continues:

But in 2023, a patient came to my office seeking a hysterectomy and made me rethink everything. She was in her early 20s and perfectly healthy, but she did not intend to undergo a full medical transition. Instead, she identified as nonbinary, but presented very much like a conventional woman—in the way she looked, but also in the way she acted and dressed.

She indicated she did not plan to pursue any other medicalization, such as testosterone. I felt a deep sense of anxiety over performing the procedure. I couldn’t understand how her request was any different than asking for an elective hysterectomy—a surgery that has no medical justification, and against which ACOG strictly recommends.

I began to reflect on this patient, and all the other patients who had come through my door asking for me to remove their uteri. Why was it that for a healthy young person it would be nearly impossible to get their uterus removed without an underlying medical issue, but if one were simply to identify as a man with no other plans to transition—or even just say they are nonbinary—the surgery is freely available?

When I reached out to a community of ob-gyns on Facebook and explained my reservations, almost everyone was in favor of the procedure.

One group of respondents was highly credentialed doctors at some of the best academic institutions in the country telling me the procedure was “medically necessary,” that ACOG, guided by WPATH’s guidelines, explicitly recommended it. And the second was a group of doctors who called me names like “ignorant” and “transphobe” for even questioning whether to perform the procedure in the first place.

(Ute’s note: Here we go again, the bullying of lesbians by advocates of trans ideology. Next thing you know, this liberal doctor will be called a “Right Wing Christian Conservative.”)

Dr. Solheim continues:

But nobody could provide a strong, evidence-based argument as to why this procedure would help my patient get better, so I declined to perform it. I was nervous to tell the patient. I was scared she would go into the community and tell her friends, and that I’d be labeled a “transphobic doctor” and my practice would be at risk. I had seen that happen to plenty of highly regarded physicians before me.

Shortly after, a detransitioner, a woman who had sought testosterone treatment to transition to male but later stopped taking it and resumed identifying as a woman, came into my office. I had been told for years that detransitioning was so rare, so unlikely, that I was shocked to find someone in my small community going through it.

Around this time, in the fall of 2023, I decided to run to become chair of the Iowa section of ACOG. My focus at the time had been on increasing reproductive healthcare access in rural areas like mine, where we struggled to recruit and retain good doctors. When I assumed the position, I acted as ACOG’s loyal soldier, consistently relying on their standards of care and defending the organization when doctors expressed their frustrations. My superiors in the association told us that by sticking together in our guidance, we could more effectively help our patients and fight for improvements in our field.

But in the background, I began to dig more deeply into the literature on transgender medical science. I assumed there would be a great body of research supporting these invasive measures, even if they didn’t always make sense to me.

But I couldn’t find a single good long-term, longitudinal study on the health outcomes of transgender patients who underwent treatments including hormone replacement therapy and surgery.

Then I started reading books like Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think, an investigation into what went wrong at the UK’s Tavistock Gender Service for Children, which shut down in 2022 after independent inspectors found it provided “inadequate” care. In July 2025, I tuned in to a United States Federal Trade Commission hearing that laid out a strong case that leaders within WPATH unethically manipulated their data or put pressure on researchers to produce outcomes that supported their preexisting guidelines.

(Ute’s note: I transcribed a great many of the speeches at that hearing, which are on this same blog. Simon Amaya Price and his father presented a moving story of resisting the mental health practitioners’ pressure to start medicalizing. Unlike detransitioners who have permanent bodily damage, Price “merely” has to deal with the lost time and lost relationships from the years when he identified as female.)

I was floored to discover the research basis into gender medicine both for adolescents and adults was not just poor; it was fraudulent. I couldn’t understand how my medical association, let alone others in my field, could endorse it.

In December 2025, I authored an essay on my blog titled “Physicians Must Demand Answers from WPATH.” In it, I argued that it was time for members of my profession to hold ourselves to the highest, most rigorous and data-driven standards of care when treating patients with gender dysphoria, even if it means having to admit we had previously been misguided.

(Ute’s note: My humble suggestion for the first response to a teen or young adult presenting with “gender dysphoria” is to go on a schedule of limited time online, no ipads or phones or computers in the bedroom at night, remove as many mirrors as possible from the home and start wholesome hobbies like family Scrabble night and gardening. In other words, use your mind in a cognitive behavior therapy manner to overcome the obsessive thinking patterns.)

Dr. Solheim continues:

I didn’t expect ACOG to completely disregard all of the concerns I had raised. On February 4 of this year, two months after publishing my article, the newly appointed vice president Rachel Pittman sent me an email stating my article “raises concerns” because of my “public expression of dissatisfaction with ACOG’s inclusion of WPATH in its clinical guidance.”

She requested I join a meeting with her and the association’s legal staff. On March 10, ahead of our meeting, she followed up to emphasize that I could voice my concerns during the meeting “relating to care for transgender people,” but added that “we aren’t planning on having a full discussion on the issue.” The meeting lasted only 20 minutes, and in the end, I was forced to resign if I wanted to continue expressing my concerns publicly.

(Ute’s note: this is classic “no debate” strategy, constantly used by crossdressing men and their allies. Girls have been groomed into this during vulnerable phases of life, like puberty, by internet influencers, gay/straight alliance school groups and the socially inappropriate male crossdressers who volunteer to lead teen groups at LGBTQ+ centers. Ray Blanchard and his “we’ll never understand what its like” attitude promoted this. I will wait until one of us meets our maker for him to recognize and apologize for the malpractice he’s committed as the lead “trans researcher” of the 20th century.)

Dr. Solheim continues:

What made my dismissal all the more ironic was that the very day I was ousted, ACOG awarded the Iowa section the State Legislative Advocacy Award for my work to recruit and retain ob-gyns in the state. A week earlier, ACOG recognized me with a service award and asked me to give a presentation in Washington, D.C., about my work in Iowa to a national audience of ob-gyns.

Rather than hear my concerns and take them seriously, my national medical association chose to silence me. They chose to be complicit in a campaign to promote ideology in medicine over evidence-backed science.

(Ute’s note: I will post the last part of Dr. Solheim’s article with my commentary soon. Please share this as widely as possible and let us know in the comments if you’ve got links to any appearances Dr. Solheim makes in the media. She’s going through the same whistleblower stages as Jamie Reed, the founder of LGB Alliance. They have a YouTube channel, which might be called Courage Coalition. They post every weekend. Dr. Solheim is now part of this organization. It’s interesting to me that Sophie Cunningham’s clear and streamlined statements on girls’ sports are cresting on the internet. It’s all of a piece, if you ask me.)

Below is an excerpt from the article Dr. Karla Solheim published on August 5, 2026, in The Free Press. It’s taken some time for FP to get to the pithy truth of gender woo—I surmise due to pressure from the LGBTQ side on openly lesbian journalist and Free Press founder, Bari Weiss. I’ve repeatedly asked them to review Behind the Looking Glass at Lime Soda Films YouTube channel. I’ve repeatedly requested them to cover the trans widow angle of the collateral damage of these men who go into 24/7 crossdressing mode. I once got a reply that they didn’t have the bandwidth or something to go into this topic. Perhaps they will now.

I recommend becoming a paid subscriber of Free Press, as this doctor’s story is not going to end in just one article. Other doctors who are considering training in say, cleft palate repair, in order to leave off of this malpractice ridden gender stuff, are probably losing sleep over Dr. Solheim’s whistleblowing. This is the kind of information that turns elections. Prepare yourself to memorize her words, use them during Labor Day BBQs and have the links on your phone. This is, finally, a doctor admitting to widespread malfeasance on a stunning scale. I don’t believe she even understands the scope.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From Dr. Karla Stolheim, Iowa OB/GYN, on Aug. 5, The Free Press:

I served as the chair of the Iowa section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) for a year and a half, where I dedicated my time to expanding women’s health access to rural areas in my state.

But in March, one of ACOG’s vice presidents called me into a meeting and told me I had a choice: resign from my position as chair, or stop publicly criticizing ACOG’s endorsement of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender medical care.

I had come to realize that our profession was not doing the right thing by encouraging medicalization and surgery for transgender patients, when robust evidence that these treatments provided long-term health benefits did not exist.

The choice was easy.

I told the vice president, Rachel Pittman, that I would resign because I did not intend to silence myself on an issue about which I care so much, and one that impacts so many vulnerable patients deserving of the best, evidence-based medical care.

To understand how I came to this position, I have to take you back to my first day working as a general obstetrician at the UnityPoint LGBTQ+ clinic in Waterloo, Iowa, in 2019.

After enrolling at the University of California, I attended the University of Iowa for my medical residency, where I met my former wife; we had three kids together. I’ve poured myself into my work, at times spending over 120 hours a week in the hospital.

When the opportunity presented itself to work at the LGBTQ+ clinic a few times a month, I jumped at it. I knew how lesbians had historically felt ostracized by their doctors, and I wanted to help rebuild trust.

I was surprised to find that my first patient at the clinic was a biological woman who identified as a man. Even more surprising was that my second patient was too, as was my third, and nearly every patient on my schedule. Those who didn’t identify as transgender identified as nonbinary. The clinic, I learned quickly, didn’t predominantly serve the needs of lesbian or gay patients. It was, by and large, a gender clinic, there to provide medical pathways toward transition for those with gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy and surgery.

I didn’t mind this at the time. In fact, I enjoyed feeling like I was providing much-needed care for an underserved community. I left the clinic after a year due to scheduling conflicts, but it continued to refer patients to me. I performed over a dozen “gender-affirming” hysterectomies—surgery to remove a uterus—on patients who, in some cases, had traveled hundreds of miles to see me. It’s a major medical procedure, which comes with risks as serious as death. By this point, all of the gender-affirming hysterectomies I performed were on biological women who were seeking to transition to men and who had plans to be on lifelong testosterone treatment. I thought the medical basis for these procedures was plausible: lifelong testosterone treatment could cause uterine complications, and in addition, it made sense to me that seeing menstrual blood, or even knowing they had a uterus in their bodies, could cause these patients profound anguish. I presumed that the benefits of a hysterectomy in these cases outweighed the risks.

(Ute’s notes: my understanding is that this is in rural Iowa, where many families are traditional Christians and where many other issues may be in play, for female patients coming in with maladaptive trauma response. Doctors like Solheim are not prepared to do psychiatric intake in a clinic for women’s health. WPATH specifically does not ever admit that childhood trauma and sexual abuse experiences are often in the case histories of patients presenting with cross-sex ideation. Please do visit YouTube channel, Trans Widow Ute Heggen, and look up my Heggen Lexicon, to understand the manipulative use of language, institutional capture, to grasp how a logical and responsible doctor could be taken in by the WPATH deceptions.)

But in 2023, a patient came to my office seeking a hysterectomy and made me rethink everything. She was in her early 20s and perfectly healthy, but she did not intend to undergo a full medical transition. Instead, she identified as nonbinary, but presented very much like a conventional woman—in the way she looked, but also in the way she acted and dressed. She indicated she did not plan to pursue any other medicalization, such as testosterone. I felt a deep sense of anxiety over performing the procedure. I couldn’t understand how her request was any different than asking for an elective hysterectomy—a surgery that has no medical justification, and against which ACOG strictly recommends. I began to reflect on this patient, and all the other patients who had come through my door asking for me to remove their uteri. Why was it that for a healthy young person it would be nearly impossible to get their uterus removed without an underlying medical issue, but if one were simply to identify as a man with no other plans to transition—or even just say they are nonbinary—the surgery is freely available?

(Ute’s note: we in gender critical world know that every doctor prescribing testosterone to young women should be asking these questions.)

I had to give you, the loyal reader, a nature image to soften the blow of this news. Humans cannot metamorphose like a caterpillar. The butterfly metaphor has been used far too long by the trans cult. This one is from my old garden in Kingston. I’ve been encouraged to sight a half dozen so far, at my more northerly new location. Grow the flowers and count the butterflies. Look up stars in the night. Order your spring tulips and daffodils now, before the fall planting stocks run low! ooxoo, Ute

This was just posted on Facebook. I’ve been waiting for doctors, especially surgeons, to start recanting their past. I figured they were quietly learning how to correct cleft palate and we’d never hear from them. I hope this is the start of an avalanche.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today Dr. Karla Solheim tells her story. SHE PERFORMED THE SURGERIES. THEN SHE READ THE EVIDENCE.

Dr. Karla Solheim is a board-certified OB/GYN, former Iowa Section Chair of ACOG, a Fellow of ACOG, and a lesbian. Until 2023, she performed gender-affirming hysterectomies herself — fully trusting that the WPATH guidelines behind them were grounded in evidence.

Then she went looking for that evidence herself.

What she found in hundreds of pages of internal WPATH documents, released by the Alabama Attorney General, was academic fraud: guidelines manipulated to avoid legislative scrutiny, language like “insufficient evidence” quietly swapped for “medical necessity,” and predetermined conclusions dressed up as settled medical consensus — the same guidelines that ACOG, the AAP, and the APA point to as the basis for treating gender-distressed youth.

She didn’t go public right away. For four months, she tried to fix it from the inside — writing to ACOG’s District VI Chair, its CME channels, and directly to ACOG President Steven Fleischman. She got no substantive answer.

Two months later, ACOG mobilized — not to investigate the evidence, but to manage her. At a staged meeting with ACOG’s VP of Membership and Chief Legal Officer, she was given a choice: stay silent, or leave.

She chose to speak.

Her full account is out now in The Free Press. In this conversation, Dr. Solheim tells us what she found, what it cost her, and why she’s speaking on the record.

Dr. Solheim is now Medical Director of LGB Courage Coalition.

(Ute’s note: Let me know in the comments if you think this will help detransitioner malpractice lawsuits.)

This past March, a few of my joints started kvetching about missing their naps. I’d been ranging around in my woods and garden, doing early spring mulching &etc. I turned 69 at the end of last year and suddenly realized I might end up watching my flowerbeds go to the weeds, as my father did his garden during his late 80s. By the time I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin at my childhood home every July, it was hours daily to bring Dad’s beds back to presentable status. The gardens I created and nurtured in Kingston were larger by several magnitudes, thus, realistic thinking took root.

Considering I’ve been spat at, yelled at, scolded, shunned and ignored in my 9 years living in Ulster County town, Kingston, New York, I started scouting out small houses on small plots in cities north of me. The thought of a fresh start glimmered on the horizon.

Now that I’m gone from there, having found exactly the little house to buy at a good price and remodel with the money from the Kingston sale, while slowly planting the 50 odd dahlias, roses, wildflowers, daylilies, nasturtiums and marigolds (there’s more but this article would become too long) I surprise myself with an immediate sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, relief and optimism.

There was one part of one afternoon when I felt that emptiness for the topic of leaving my estranged older son in the town he lives in since college, but that was it. I sent his childhood artwork to his address and kept only the best artifacts, then sent his younger brother a comparable box to his father’s co-op apartment address in Brooklyn. I felt they should have their first grade stories, their little sculptures, their grade reports. I kept the homemade Mother’s Day cards and the best specimens. I threw away or deposited under flowerbed mulch the artwork that didn’t make the cut.

The owl stone my excellent mover schlepped here from the Sculpture Garden at the Kingston place now guards the dahlias and calla lilies in front of the house. I’ve got to get a better solar light to show it off at night. The granite block she sits on was here, randomly left in the back yard, a match made in heaven. I need to mulch this garden. The weather’s been a bit dry.

So I’m going to tell the truth about Kingston, a toxic town for biological realists like myself. Its the town that Peter Buffett shores up, supporting any number of nonprofits woki-fying the 24,000 or so populating the place. The Etsy originators operate there similarly, virtue signaling from their oddly painted Good Works Institute in a large Victorian house on St. James Street. Etsy refuses to sell evolutionary biologist, Dr. Colin Wright’s mugs and Overton Window poster because, “transphobic.”

I’ve written Buffett and Good Works letters, explaining the plights of trans widows as well as the fact that many of these women live in or around Kingston, often stuck in this untenable marriage to a suddenly full time crossdresser because of young children and finances. I probably left my return address off, fearing their staffers would come and spray paint nonsense on my house.

Peter Buffett is responsible for the firing of one of the Black leaders of the town, Tyrone Wilson, from his show at Buffet-funded Radio Kingston. He’d been talking honestly about the careless speech references to various ethnic groups he’d heard in his Bronx childhood, ruminating about some now forgotten phrase from his high school football years. Maybe a Black lineman got benched for such a remark at the high school—the details have dimmed. Tyrone knows everybody.

As it happens, my son was involved in the “struggle session” Kingston Democratic Party politicos put Mr. Wilson through earlier, after a self-admitted bipolar polarizing figure, Callie Jayne, had spied on his family Facebook page. She made herself busy finding a post of Tyrone’s to his own NYC relatives when a niece was startled by a crossdressing male in a public women’s bathroom there. Ms. Jayne, who claims to be non-binary now, despite being mother of two daughters, called my son to report that Tyrone had the temerity to tell his relatives that men should not be going into the ladies’ lavatories, agreeing with the patriarchs of the Wilson family that daughters need protecting. Callie Jayne found this abhorrent and offensive, despite the fact that only his family had seen it and it hadn’t “gone viral.” This is a woman who called me a “rich white lady” to my face, when soliciting funds for her now defunct charity.

This was during the shutdowns of covid, and they corralled Tyrone Wilson into meeting a bunch of them outside in Hasbrouck Park, where they took turns expounding his list of sins. When I heard about it I called up Tyrone to make a mother’s apology but of course by then my son had already refused to talk to me so I could not work on his manners and lack of tact. I wrote my son a note mentioning the Chinese Cultural revolution when children forced struggle sessions on their parents and often these ungrateful offspring got violent. Some died of their wounds.

I wonder how the participants’ recollections are affected now by the recent Supreme Court decisions supporting female only women’s and girls’ sports?

When I moved to Kingston after selling my Brooklyn co-op in 2017, the politics of the town was evenly divided and the county legislature had a slim Republican majority. The district’s representative in Congress was John Faso, a Republican.

Now, with Kingston’s reputation as a “trans-friendly” locale, there’s no avoiding the crossdresser and his boom box, dancing almost daily on Broadway in front of a bar called Tubby’s, appearing to be advertising “services,” in my humble opinion. He’s also committing sins against the art of choreoraphy. The nearby youth Hip Hop school, EEC, has trans flags all over their hallways. I went in there, asking if they might be interested in furniture I didn’t plan to take in the move, saw the flags, and launched into my assessment of this brainwashing for their fully-enrolled nursery school program, and Drew Andrew’s daughter agreed with me, implying they’d been coerced into putting them up. Drew is the tour de force hip hop teacher and choreographer, getting children of all ages out there performing under the lights at the historic theater near the no-talent crossdressing street performer’s spot by Tubby’s. His boombox is aways turned up full volume and the police apparently feel constrained from reminding him of noise laws and illegal interference with foot traffic on the sidewalk.

As I’ve mentioned in past videos on Trans Widow Ute Heggen YouTube channel, the police have been called on me a couple of times by the trans flag waving neighbors, when I campaigned against the ludicrous language of Proposal 1 two years ago. The language of “gender expression” being the core of their intended insertion into the New York State Constitution. It passed, due to the fact that the media didn’t report accurately on the likely effects of this ballot initiative.

I will finish this epistle by reporting the fact that the local NY state senator, Michelle Hinchey, would not allow her GOP opponent to even bring up the topic of sex trait medicalization of minors or detransitioners during debates in the last election cycle. This didn’t surprise me, as I’d called her office asking to speak to her as my elected official, regarding the “Gender Unicorn” being taught in school and my Piaget-informed response, and the staffer hung up on me, the elder abuse dripping from her dismissive voice.

As I’ve become more vocal, telling my story to any likely receptive traditionalists, I’ve been told by Hispanics and African Americans, “we’re not allowed to say these things.” It’s important to bring it up and let people see what they see.

Please write in the comments any similar experiences where you live. It’s super to have left the above bollocks behind. Thanks! Ute

Kara Dansky

Jul 01, 2026

(Ute’s one and only note here. I didn’t feel a need to add to Ms. Dansky’s excellent analysis. I’ve just finished my move away from over-woke Kingston, NY, and will write more soon, and post new videos to Trans Widow Ute Heggen YouTube channel. I promise!)

This post is free and shareable. It would be good to share it liberally, because this message really needs to get out there.

On Tuesday June 30, the US Supreme Court announced that states may, consistent with federal law and the US Constitution, maintain single-sex sports.

That is, the states of Idaho and West Virginia (and the 25 other states that protect single-sex sports) may maintain girls’ sports for girls and boys’ sports for boys.

And yet, many people have insisted that this means a complete ban for all “transgender” athletes from sports entirely. This is not true, and most of the people propagating this narrative probably know it.

I and many others have spent countless hours since Tuesday morning correcting this lie on social media.

This is me, correcting NBC Out:

This is me, correcting California state senator Scott Wiener (who has done more than anyone to shred women’s sex-based rights throughout his state):

I was a bit more harsh with him, because I know he knows the truth.

This is Sall Grover, correcting Politico from all the way in Australia:

And here is the queen, correcting the BBC:

There are many other examples.

At least some of these outlets manage to clarify that certain athletes (the male ones, the ones they refer to as “transgender”) are prohibited from participating in female-only sports, but they neglect to mention that all male athletes (including the ones who call themselves “trans”) are still welcome to participate in sports intended for men and boys.

Earlier this morning, a friend forwarded to me an email from a group called Legal Voice that contains this:

It’s simply not true.

I was once chatting with a friend about all of this (long before Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision), and she said that she generally agrees with me about sex and gender, but that she’s against “the sports bans.” I asked her to provide a single example of anyone being “banned” from sports and she couldn’t. I explained that she had been under the impression that “transgender” people have been “banned” from sports because that’s the lie the mainstream lefty media has fed her.

Idaho and West Virginia have not “banned” anyone from sports, and the Supreme Court has not said that “banning” anyone from sports is permissible.

Idaho and West Virginia (and 25 other states) have said, very simply, that girls’ sports are for girls and that boys’ sports are for boys. That’s it.

On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court ruled that they may do so. The Court’s decision was 9-0 with respect to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It was 6-3 with respect to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Anyone peddling the narrative that people have been “banned” from sports because they call themselves “trans” is either stupid or lying (most likely the latter).

By Tyler O’Neil The Daily Signal

(from The Heritage Foundation)

Ute’s note: additionally, the husbands/partners of the following 4 women murdered them, as they attempted to get out of the abusive situation:

Samantha Lee Brown, Jennifer Anderson, Beverley Guenther, Olesya Sinkova. All of these male murderers who claim a female persona are now serving their 8 years to life sentences in women’s prison estates. When these crimes are reported, the victims’ names are often omitted.

As well, many of the 80 women, the trans widows I’ve collected testimonies from report they were physically (and often sexually also) attacked by the crossdressing husband, such that she feared he was going to kill her and it was only her body’s reaction that saved her in the moment. Battery strangulation is shockingly common. The rate of sexual assault by these trans ideating husbands is 39% and the rate of separate physical assaults is 38% in my data from The Heggen Survey. My comments on Mr. O’Neil’s article appear as here, in bold italics.

Tyler O’Neil writes:

America’s counterterror forces can no longer ignore the threat of extremism motivated by transgender ideology, and President Donald Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy rightly addresses this threat.

The counterterrorism strategy opens in a new tab, released Wednesday, outlines three major threats: narcoterrorists and transnational gangs; legacy Islamist terrorists; and violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.

That third category includes transgender ideology-motivated extremists.

According to the strategy, America’s counterterrorism efforts will “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

“Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies,” the document adds.

It remains unclear whether the FBI will accept the Oversight Project and The Heritage Foundation’s request to use its authority under 18 U.S. Code § 2331 to designate “transgender ideology-inspired violent extremism as domestic terrorism,” but this document may enable that move.

The Trump administration deserves credit for taking this threat seriously, and also for pledging to address these threats “apolitically and founded upon reality-based threat assessments.” While the U.S. will examine left-wing extremism, the document pledges that America’s “counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us” in the way the previous administration did.

(Ute’s note: The Biden admin targeted religious and other conservative groups for surveillance and started FBI files on parents who expressed opposition to transgender cult “workshops” in the public schools. This means parents were shadowed in PTA meetings, etc.)

O’Neil continues:

Most people who identify as transgender likely do not pose a threat to their fellow Americans, but a growing list of attackers either identified as transgender or appear to be motivated by transgender ideology.

Examples of Alleged Transgender-Motivated Violence

Tyler Robinson, 22, who faces murder charges in the September killing of Charlie Kirk, reportedly lived with a boyfriend who identifies as transgender and allegedly told his boyfriend he shot Kirk on his behalf.

In February, Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old man who identified as a woman, shot and killed eight people in British Columbia, Canada.

Robin Westman, a 23-year-old man identifying as a woman, shot and killed two children at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis in August.

Julia Grace Egler, 16, allegedly shot and killed her mother and her mother’s boyfriend following multiple disputes with her mother about her transgender identity and “misgendering.”

Mia Bailey, a 30-year-old man who identifies as female, shot and killed his parentsopens in a new tab in June 2024.

Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as male, shot and killed six on March 27, 2023, at a Presbyterian school in Nashville, Tennessee.

On May 7, 2019, Maya “Alec” McKinney opens in a new tab, a 16-year-old woman who identifies as male, and her 19-year-old fellow student, Devon Erickson, shot and killed one and injured eight at a school in Highlands Ranchopens in a new tab, Colorado.

In June 2024, a judge sentenced Alexia Willie, a man who identifies as a woman, after he confessed to threatening to rape girls in girls’ restrooms, carry out mass shootings at schools, and bomb churches.

Where Does Transgender Violence Come From?

To call the transgender movement radical would be an understatement. This movement not only encourages men and women to adopt a “gender identity” as the opposite sex and to alter their bodies to make them conform to this identity, but it also demands that society accept, and even celebrate, the delusion.

Activist groups such as the Human Rights Campaign not only demand societal acceptance but also demonize dissent as a form of violence against people.

HRC has described the deaths of people identifying as transgender as an “epidemic.”opens in a new tab However, the Human Rights Campaign’s own data suggests that these people face a lower homicide risk than other groups, particularly men, women, black, white, and Hispanic people.

This claim represents the fountainhead of a constant stream of hyperbolic transgender rhetoric. For instance, MSNBC columnist Katelyn Burnsopens in a new tab once described a move to restrict the Frankensteinian treatments of “gender-affirming care” as an act of genocide.

The Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is little evidence for positive impacts from transgender medical interventions on minors, but it found many documented harms. A jury awarded a detransitioner $2 million, finding that the medical professionals who carried out sex-rejecting procedures on her were liable for medical malpractice.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a statement recommending against transgender surgery for minors under 19, leading other medical associations to follow suit.

Supporters of these sex-rejecting procedures maintain—with a straight face—that people with gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s sex) cannot prevent themselves from committing suicide if they do not receive these interventions. They then use this argument to demonize any scrutiny of these interventions.

(Ute’s note: the mind/body dissociation of opposite sex ideation is often a maladaptive coping mechanism the individual slides into when childhood abuse and trauma are unresolved in adolescence and adulthood. Many de-transitioners attest to this as well as trans widows who are aware of the former husband’s history.)

Online influencers who identify as transgender have amassed huge followings, and members of their audiences may find themselves bombarded with exaggerated rhetoric about the “hate” of those who dare to disagree. In fact, the influential Southern Poverty Law Center repeatedly compares conservative Christians who disagree with transgender orthodoxy to the Ku Klux Klan.

If you legitimately believe that there is an “epidemic” of murder against people like you, that opposition to your agenda is a form of “genocide,” and that Christians’ disagreement with transgender identity is fueling this, you might be tempted to lash out.

(Ute’s note: in woke upstate NY towns, we’ve seen official placards from the advocate groups with slogans such as: “If We’re Angry, It Comes Out of Love.” I see this as a not very hidden justification of their violence, threats and harassment.)

The Trump administration is right to take this threat seriously, and I hope to hear more about its effort in the coming days.

Tyler O’Neil | Senior Editor

Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at the Daily Signal and the author of two books, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center“ and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

Ute’s Introduction: I’ve edited out the blather about “indigenous land” that Ben Ryan quotes from the WPATH zoom meetings. While these pontifications indicate the hypocrisy and nonsensical thinking, we’ve all heard the same rote virtue signal drivel too many times already. Odd, isn’t it, how encroachment of physical space is to be apologized for, but invasion of the category of female is of no concern.

As usual, I will write my comments in bold italic after the paragraph I wish to expound on.

The video linked here is further proof of the WPATH corruption. I transcribed the dialogue of Brianna Wu (male with cross sex ideation, post-op) and former WPATH president, Dr. Marci Bowers (male with cross-sex ideation, post-op) in which they both break down, fuss and can’t agree on how to actually diagnose a “transsexual.”

Ben Ryan, in Unherd blog:

The tapes, subpoenaed by the Alabama attorney general in response to a federal lawsuit, covered a pivotal period from 2021 to 2023, when pediatric gender medicine first began to face political backlash. In addition to egregious lapses in judgment on the part of WPATH, the videos are a case study in the excesses of peak woke, neatly preserved, as if in a time capsule.

During a long winter of dyspepsia, I digested well more than 100 hours of the academic faithful checking their privilege and preaching about “centering lived experience.”

And I can now report that there are few subcultures more slavishly faithful to the woke religion than WPATH was during the post-Racial Reckoning micro-era.

According to sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s landmark 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, the term woke, in its original, early-20th-century definition, referred to “an awareness of social injustices and a commitment to rectifying them.” Today, it is typically used pejoratively for anything Left-coded that might “seem ridiculous,” as al-Gharbi observed. And not always unjustly: at its peak, the philosophy amounted to a form of egalitarian signaling by cultural elites that purported to serve the needs of the marginalized — mostly by hewing to politically correct positions on gender, sexuality, race and identity issues — but in fact mostly served their own needs for status and legitimacy.

I observed all these tendencies at the WPATH conferences, which were held virtually during Covid times, and then in hotel conference rooms in Montreal and Denver, and featured the titans of transgender medical care. One could only expect such discourse given the cast of characters. There were LGBTQ identities (and allies). There were overly educated cultural elites. There were activists. And there were guilty white people — overwhelmingly and blindingly white people — who sought to compensate for their inadequate melanization through promises to diversify WPATH and promote equity across the land.

These defenders of the marginalized were fluent in the academic-elite lingua franca of critical theory, intersectionality, and social justice, hewing to conformity at the expense of content, common sense, or even their own supposed mission to help gender-distressed children and adolescents. They stayed ahead of what Steven Pinker coined the “euphemism treadmill,” rattling off all the latest identity-politics jargon — deftly observing the imperative to shift from “transgender,” to “gender diverse,” to “gender expansive”; and from “Latino,” to “Latinx,” to “Latine.” They doled out trigger warnings for bread-and-butter medical subjects — to audiences of doctors and psychologists.

(Ute’s note: they also completely ignored the factor of trauma experiences in the development of cross-sex ideation, and pretended that Piaget’s stages of childhood cognitive development did not exist, had not been validated for a century, &etc.)

In one session, which concerned the informed-consent model for providing gender surgeries, attendees were instructed to “please feel free to leave or take a break if need be. We want you to prioritize your own well-being above the content that we are sharing here.”

They succumbed to concept creep, with one presenter defining trauma as “an experience or series of experiences that negatively affect someone’s interactions and experiences of moving through the world” — a definition so diffuse it could apply to anything from the Holocaust to a hangnail. And they undermined their own authority, responsibility, and legitimacy as care providers endowed with doctorates, as they conveyed that their young patients’ narratives were more important than diagnostic and scientific precision and the core principles of medical ethics.

Were there pronoun declarations? But of course. In fact, a WPATH conference is the rare setting where this performance might be useful. However, the vast majority of presenters, sometimes to their own professed chagrin, were not transgender. Most were straight women and gay men; the latter rarely admitted such a jejune and déclassé sexual identity, opting instead for obliquely declaring themselves “a member of the LGBTQ+ community.”

“The quasi-religious zealotry I observed provides a weak foundation for a medical movement that seeks to care for a population of psychically unwell teenagers by subjecting them to drastic and permanent physical alterations.”

The presenters didn’t stop with simply professing themselves a they/them. They routinely introduced themselves according to their sexual, racial, and class-based identities, making a point of self-flagellating should their oppression score prove subpar. One typical throat clearing was: “I’m a cisgender white woman who comes from a lot of privilege.” Another team declared: “We are white providers,” who, when caring for patients, took into consideration “the soup we all swim in, which is the dominant white Western ideas of what gender is, can be, should be.” Presenters displayed performative guilt and — with no sense of irony — apologized for their status as central players in a power structure that they were eagerly leveraging to promote the medicalization transgender identity in minors, even as they denounced that system as woefully damaged and damaging.

Overall, the conference sessions placed a disquieting emphasis on correct-signaling over evidence-based medicine. If the presenters genuinely hoped to win over the public and other medical skeptics and establish gender-transition treatments and surgeries as a settled practice in pediatrics, one might have expected them to observe exacting caution and engage in scientific testing sufficiently rigorous to defend the ethics of providing irreversible, life-changing body alterations to highly distressed and impressionable minors. Alas, no.

Conference attendees were treated, for example, to a short sermon by Florence Ashley (they/them), a Canadian “transfeminine” legal scholar and author of Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body. Ashley, a biological male who claims a loosely designated feminine identity, preached that erecting “gatekeeping” around gender-transition interventions for patients of all ages was “illegitimate by default.”

(Ute’s note: Good Lord! Is there an ex-wife who should contact me?)

There was also a session on experimental medical interventions for patients who identify as nonbinary. Dr. Walter Bouman, a British transgender-care specialist and WPATH leader, acknowledged working in the dark in this particular discipline. “We simply don’t have the evidence,” he admitted. And yet he and other care providers claimed it an imperative to provide mix-and-match sets of sex characteristics based on patients’ demands.

Such blind devotion to patients’ body-modification impulses extended even to minors and their “embodiment goals.” Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a top pediatric gender doctor practicing in California, confessed at the conference in 2023 that determining whether patients are “really trans” is “actually not the discussion I’m interested in participating in.” Instead, she wanted to talk about “giving the very best possible care to trans young people.” Nowhere in this astonishing confession was there room for determining whether a child’s gender confusion could prove only temporary— and thus there was no consideration of whether the youth might later regret the medical intervention.

(Ute’s note: I think this is called “confirmation bias,” meaning a patient comes in with vague complaints and the good doctor Olson-Kennedy finds this must be a girl who wants to be a boy.)

Instead of caution we got hyperbolic warnings about white supremacy. Presenters such as policy wonk Kellan Baker and ACLU litigator Chase Strangio claimed, with no evidence, that objections to pediatric gender medicine, or to biological males participating in girls and women’s sports, were rooted in racist attitudes. Meanwhile, the conference sessions repeatedly called rueful attention to the fact that, despite everyone’s better efforts at recruitment, the organization’s leadership and its members were overwhelmingly white, as were their pediatric patients, as were youths participating in their studies.

Such laments were paired with commitments to the equitable provision of medical interventions to nonwhite populations. White presenters ritually groveled over their racial or cispatriarchal supremacy. One, Dr. Carl Streed, a WPATH leader — a white gay man and primary-care physician at Boston Medical Center — heartily agreed to an observation that men of his persuasion controlled trans research and should voluntarily “step down” from leadership positions.

(Ute’s note: Yes—but they should all step down and start working towards actual reconstructive plastic surgery, such as for cleft palate and club foot. Or just go away and sail around the world solo.)

These scenes highlight the intrinsically unstable nature of the woke belief system, which has always displayed contradiction and paradox. For example: race is a mere arbitrary social construct best dismissed and yet should be a source of monomania given that it is the architecture upon which all of society is built. Or this: given the overwhelmingly white makeup of WPATH and the field’s population of minor patients, perhaps pediatric gender medicine itself is fundamentally white. Where is the respect for marginalized cultures, when one of the chief professed goals is to impose what amounts to a glaringly white undertaking onto black and brown children?

The only black trans woman I saw in all the WPATH videos I observed was Dr. Elle Lett, an activist-oriented statistician-epidemiologist (and insufferable gadfly on social media). Dr. Lett was still in training at the University of Pennsylvania when she (Ute’s note-[sic] this is a male human being, thus, he is the correct word.) gave a ramblingly woke plenary address to the 2021 conference. “Medicine,” she [sic, should be he] claimed, was “nested in the system of oppression,” and statistical methods “develop[ed] out of eugenics.” She called on attendees to “reject the notion of sample size and validity” in favor of messier science, provided it gave voice to the voiceless. The most mind-scrambling scenes came from sessions in which presenters preached the imperative to provide gender-transition treatment to Native Americans of all ages.

I have no doubt that the WPATH conference presenters genuinely approach their medical mission with compassion. They routinely and emphatically expressed concern for their pediatric patient population, with apparent sincerity. But the quasi-religious zealotry I observed provides a weak foundation for a medical movement that seeks to care for a population of psychically unwell teenagers by subjecting them to drastic and permanent physical alterations. And it’s hardly possible to dispassionately weigh the risk versus benefits of these medical interventions when an unfalsifiable mode of new-age spirituality is pressing its finger on the scale.

But a blindness to one’s own hypocrisy has always been the defining feature of the woke movement. So it’s no surprise that these medical radicals have proved incapable of self-correction, and that external political forces have stepped in to smash the precious temple they’ve built.

Ute’s conclusion: Bring it on! Get those therapists decertified! I could have told you all of this 30 years ago. Next year will be the third decade since Dr. Connie Christine Wheeler submitted her nonsensical, accusatory sworn affidavits to Kings County Supreme Court during the epic divorce. It has always been this way, notwithstanding Dr. Ray Blanchard’s claims about his infamous protocols of crossdressing for 2 years prior to getting surgeries. Why did he pretend that wrong sex hormones don’t have risks, and agree to the rush of patients into the endocrine netherworld?

Benjamin Ryan is a New York City-based reporter. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publication.

Watch my nature shorts at Trans Widow Ute Heggen channel to rebalance your mind and body after reading this!

Tyler O’Neil@Tyler2ONeil

Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

Imagine you are confused about your gender, and you think you were “born in the wrong body.” Do you really think a series of experimental drugs and surgeries to erase your biology and make you appear as the opposite sex would improve your psychological condition?

It should come as no surprise that a landmark study from Finland suggests the exact opposite: Fins under 23 who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria proved more likely to receive specialist-level psychiatric treatment, both before and more than two years after the first referral to a gender clinic—and “gender-affirming care” made things far worse.

The study, published Saturday in the journal Acta Paediatrica, finds that young people who were referred for gender identity services were more than three times more likely to receive specialist-level psychiatric treatment than other Fins, both before and after their first appointment.

Those who underwent medical interventions after such referrals proved even more likely to need specialist-level psychiatric help.

(Ute’s note: specialist help means the patient was suicidal some or most of the time in this follow up period after supposedly “life saving” wrong sex hormones and surgeries.)

Most studies on the issue suffer from a lack of follow-up and a lack of consistent control groups. This study included both.

Working with the Finnish government, Statistics Finland, and a hospital with one of the country’s two gender clinics, the study analyzed eight groups: men and women with gender dysphoria who did not undergo sex-rejecting procedures; men and women with gender dysphoria who did undergo such procedures; and men and women from the general public, matched by birth year and municipality to each patient in the other groups.

(Ute’s note: this means there was an age-matched control group. Finland was known decades ago, for a high rate of suicide, and their psychiatric care system reflects comprehensive protocols developed to deal with the situation.)

The study used the 11-digit personal identification number that each Finnish resident receives to track medical data and psychiatric visits.

The study found that 61.7% of the gender-dysphoric young people received specialist-level psychiatric treatment more than two years after being referred to a gender clinic, while only 14.6% of the control group received such treatment in a comparable time period.

These young people also proved more likely to receive psychiatric treatment before their gender dysphoria diagnosis (45.7% compared to 15.0% of the control group).

The study also finds that young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than those who were diagnosed before 2010. Only 15.3% of young Fins diagnosed before 2010 had visited a specialist beforehand, and 14.2% had done so two years after their first referral. Meanwhile, 47.9% of those who were diagnosed after 2010 had received specialist-level help beforehand, and 61.3% received it two years afterward.

(Ute’s note: this reflects the surge in the social contagion of “trans identification.”)

Psychological problems increased even more during follow-up after “gender-affirming care,” rising from 9.8% to 60.7% among men trying to appear female and from 21.6% to 54.5% among women trying to appear male.

These findings suggest two important things: that sex-rejecting procedures do not improve mental health long term, and that the people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria are more likely to have psychological problems—both before and after the diagnosis.

The study presents a population in crisis: nearly 50% of the gender-dysphoric youth had visited a psychiatric specialist more than 25 times in their lifetimes, compared to 11% of their peers.

“Finland’s more than two decades of nationwide data show a clear pattern: youth who undergo medical gender reassignment use psychiatric services at markedly higher rates than even prior to that intervention,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at Do No Harm, told The Daily Signal.

The study admits its own limitations: It did not analyze what sort of psychiatric services patients received, and it did not control for patients’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

(Ute’s note: This is because the national health care has a standard set of protocols in which talk therapy is almost unlimited and residential psychiatric placements occur for patients who have already had a great deal of counseling and mental health help outside of a psychiatric hospital. It is unfortunate that their system was apparently not explained in the study. The mental health care system in Finland is very comprehensive.)

Why This Makes Sense

Contrary to transgender activists’ claims, it stands to reason that the grotesque transgender experiments often dressed up in pretty language as “gender-affirming care” might harm a person’s mental health long-term.

(Ute’s note: while I agree that these genital surgeries are grotesque, this is not a word I would use. I would say these dangerous and unsuccessful sex rejection surgeries result in a high propensity for serious medical emergencies in the years after, and the pain management involved is substantial.)

When a doctor diagnoses a minor with “gender dysphoria”—the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s sex—the doctor may go on to prescribe “puberty blockers” (drugs that law enforcement uses to chemically castrate sex offenders), cross-sex hormones (which often cause permanent interventions in a person’s body to make them appear as the opposite sex), or surgeries to remove breasts or genitals.

These “treatments” often leave patients stunted, scarred, and infertile. Detransitioners like Joni Skinner have testified that this “care” left them unable to experience sexual satisfaction. A jury recently awarded one detransitioner more than $2 million in a medical malpractice suit.

How Americans Should Respond

While opponents of “gender-affirming care” should find ourselves emboldened by these results, we should also respond with compassion to those who are struggling.

This study suggests that people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria also suffer from other psychological problems, and they need counseling that helps them process the mental issues that lie beneath gender dysphoria.

The Supreme Court recently struck down part of a Colorado law preventing mainstream patient-directed talk therapy from addressing the potential underlying causes of gender dysphoria, but activists are already working on other ways to demonize and outlaw this kind of therapy.

(Ute’s note: in this decision the justices voted 8-1 for free speech, with Katanji Brown Jackson writing her committee of one dissent.)

This study doesn’t just undercut the arguments for sex-rejecting procedures—it highlights how important this alternative kind of therapy is, and why Americans should champion it, not condemn it.

(Ute’s note: I will never stop beating the drum of walking, gardening, mind body movement such as Primal Fitness by the Tapp Brothers for males and my movements for wellness series at my YouTube channel, Trans Widow Ute Heggen. These kids are sleep deprived, and have terrible schedules in which they are not out in nature for enough hours a day.)

If we want to actually help people who suffer from gender dysphoria, we must champion therapy that helps them come to terms with their biology, rather than a medicalization that engages in experiments aimed at erasing it.

(Ute’s conclusion: This study hit the ball out of the park. It is already mischaracterized by trans lobbyists. Like the Swedish study of death records, it proves in a statistically significant way that the long term follow up has been neglected and intentionally obscured. Those who have sunk cost fallacy will be unable to accept the logic until there are dozens of studies showing this. We do not have the record keeping Sweden and Finland have. This is all encouraging, but the pushback is going to continue to be shrill, deceptive and shouty.)

As I’m wont to do, my comments are in this bold italic font between Mr. O’Neil’s paragraphs.

Tyler O’Neil@Tyler2ONeil

Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

Transgender surgeries and cross-sex hormones represent downstream effects of a basic failure in therapy that sets patients up for long-term harm, warns a former trauma clinician who now crafts policy to protect people from these experimental “treatments.”

Therapists who try to treat people with gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex—often recommend patients undergo medical interventions to make a man appear female or vice versa. This represents a lack of hope, Dr. Jennifer Bauwens told The Daily Signal.

(Ute’s note: I see my sons’ rejection of me, the devoted mother who got them through college with no loans, who was there to pick them up after school, who paid for all of the Little League fees when Neddy would not consider helping out, as a continuation of his self harm. I see Neddy’s early childhood abuse manifesting as self harm as he struggled with becoming a father himself. His substitution of me for the target of his anger at the time has now morphed into our sons’ complete rejection of me, their complete no-contact policy as harming themselves more than me. They’ve lost the right to inherit my assets. They’ve lost the memories of my parents’ love of them, the times when they were too young to remember.)

The decision to “medicalize” a patient, rather than trying to treat underlying psychological trauma, traces back to a therapist’s lack of faith in his or her own abilities.

(Ute’s note: the doctors decided to change laws without consent of the people, writing letters to local government for name changes post surgeries, going back into the 1980s. “It’s so rare,” they claimed, ignoring Janice Raymond’s 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire. The therapists used their shock and impotence to urge and promote patients with this ideation to choose these radical, irreversible surgeries. Psychologist Ray Blanchard, eager to get away from his prison work with convicted sex offenders, developed his famous and famously ignored “Blanchard Protocols.” The rules involved a falsehood called “The True Life Test” whereby a dude dresses as a woman full time for 2 years, gets letters from his shrinks to take to the surgeons and “be transformed.” The fact that a high percentage of post surgery emergency treatments are necessary for keeping the bladder and urinary tract functioning is never emphasized. Blanchard has publicly stated that seeing a crossdressed duck in the Elmer Fudd cartoons, a duck hiding from Elmer’s blunderbuss, could be the moment his patient suddenly understands he’s “really female inside.” The fact that this isn’t recognized as discomfort with homosexuality is what should be shocking.)

“If you really have hope that your method could change [the underlying issues], you’d keep it in your clinical space, but the fact that there isn’t a lot of hope for seeing these people change who are struggling with this distress, it’s like we have to outsource it to other ways of handling it,” argued Bauwens, director of American values at America First Policy Institute.

“I was trained to think that if I don’t have hope for a client, that’s time for a referral,” the former clinician explained.

“Goals of therapy should be, first and foremost, let’s reduce the distress that people are feeling over their bodies,” Bauwens argued. “It should not be, ‘Let’s transform their bodies to look like something else.’ We need to be about helping people to form their identity in what their biological sex is.”

(Ute’s note: It’s very hard for me to live with the malpractice here. These therapists should be asking about addictions to illegal drugs, pornography and alcohol. They should be asking about childhood history, learning if the patient was abused, abandoned or neglected. They should be learning if the patient had opposite sex siblings who were favored by the parents. They should be helping the patient to plan a few mind/body sessions, breathing to forestall panic attacks, movement for wellbeing and focused time outside in nature. The therapists should be recommending a journal of nature observations. The therapists should be determining if this patient believes that wrong sex hormones change chromosomes and make sure the patient has the real information that nothing changes chromosomes. I’m pretty annoyed about this.)

“We don’t need people to become somebody else—that’s actually pathological,” she added.

An Ideological Echo Chamber

The medical industry has started to move against “gender-affirming care,” but the psychotherapy profession is likely to lag, Bauwens warned.

The Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is little evidence for positive impacts from transgender medical interventions on minors, but it found many documented harms.

A jury recently awarded a detransitioner $2 million, finding that the medical professionals who carried out sex-rejecting procedures on her were liable for medical malpractice.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a statement recommending against transgender surgery for minors under 19, leading other medical associations to follow suit.

Even so, Bauwens expressed skepticism that therapy will follow this trend.

“When I went for tenure track positions, one of the things that I was told was that we want you to take your students out and do protests,” she recalled. While most of the protests at that time centered on the Black Lives Matter narrative after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, her experience revealed the activist bias in these schools.

(Ute’s note: while a broader discussion of “woke” therapy curricula pretending social engineering is the answer, I’d rather that Bauwens kept the theme on the flaws in “gender affirmation.” Do the political stuff in a different interview. She diffused the point, making it about her tenure track efforts, a completely valid criticism, but distracting from the very pointed, serious damage that “gender affirmation” is doing.)

She warned that many programs act “like a sort of think tank—if you will—for some of the Democratic policies that are being pushed.”

A 2012 survey found that liberals outnumber conservatives in psychology by a ratio of 14-to-1. Studies in 2019 and 2021 found a similar overall bias. According to OpenSecrets, health professionals contributed $35.3 million to Democrat Kamala Harris and only $11.5 million to Republican Donald Trump in the 2024 election cycle. The three top contributors gave 100% of their donations to Democrats and left-wing groups.

(Ute’s note: instead of this political right/left business, I’d critique the terrible studies, the fact that the “Dutch Protocol” is based on an unbelievably small study with no credible follow up.)

Bauwens noted the profession’s political slant, saying, “that gives you an idea of the research that’s coming out of the field, and what the worldview is that drives it, and also the practice and the training.”

She argued that the profession “needs to be reformed.”

“It needs to be dealt with, so that people can actually get help in their time of crisis and not be led astray,” Bauwens said.

Combating ‘Social Transition’

Last week, Bauwens released model legislation to protect children from “social transition,” the process of using female pronouns for a boy who identifies as a girl and treating him as a girl—or vice versa.

(Ute’s note: I’d work on preventing secret social transition in schools, and somehow make the therapy programs present the mind/body options in the training of therapists.)

Psychiatrist Dr. Stephen B. Levine has argued that social transition “is a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes,” making patients far more likely to take “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, or full genital surgeries.

Bauwens cites research showing that without this intervention, 65% to 94% of minors who suffer from gender dysphoria will ultimately grow to resolve their discomfort with their sex.

Her draft legislation would designate social transition “a psychological intervention that lacks empirical evidence demonstrating effectiveness or safety as a treatment for gender dysphoria and has been documented to cause psychological and physical harm.”

The legislation would forbid adopting names or pronouns inconsistent with a minor’s sex; permitting access to sex-segregated spaces of the opposite sex; modifying school records or identification documents to contradict a minor’s sex; and providing resources to encourage a transgender identity.

In part by forbidding social transition, Bauwens aims to empower therapists to actually help patients resolve gender dysphoria, rather than encouraging them to go under the knife, altering their bodies to resolve what really is a mental struggle.

Giving therapists hope that they can resolve these problems for patients would go a long way toward a larger goal, she argued.

“We need to make therapy great again,” Bauwens said.

Related posts:

1. SEISMIC: A Detransitioner’s $2M Jury Verdict Threatens Child Mutilation Pipeline

2. EXCLUSIVE: White House Weighs Executive Action to Prevent Government From Taking Kids From Parents Who Oppose Gender Transition

3. State AGs Hold AMA’s Feet to the Fire on Gender Transitions for Children

Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.

The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.

In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.

You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.

Christina Buttons, writing in City Journal, assessed the results of a Hong Kong follow-up study on patients who went to the gender clinic there. Details at the end of this article say it all; participation in advocacy groups and political action organizations is found to be associated with negative mental states, instead of the benefits touted by trans allies and non-profit entities.

My notes appear in bold italics when there are elaborations to be made.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Christina Buttons, Feb. 12, 2026~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The mental-health case for medical transition relies on observational clinic studies that measure patients’ psychological distress before and after treatment. Many of these studies follow small samples for short periods, often less than two years. When these studies report improvements in patients’ symptom scores or well-being measures after medical transition, the design often cannot tell whether the medical intervention drove the difference, since other things typically occur alongside treatment. That is one reason systematic evidence reviews have repeatedly judged the certainty of this evidence as low and the findings as inconsistent.

A new retrospective follow-up study from Hong Kong, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry earlier this month, addresses those problems. The authors argue that much of the earlier literature leans too heavily on group averages and does not adequately account for basic determinants of mental health, such as social support and coping style. Instead of treating those variables as background, the Hong Kong researchers measured them directly and included them in the same longitudinal models as treatment status. Their aim was to see whether hormone use or surgery still predicted changes in depression and anxiety once support and coping strategies were considered.

(Ute’s note: this is in direct contrast to the loose quackery of Annelou De Vries, et al, in the 2014 published Dutch Protocols Study, in which only 33 of the original 70 subjects finished the exit survey after completing the hormones and surgeries of the program. Also noteworthy here is the fact that Hong Kong is now part of the Republic of China, as opposed to the independent city-state when that gender clinic was created.)

The study followed adults seen at Hong Kong’s public Gender Identity Clinic. The proctors assembled the original 394-participant cohort in 2019 and 2020 and collected follow-up data between October 2023 and June 2024. After accounting for deaths, loss to follow-up, and participants who discontinued hormones, the final sample included 178 people.

(Ute’s note: the loss-to-follow-up cohort is the important one to find and gather information from. While daunting and likely expensive to contact and follow up with, this group can tell much about what went wrong or how they changed their thinking.)

Of that sample, nearly half were “female-to-male,” nearly half “male-to-female,” and a small fraction identified as “non-binary.” The median age was 36, and most were not in a romantic relationship. Over a quarter had psychiatric comorbidities, one in four were taking psychotropic medication, and more than one in three were in active care with a psychologist.

(Ute’s note: “most were not in a romantic relationship” tells an important detail in these patients’ stories. I know from my ex-husband’s crossdressing diaries that he constantly fantasized about a straight male romantic interest. He later settled for a much younger woman who had saddled herself with college debt and paid it off, while refusing to pay for our sons’ tuitions.)

Participants completed standardized questionnaires on depression, anxiety, and stress (the DASS-21) and on perceived social support and coping strategies. “Social support,” the authors explain, refers to the “perception that help will be available when needed,” while “coping” refers to personal efforts to manage stressors or emotional challenges. The study distinguishes between “facilitative coping,” which includes active coping, planning, positive reframing, and seeking emotional or practical support; and “avoidant coping,” which includes disengagement, self-blame, and substance use.

The authors emphasize that coping style is an important determinant of mental health. They cite prior research linking avoidant coping with worse outcomes in trans-identified populations. “Avoidant coping,” they write, “is consistently associated with worse mental health, including anxiety . . . and depression.” By contrast, facilitative coping, such as cognitive reframing—similar to methods used in cognitive behavioral therapy—is associated with improvement.

The study divided participants into three main groups:

1. those who had not had surgery,

2. those who underwent surgery during the study period, and

3. those who had already had surgery by the time the study began. A secondary analysis divided participants by hormone status and duration of use, noting that the full effects of hormones can take years to develop.

What makes this study distinct is not only its size and duration but its design. The authors tracked changes over time, while controlling for social support, coping, and other background factors. Put simply, the question was: Accounting for these other influences, do hormones or surgeries still predict better mental-health outcomes?

The answer was no.

Neither surgery nor cross-sex hormones significantly reduced depression, anxiety, or stress once coping and social support were included in the statistical models. Instead, it was those psychosocial factors that proved the strongest predictors of patients’ mental health. Facilitative coping and both types of social support—meaning support from family and from friends or a significant other—were associated with fewer depressive symptoms. Avoidant coping, by contrast, was strongly linked to higher depression and anxiety.

(Ute’s note: the therapists in this speciality will not admit they pressure wives to stay with crossdressing, medicalizing husbands to be the support system, insisting that we loan them our clothing, accessories, make-up and our very identity as wife and/or mother. They defame and vilify us when we refuse, when we go out to find our own new reality.)

As the authors summarize, “gender-affirming treatments did not reduce depressive or anxiety symptoms significantly, after controlling for coping and social support.”

While the authors found that participants who received hormones or surgery reported greater “gender congruence”—a perceived alignment between patients’ “gender identity” and their bodies—this did not translate into improved mood. The authors note that “mental wellbeing did not improve despite greater gender congruence,” consistent with earlier studies that found the same pattern.

(Ute’s note: aha! “Gender congruence” says it all. This false concept pretends that lipstick, eyeliner and lingerie cause a male to be “congruent” to femaleness, when we all know that shoulder/hip ratio, size of hands and feet, voice and facial structure cannot all be modified to convincingly “pass” as female in a man. There are also many “tells” for women who claim male “gender.”)

The Hong Kong study’s longer timeframe also allowed for a clearer picture than short-term research. The group that underwent surgery during the study period showed reduced depression in raw averages, while the groups that had already had surgery or had none showed increases. But this apparent benefit vanished once social support and coping were factored in, suggesting that mood improvement reflected the concurrent rise in family support rather than the surgery itself.

The findings speak to a deeper misunderstanding about the nature of gender-related distress. The prevailing public narrative casts trans-identifying people as a biologically defined minority group, harmed by stigma and in need of medical affirmation.

The research, however, does not convincingly establish transgender identity as a distinct biological condition.

Another interpretation is that many trans-identifying individuals are experiencing psychological distress—often alongside sex-atypical traits or same-sex attraction—and have been taught to understand that distress through the framework of “gender identity.”

From this perspective, gender identity is not a fixed trait to be affirmed but a belief to be examined. Transition then becomes a way of externalizing inner conflict rather than resolving it.

The Hong Kong study lends support to this view. In that cohort, the factors most strongly associated with better mental health were not hormones or surgery but ordinary determinants of well-being, such as healthier coping strategies and stronger social support.

For many individuals, immersion in online or activist communities centered on grievance and identity may instead entrench distress. More than half of participants in the cohort reported active involvement with the transgender community. Recovery, the findings suggest, is more likely to follow from disengaging from those environments, finding purpose, and pursuing reality-based therapeutic approaches.

The new Hong Kong study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that medical transition does not resolve the psychological problems that lead people to seek it. Instead, the paper points toward addressing those problems directly—not medicalizing distress under the banner of “gender affirmation.”

(Ute’s note: studying detransitioners and those who desisted before getting hormones or surgeries is clearly needed for the field to make progress in best practices. We trans widows are able to contribute much more than doctors and therapists are willing to admit.)

ptSroseond17a3imhcm1f8810m18lcui521042fh50muu1117h51ilm9m84f ·

SAY THEIR NAMES

As of late January, 2026, this list has 39 names. Please add names in the comments and I will edit them in.

Fox Varian (Just won $2 million settlement in jury verdict concluding Westchester malpractice lawsuit against the psychologist and the surgeon)

Clementine Breen

Chloe Cole

Luka Hein

Soren Alda

Layla Jane

Prisha Moseley

Laura Becker

Claire Abernathy

Simon Amaya Price

Walt Heyer

Elle Palmer

Eden Simons

Luke Healy

Isabelle Ayala

Maia Poet

Nicolas Blooms

Daisy Strongin

Jade Martin

Alexander L

Katie Anderson

Ritchie Herron

Michelle Alleva

Chris Beck

Victoria Gugenheim

Katie Coblentz

Cat Cattinson

Sam Kaye

Luka Hein

Forrest Smith

Soren Aldaco

Hasci Horvath

Keira Bell

Ginny Welsh

Antoinette De La Cruz

Jonni Skinner

Airiel Salvatore

Mel Jefferies

Sarah Shipman

Isabella Alaya

I’ve been posting links to my YouTube channel, Trans Widow Ute Heggen, in several substack blogs I subscribe to, as we’re writing and reading analyses of the Supreme Court arguments in the women’s sports rights cases. Sometimes I’m told to stop this shameless self-promotion, as the trolls assume I monetize my small channel or that I make money from my self-published memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow. I will never make money from this project. I wish I could start a fund to cover legal fees for the wives needing help in getting the divorces. Another time, I’ll write up suggestions for the attorneys who represent us. I have to get out and shovel the driveway in a few minutes . . . .

I’ll sprinkle shorts like the above one throughout this post, as I seek to demonstrate natural natal female authenticity, which no male can achieve. I now have data from 79 trans widows and the rate of sexual assault within is 39%, physical assault 38%. To make this perfectly clear: husband who reveals he wants to “be a woman” sexually assaults his wife, as he’s acting out the pornography scenarios he’s become addicted to. The physical assault data is separate from the sexual assaults. These include pushing his wife down the stairs, holding her so tightly she can’t breathe and battery strangulation. Now that we know that “BPJ” (one of the male athletes in the Supreme Court cases) threatened anal rape on his female teammates while in the locker room, we must connect these psychiatrically ill boys and the men they may mature into.

It’s the coercive control in operation here, from trans widows, women who divorced suddenly full-time crossdressing men. Like Will (renamed himself Lia) Thomas, most of our ex-husbands have looped down into the canyon of kink sex fetish. Will Thomas’ alternate X account was found to advertise his sex prop wall, and further posts of his demonstrated this sexual obsession. I don’t know whether he was actually castrated, but he looked absolutely ridiculous in his long dress with slit up to his lengthy thighs at a recent awards show.

While I had no proof that Neddy was hooked on porn, the proof that the therapists believed these warped representations of romantic relations was in my in person session with Ruth, the Charlatan. (as she appears in my memoir) She suggested not just that I needed to watch some of this stuff, but that she recommended a specific store for videos and equipment. She didn’t say dildo, and I just can’t remember exactly the euphemism she used for the toys. Actually, she said “toys.” Blech. Refer above to the dance photos from a lifetime ago, to understand why I had connections between mind and body without added objects. Alright, now to the shoveling . . .

First, a calming snowy scene in the Hudson Valley, where Ute Heggen takes nature photos when not preoccupied with crimes by men who claim female identity.

Also, we must take note whether the ACLU steps in to make sure he serves his 10 years in a women’s prison estate. Except, oops, that would be Federal Prison, where Executive Orders prevent that from happening.

Please note that trans widows have been trying to get the word out regarding the violent behavior of men with a psychiatric illness surrounding sex-based obsessive compulsive disorder. Find it all at YouTube channel, Trans Widow Ute Heggen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Man suspected in Vance home attack asked to be called ‘Julia’ during arrest: authorities

by ALEXX ALTMAN-DEVILBISS | The National News Desk

Tue, January 6, 2026 at 2:39 PM

7VIEW ALL PHOTOS

William Defoor appeared before a judge Tuesday for his arraignment Jan. 6, 2026 (WKRC)

CINCINNATI, Ohio (TNND) — The 26-year-old suspect accused of vandalizing Vice President JD Vance’s Cincinnati home on Monday reportedly told authorities to call him “Julia” at the time of his arrest and has a history of prior run-ins with the law along with mental health issues.

William DeFoor, 26, was arrested by the U.S. Secret Service and Cincinnati police and charged with damaging government property, engaging in physical violence against any person or property in a restricted building or grounds, and assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.

FBI sources confirmed to Fox News that DeFoor demanded to be called “Julia,” after he allegedly used a hammer to try to break into Vance’s Ohio home.

It is unclear if DeFoor identifies as transgender or nonbinary, but recent social media pages show up under the name Julia DeFoor.

Agents observed DeFoor running along the fence line of Vance’s home around midnight, according to an affidavit. Officials said DeFoor ran up the driveway and attempted to break the driver’s side window of an unmarked federal law enforcement vehicle blocking the entrance.

DeFoor was ordered by agents to stop and drop the weapon, but continued toward the house and used the hammer to break several windows and damage a security system owned by the government valued at more than $28,000.

DeFoor’s attorney said during the first court appearance on Tuesday that the attack had nothing to do with politics, rather “an expression of someone not in control of his mental health situation.”

“I just don’t think there is anything political going on here, judge, it’s purely a mental health issue,” the attorney stated.

DeFoor was ordered by the judge to be held on a $11,000 bond on the state charges. He remains in custody on a federal hold.

Vance responded to the incident on X, saying, “As far as I can tell, a crazy person tried to break in by hammering the windows.”

In this image taken from WCPO 9 News video shows officials inspecting broken windows and other property damage at Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio home in eastern Cincinnati, Ohio, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026. (WCPO 9 News via AP)

He also requested that the media not plaster images of his home with holes in the windows in order to protect his kids.

“One request to the media: we try to protect our kids as much as possible from the realities of this life of public service,” Vance wrote. “In that light, I am skeptical of the news value of plastering images of our home with holes in the windows.”

If convicted on the federal charges, Defoor could face up to 10 years in federal prison. A charge of assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison

I’ve omitted names and locations in this letter. I post it here as a model for communication with your local elected officials, if you are a person whose life has been turned upside down by the trans cult. For me, it is part of my decision to stop working under the radar. My main points are:

1. In US blue states, the local elected officials overtly and covertly bully parents & ex-wives of suddenly crossdressing husbands, encouraging this social contagion of family alienation.

2. We have ample evidence now, as written in the recent HHS report on the dangers of “gender affirming care” for young people.

3. Whether owe voted in these representatives or not, we are their constituents. They owe us respect and representation.

   Special note: I used my personal experience of having the police knock on my door, at the request of my son who is “no contact” with me as an example of the use of public resources to solidify the alienation. I hope that some of the erased mothers and fathers who subscribe here, will find the structure of my letter useful. It was a hard copy letter, hand delivered, so I did not include links. Please let me know in the comments if any parts of this prove useful. I will read this on my channel soon; I had to take a few days to recover from this cruel act, imposed on me by my beloved firstborn.

   Regarding the part about my psychiatrist, please know that I am not in deep emotional turmoil. I have appointments twice a year to check in. It is true that he’s now adjusted his position on “affirming care,” but he said he has to keep that under the radar to avoid defamation. Be well all, Ute

County Executive and County Executive Office,

I am a constituent whom you have left behind and I write to tell you that this claim of leaving no one behind in your mission statement is not credible.

I live here in our city, paying over a quarter of my retirement income in taxes, and I do not deserve the bullying, cancellation and grief that your Left of center movement imposes on women like me.

My son’s name is XYXYXY, and I have been quite concerned about him in light of his marriage breaking up recently. I’ve written to him at his new address, offering financial help and a sympathetic ear. I left a beautiful chrysanthemum for him with the letter of concern during the fall, and the day before Hanukkah began, I dropped off a gift package with his favorite cookies and many items to celebrate with.

I didn’t expect thanks. I have not received thanks for getting him through college with no loans, for the $20k I gifted him in the last few years, or the insurance policy I set him up with to further his financial future. I do not get a Mother’s Day card, birthday card or any holiday greetings. My letters, starting with the words, “I will always be your mother and I always love you,” are never answered.

Many specious claims have been made about me since I’ve become outspoken about the dangers of treatments like urinary tract surgeries for the purpose of sex rejection. I am in treatment with a psychiatrist, to deal with the isolation I experience, and he’s stated that he’s now come to the conclusion that the surgeries are medical malpractice, but he and others who have reconsidered treatment plans for Sex-Based Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are not able to speak out while still in their working years. Several retired doctors have now spoken out, and you’ll find they agree with the recent HHS statements on the dangers of this poorly evidenced field of medical practice.

While my son claims he’ll speak to me if I “go to treatment,” the fact is, I am in treatment, but I can’t schedule a joint appointment to demonstrate this to him, because my psychiatrist is fearful of the power you and the Democratic politicians have in this county, and you could ruin his career. Thus, doctors who believe these treatments are too risky and find there’s societal damage in the “no contact” policy of parental alienation which your political party promotes, are preventing them from speaking the truth about decades of medical misadventures.

This is the mother erasure your movement engages in. Fully 25% of millennials have gone no contact with one or both of their parents. There are ramifications for the mostly elderly constituents you supposedly represent, as we age, in this world of Left wing enforced isolation. I just turned 69.

You support this cancellation, silencing and erasure.

I have concerns regarding the lies the officer related to me, which my son claimed to the desk detective to make the complaint. He said he had a dispute with “a neighbor” who dropped off garbage on his stoop. The officer was not impressed, and he knew of my son’s position in the our legislature. I have never made a scene, threatened anyone or engaged in behavior which a judge would grant a restraining order for. The police officers I’ve spoken to in the local force have indicated to me that they are often called for non-emergency issues such as this, initiated by “defund police” advocates, who hypocritically call for law enforcement assistance when they should be talking to the people they disagree with, exchanging ideas and listening to the other side. Our local government is acting as censor, suppressing the new information exposing the dangers of sex rejection treatment. In recent local campaigns, the candidate running against the Democratic party candidate was prevented from bringing up the topics of males on girls’ sports teams and the growing ranks of detransitioners. She refused to entertain any discussion in service of protecting girls and women.

You must understand that there could be an incident of domestic terror right here in our county, and if police are out on calls by Democrat-affiliated individuals to silence those they differ with, there could be tragic results where police are not available in the numbers needed in a hostage situation or an active shooter event. As well, the police do not feel supported by Left wing politicians here. This is not good for our community.

This is a situation I must bring up to you, as your constituent. I am a woman you’ve left behind.

I have been engaged in important pollinator garden work, and could give you and people in your office important data and information on the increased butterfly population I’ve fostered and documented. I used to believe in this county as a place where my environmental work would matter.

I live here without a car. I used to get rides from my son to shop and go to the doctor but I manage without his help. I got myself to cataract surgery on my own when my eyesight started failing. He was aware of my surgeries, but did not reply when I reached out.

You believe that women like me should experience erasure and silencing. All due to the sin of warning of the dangers for children having procedures to effect sex rejection, such as double mastectomies for teen girls and removal of gonads in both sexes—all dangerous procedures with detransitioner malpractice lawsuits pending.

Here is an assessment of the social harms of alienation from researcher Rachel Haack:

“When parents share their experience of estrangement, the comment sections often turn into bullying. They are accused, shamed, dissected and blamed. People speak to them as though their entire identity can be reduced to that of a failed or harmful parent. The asymmetry here is profound and deeply telling.”

Your own county mental health department has the policy that even a woman like me, who experienced financial and psychological abuse from a husband who suddenly claims female identity, should, in her own individual therapy, be caused to say “she and her” about the husband she divorced. This is damaging misogyny. I have confirmed this detail of your policy for struggling trans widows with the staff of that office. How can you pretend you do not leave us behind?

There happen to be several young mothers caught in this limbo in their marriage, right here in this county, and you are leaving all of us behind.

At this point in time, I am your constituent. I write to you to point out that I am not the only one you leave behind, that the shunning we experience does have political meaning and that you are willfully behind the harassment and bullying we endure.

My then husband lied about where he was, as I mothered my four year old and his infant brother in the middle of Brooklyn. He spent huge amounts of family money on his second wardrobe. He made specious, provably false claims about me in public and in court.

I find it completely logical that he’s poisoned my sons with more lies about me. This is very, very common for trans widows; the defamation runs at a rate of about 54%. I collect the sole data in the world on our experiences. With 79 trans widows’ testimonies, it emerged that in 39% of the cases, the wife was sexually assaulted by him, and police do not enforce the laws passed to protect women. In 38% of the cases, he physically assaulted her. Three women were murdered by their crossdressing husbands as they attempted to leave and these men now serve their sentences in women’s prison estates. I collect their information for a separate set of data. While I was not subjected to physical abuse, the emotional cruelty my former husband foisted on me, as he claimed to be me, the mother, on official documents, caused the need to engage in a multi-layered, years long healing process. The same work I do for grief, ambiguous loss and to deal with PTSD symptoms is the program that psychiatrically ill patients who believe their life will be better and solved with plans for surgery after surgery, is actually the path towards healing from a psychiatric illness. In any other diagnostic happenstance this pattern of repeated plastic surgeries is recognized as a pathological addiction to body modifications.

The “help” that our County Office of Mental Health offers trans widows is actively damaging these women in need, by forcing them to use language that is not representative of what she experienced and works to recover from.

I understand the use of “trans rights” to push back against the sometimes overblown rhetoric on the Right. But the psychiatric illness of cross sex ideation is not cured by risky surgeries on the urinary tract. I know this from detransitioners.

I am a retired Kindergarten teacher. The Piaget stages of child development and the milestones of Object Permanence and Conservation of Matter are still accepted as the standards in early brain development. At no time is it possible for an infant to meaningfully express the belief that he or she is “in the wrong body.” I have over 20 years of experience teaching young children and innovated many successful and useful teaching strategies I could contribute in some way to our county. But I am cancelled, shut down and silenced, and you are part of the forces doing this to me.

It has come to light that teen girls who have their breasts removed as part of their sex rejection treatment are interfering with the body’s production of dopamine, the “feel good” hormone, because the loss of the prolactin produced by breast tissue has a dopamine production connection. This has been suggested recently as one factor in the uptick in post-surgery suicides among these young women. Unfortunately, the news about these deaths does not find its way into media, because of the suppression of such information by the Trans Journalists’ Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide.

Since these girls often emerge as same sex attracted, I find it odd that you aren’t doing more to protect them.

I have been demonized by my ex-husband and now my son. You have left me and women like me behind, Executive. I do not understand how you consider yourself ethical, when you promote shunning of loving and well-meaning parents.

The reason the Left shuts down all discussion of the dangers of “affirmative care” is to virtue signal to the world that you’re inclusive. But you are not.

I remain disappointed with your leadership. Ute Heggen

I gave my address, but not email or phone. I’ll let you know the reply, if she does.

‘MALPRACTICE’: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Announces 6 Moves to Crack Down on ‘Sex-Rejecting Procedures’

Tyler O’Neil | December 18, 2025

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks on Nov. 12. (REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo)

Tyler O’Neil@Tyler2ONeil

Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced six moves to crack down on the “malpractice” of “sex-rejecting procedures” Thursday.

“This is not medicine; it is malpractice,” Kennedy said of the transgender medical interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” He warned that doctors have engaged in “needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic Oath” to “first, do no harm.”

“Sex-rejecting procedures are neither safe nor effective treatment for children with gender dysphoria,” he declared (referring to the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s sex).

(Ute’s note: I didn’t think I would see this kind of condemnation this year. This is all correct and the phrase “sex rejection” is apt.)

Kennedy announced six actions against these procedures during an event at the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington, D.C.

HHS has moved to establish two new rules: one preventing hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid from performing these procedures on minors; and a separate one prohibiting Medicaid dollars from funding these procedures on minors.

Kennedy also signed a declaration finding that sex-rejecting procedures “do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care,” and warning that practitioners who perform these procedures on minors would be deemed outside of these standards.

The Food and Drug Administration will send manufacturers warning letters on breast binders, which are necessary for some women but are often misused in order to make girls and women appear male.

(Ute’s note: breast binders can cause bone deformation of the ribs in teen girls, affecting their breathing & heart function. These girls also become really rude.)

HHS is also reversing the Biden administration’s attempt to include gender dysphoria within the definition of disability.

“The Biden era amendments that designated gender dysphoria as a disability serve the financial interests of a billion-dollar industry,” Kennedy said.

The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, has ended grants supporting transgender medicine.

Finally, the Office for Civil Rights is sending a letter to recipients of HHS funding, assuring them that health care policies that do not fund sex-rejecting procedures do not violate civil rights law.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, condemned the “dishonest narrative” of transgender ideology that “treats children like lab mice.” He urged doctors to use “the least invasive possible” methods to address gender dysphoria, such as talk therapy.

(Ute’s note: many stress-reducing practices are necessary, talk therapy often revisits trauma too often. Walking with the Leki sticks, floor exercises and breathing strategies are key to recovery from psychiatric illness.)

“American taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for ideological experiments on our nation’s youth,” he added.

“Pushing transgender ideology in children is predatory, it’s wrong, and it needs to stop,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary declared.

Chloe Cole, a detransitioner, spoke about her experience and condemned transgender medicine as “unscientific medical abuse that violates every tenet of medical ethics.”

“They messed with the wrong kid,” she declared to applause.

To those struggling with gender dysphoria, she said, “I want you to know that there is a better way out.”

HHS published a medical review in May finding “extremely weak evidence” for any concrete benefits from “gender-affirming care,” but many harms. This followed an executive order from President Donald Trump urging the health administration to protect kids from the interventions.

The House of Representatives passed a bill to outlaw such procedures Wednesday.

Do No Harm, an organization that opposes racial ideologies and transgender ideology in medicine, praised the announcements Thursday.

(Ute’s note: I believe this should have read “radical ideologies.” I’m seeing a surprising level of typos lately. AI can’t fix everthing.)

“President Trump and HHS are taking another critical step to protect children from harmful gender ideology,” Do No Harm Chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb said in a statement. “The proposed rule—banning hospitals from performing sex change interventions on minors as a condition for Medicare and Medicaid participation—is common sense, evidence-based, and morally imperative.”

We’re All Just Winging It’: What the Gender Doctors Say in Private

In footage obtained exclusively by The Free Press, gender doctors acknowledge they perform life-altering procedures on vulnerable youth with no supportive evidence—and they are proud of it.

(Ute’s note: someone must ask these doctors if they studied Piaget.)

When they think no one’s listening, gender clinicians talk very differently among themselves than they do to the broader medical world or the public.

By Leor Sapir

At their conferences, closed to outsiders and the press, the gender clinicians allowed themselves to speak freely. They spoke about the boys who said they wanted to be girls and the girls who felt they were meant to be boys, and the medical and surgical interventions that would make them appear as the opposite sex. The clinicians also discussed new procedures for a new type of patient—some of them adolescents—who wanted to be made to look as if they had no sex at all.

In one of the videos, obtained exclusively by The Free Press, from the 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) spoke about one such case. Penkin told the audience about Sky, who she described as an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who was living on his own for the first time.

Penkin explained that Sky expressed a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Sky, Penkin said, reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future.” Indeed, Sky did “not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible,” according to Penkin.

Not so long ago, a patient like Sky would have been given a psychological evaluation and offered mental health counseling. But in the evolving world of gender medicine, clinicians now want to help young people like Sky achieve their gender goals.

Penkin explained to fellow professionals that requests for procedures that are “nonbinary” are “growing in number.” But the field is still wedded to binary assumptions. This means that procedures such as “nullification” (surgically leaving patients with no external genitals) or “penile preserving vaginoplasty” (surgically crafting a pseudo-vagina underneath the penis) are not as accessible as they should be.

Penkin said that when confronted with a patient like Sky, existing “research” and “standards of care” are “not enough to meet the needs of our patients, and we need to take it to the next level to really think about how we evolve and match the needs of our patients as their needs are being expressed to us.”

Penkin’s colleague, psychologist Mair Marsiglio (she was identified as “Mary” in the video), agreed, and described doing just that. Marsiglio told the conferees that it’s “important to reframe the role of the mental health person or the psychologist as a collaborator rather than a gatekeeper.” That meant, Marsiglio explained, making sure that patients with serious mental health problems such as “multiple personalities” and “psychosis” are not excluded from gender surgery just because the team is “uncomfortable” operating on them.

Marsiglio said that being a member of the surgical team provided the opportunity to “help the patient. . . navigate care.” This is especially necessary, Marsiglio said, when what is requested by the patient is “a surgery that has not been performed before or is of higher risk.”

As for Sky, Penkin explained that the healthcare system still required minimal oversight, especially when seeking insurance coverage for procedures. Sky was able to obtain “two letters of support” from mental health professionals, according to Penkin, clearing the way for the teenager—who was legally an adult—to be castrated.

A Major Strategic Blunder

We know about the case of Sky, and other such young people, because of a lawsuit. And because of that lawsuit, The Free Press has obtained exclusive access to some of the recordings made at these conferences, the content of which are being made public for the first time.

In recent years, 27 states—almost all Republican-leaning—have passed laws that restrict or ban medical gender transition of minors. In 2022, Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act criminalized such medical procedures. Advocacy groups including the Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center immediately sued the state to overturn the law. This suit—Boe v. Marshall—became a major strategic blunder.

The plaintiffs urged the federal district court to rely on the expertise of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and its American chapter, USPATH. WPATH was widely touted in the advocacy and medical communities as providing unassailable guidance, in the form of its “Standards of Care,” for how to provide treatment of young people with gender dysphoria—or distress over one’s biological sex.

The court agreed, and the materials obtained in legal discovery by the state of Alabama between 2023 and 2024 about WPATH’s methods and conclusions proved scandalous.

It was alleged that WPATH had suppressed evidence reviews by researchers who found that the supposed benefits of hormones and surgeries for minors were not based on credible evidence. WPATH was also accused of failing to manage or even acknowledge conflicts of interest, allowing clinicians to write medical recommendations favorable to their financial and other interests. Reportedly, it eliminated age minimums for hormonal and surgical interventions on minors for explicitly political reasons.

News of the misconduct appeared in the The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, City Journal, and the prestigious medical journal The BMJ.

One clinician explained to fellow professionals that requests for procedures that are “nonbinary” are “growing in number.”

The litigation also resulted in Alabama obtaining hundreds of videos of conferences and other events put on by WPATH and USPATH. The videos provide a window into how gender clinicians, when they think outsiders aren’t listening, speak differently to each other from what they tell the wider medical community and the public at large.

For example, The Free Press and other publications have documented how families are pressured into approving the transition of minors with the unsubstantiated threat that a child will commit suicide otherwise. Or how false assurances are made about the safety and necessity of life-changing gender interventions, treatments that can cause many serious side effects, including infertility.

(Ute’s note: the intention/desire to radically alter one’s body permanently is a sign of immaturity, sex stereotype indoctrination and one step away from suicidal ideation.)

Last June, in another case that turned out poorly for the transgender advocacy groups, the Supreme Court ruled that state laws limiting youth transition were constitutional—thus ensuring a legal victory for Alabama. As the case by the plaintiffs against the Alabama law was coming to an end, representatives of WPATH urged the court to keep the videos under seal. They lost.

“Wing It Together”

One of the biggest revelations from the recordings is how these clinicians acknowledge performing unproven, seemingly experimental treatments—only it appears there is often no protocol being followed, no formal research being conducted, and no ethics-board approval being sought. These practitioners say their goal is to fulfill the “embodiment” desires of their patients, whatever these may be, and doing this may require “deviat[ing] from guidelines.”

To explain what it means to fulfill patients’ “embodiment goals,” pediatric endocrinologist Hayley Baines of OHSU’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital gender clinic presented a “composite case” at the 2022 WPATH conference. Baines described a 13-year-old boy who identified as nonbinary (“she/they” pronouns) and whose “stated goals are: ‘I want tits,’ and ‘I want my parts to still work.’ ” The boy and his accompanying parent, who also identified as nonbinary, were both “surprised” to hear that hormones could compromise his future fertility. The clinical team’s role, Baines explained, was to understand how “impacts on fertility and the ability to have erections” fit in within the boy’s “goals.” When the boy responded with “c’est la vie,” the parent, who wanted biological grandchildren, started crying.

For some clinicians, a WPATH conference was a place to have a safe discussion about their concerns about performing novel procedures on vulnerable young people. They discussed how to protect themselves from the possible legal and other consequences of practicing at what one gender doctor called “the edge of medicine.”

A video obtained exclusively by The Free Press shows what clinicians say behind closed doors:

WPATH updates its “Standards of Care” on an irregular basis, and 2022 was the year it released the eighth version. This revision added some new chapters, including one called “Nonbinary.” WPATH defines the term capaciously.

To be nonbinary, the Standards of Care explain, one need only have an “internal sense of gender” that is at odds with social expectations associated with one’s “assigned sex.” This includes “indigenous and non-Western genders” as well as “people whose genders are comprised of more than one gender identity simultaneously or at different times (e.g., bigender), who do not have a gender identity or have a neutral gender identity (e.g., agender or neutrois), have gender identities that encompass or blend elements of other genders (e.g., polygender, demiboy, demigirl), and/or who have a gender that changes over time.” One case, discussed by OHSU gender clinicians, involved a teen who said that he realized “Frank-N-Furter” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show was his gender identity.

(Ute’s note: the above fantasy demonstrates immaturity and delay in the Piaget stage for ages 11-14, Formal Operational. Doctors who play into this are deceitful money-grubbers.)

The Standards of Care state that nonbinary was a fast-growing area of transgender identification, comprising an estimated 25 to 50 percent of the transgender population, and particularly high among the young.

The video of the 2022 WPATH conference in Montreal features a presentation by three contributors to the “Nonbinary” chapter: Belgian psychologist Joz Motmans, British endocrinology consultant Leighton Seal, and American psychologist Laura Kuper.

During the Q&A portion of the session, a woman who said she worked at a gender surgery center asked why the contributors recommended that those seeking nonbinary procedures should first consult with a “multidisciplinary team.” The questioner pointed out that this provision was in tension with WPATH’s professed goal of eliminating barriers to all forms of medical “affirmation.” Having to go through a consultation with several medical professionals, she complained, felt “more restrictive.”

Seal explained that this recommendation was largely out of concern for the protection of his fellow practitioners. He noted that some patients will inevitably regret their procedures, and “if you have a network around you where a clinical team, in concert with the individual, has made a decision, you then have a framework to say, ‘Well, the ethics of this were explored. . . ’ ”

Seal acknowledged that interventions are based on little to no evidence of efficacy. He said, “[W]e are doing procedures here where we don’t have outcome data. So unless you want to go to individual ethics boards in each hospital to get ethics permission to do those surgeries because they’re on the edge of the field of medicine, you need to have a mechanism around you to support you. Otherwise, you could be vulnerable. That’s our feeling.”

One 13-year-old boy and his accompanying parent, who both identified as nonbinary, were “surprised” to hear that hormones could compromise his future fertility.

Indeed, a growing number of young people who have undergone various hormonal and surgical interventions are going public about being harmed physically and psychologically. Some, known as “detransitioners,” seek to reverse or mitigate the effects of medical transition. Some, having undergone a mastectomy at the outset of puberty or having damaged their bodies with hormones, are suing their medical providers, saying that they were misled about the need for and consequences of transition.

(WPATH’s Standards of Care don’t have much to say about detransitioners. There is no chapter for them, and WPATH asserts, falsely, that detransition “appears to be rare.”)

(Ute’s note: Doctors in this field who themselves “transitioned,” like Mark/Marci Bowers, are playing out their own delusions and regrets that they didn’t get puberty blockers and get it all set prior to adulthood. This is mind boggling conflict of interest. Bowers has publicly stated he believes these regretters have only themselves to blame, after claiming its “so rare.”)

At the end of Seal’s session, a clinician from Utah said that she, too, was seeing people seek nonbinary interventions at a “dramatically increased” rate. And she wasn’t sure what to offer them.

The clinician emphasized that she had no problem with the novelty of nonbinary procedures. She even liked the idea of making a kind of “Pinterest board” of gender procedures that could be offered, according to the video.

She said that she sometimes felt like saying that both she and other WPATH clinicians were making it up as they went along: “Because I feel like we’re all just winging it, you know? And which is okay, you’re winging it too. But maybe we can just, like, wing it together.”

Getting More Surgeons on Board

We don’t know what happened to Sky. But we do know about young people like him who have had the genital-erasing surgery Sky was seeking.

Another new chapter in the 2022 revision of WPATH’s Standards of Care is “Eunuchs.” WPATH defines eunuchs as “those assigned male at birth (AMAB) [who] wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals, or genital functioning.”

Eunuchism is documented throughout history, typically as a form of punishment or enslavement—or even to keep a young male singer’s voice from maturing. WPATH has reframed the desire for castration as a gender identity. Eunuchs, the Standards of Care explain, “may be aware of their identity in childhood or adolescence.” And like other “transgender and gender diverse” people, eunuchs are a “marginalized” group.

At WPATH’s 2022 annual conference, two contributors to the Eunuch chapter, Thomas W. Johnson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, Chico, and Michael S. Irwig, a physician with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, presented their work. (This video was first released by journalist Wesley Yang.) Johnson explained that the causes of eunuch identity include “desire to be not male, but. . . not. . . female either,” [or] “feeling that [one’s] genitals are not a proper part of [one’s] body” and “an extreme fetish or paraphilic disorder.”

Irwig, an endocrinologist, said that he became interested in this topic because “a lot of eunuchs do get castrated” and seek ongoing treatment from doctors like him.

During the Q&A session of the eunuch talk, the only objection came from an audience member who thought Johnson and Irwig’s use of the word castration was “stigmatiz[ing].”

Another audience member, Thomas Satterwhite, a prominent gender surgeon, recalled how Johnson helped him overcome his doubts ahead of the first castration he performed on a gay man. “Since then, I do perform a fair number of these procedures as well as other forms of genital and gender-affirming surgery that’s, um, quote, unquote, nonstandard,” Satterwhite said.

Satterwhite, who founded Align Surgical Associates in San Francisco, a private clinic specializing in gender surgery, wanted to know how the field can “get more surgeons on board” with such procedures. Irwig responded that the inclusion of a Eunuch chapter in WPATH’s latest Standards of Care, “is so huge because it’s now in the official guidelines.” There are, Irwig said, a lot of doctors and surgeons who don’t want to be seen as being “rogue and doing things that. . . may get them into trouble or that. . . may get their licenses pulled.”

The new guidelines, he said, help “alleviate some of their concerns.”

The Free Press sought comment from WPATH and the individuals who spoke in the videos cited in this article. OHSU, on behalf of its clinicians, declined to comment. Johnson said he stood by his remarks but added that paraphilia is a better word than fetish for describing one cause of eunuch identity. The others did not respond.

A New Era

The origin of pediatric gender transition began in the late 20th century as a cosmetic solution to a psychological problem. Until then, the entire field of gender medicine was tiny and primarily focused on “adult transsexuals.” These were largely middle-aged men seeking to pass as women.

The Dutch clinicians who first proposed medical transition for minors did so after observing that although the adult males said they were mostly satisfied with their decision to undergo procedures, their life circumstances had not always improved. The Dutch clinicians theorized that that was partly because of the difficulty of passing as female after experiencing the effects of male puberty, which left them with features such as broad shoulders and deep voices.

So the Dutch clinicians came up with a solution. What if they identified so-called “juvenile transsexuals” early in life, before the “wrong” puberty permanently altered them? What if they blocked a boy’s puberty, then put him on estrogen, followed by genital surgery, so that he could cosmetically pass as female as he entered adulthood?

In the 1990s, they put this idea into practice in what became known as the Dutch Protocol. Though never subjected to rigorous testing, it spread rapidly throughout the Western world. The word transsexual was discarded, and transgender became a catchall term for anyone whose “inner sense of gender” was at odds with the sex they were “assigned at birth.”

More than seven in 10 Americans, including more than half of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, believe minors should not be offered puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

Then in the second decade of the 21st century, there began an unprecedented rise in adolescents—mostly teenage girls, many with emotional and psychological problems—declaring they were trans. Many had no childhood history of gender dysphoria. But they sought powerful male hormones—administered at six to 100 times the normal range for girls their age—and surgeries to remove their healthy breasts.

At the same time, a focus on identity began to consume liberals across the West, and trans advocates in medicine began embracing a new treatment goal that now regarded assimilation as a perceived member of the opposite sex as entirely optional.

The thinking went like this: Since “gender binary” is an oppressive social construct “rooted in colonialism” (as one WPATH speaker put it), why encourage teens to conform to it? According to OHSU’s Jess Guerriero, a social worker at the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital gender clinic, who spoke at WPATH’s 2021 conference, clinicians should “actively challeng[e]” gender norms and prioritize “authenticity instead over assimilation.”

By the time WPATH’s 2022 Standards of Care were published, many practitioners attending the organization’s conference fully embraced the idea that wanting to alter one’s body to match one’s gender vision was primarily a matter of aesthetics and self-expression. The diagnosis and treatment of possible mental health issues took a back seat.

In 2024, Annelou de Vries, the leading figure behind the original Dutch Protocol, co-authored a paper in BMC Medical Ethics arguing that the field of gender medicine should move beyond the “logic of improvement,” which states that medical interventions are justified if they credibly result in mental-health benefits.

De Vries and her co-authors cited the work of Florence Ashley, a Canadian jurist who identifies as transgender and who has put the matter even more emphatically. The goal of treatment, Ashley wrote, should be achievement of “gender euphoria” and “creative transfiguration,” which means “see[ing] the body as a gendered art piece that can be made ours through transition-related interventions.”

This new paradigm means that clinicians no longer understand themselves to be treating a mental-health condition, even if they tell insurance companies for billing purposes that’s what they’re doing. And even if they tell parents of minors and the public at large that the medical interventions they propose are “lifesaving.”

They also acknowledge, even celebrate, the precarious and unstable nature of the gender identities of many of the young people who come to them confused and distressed.

“We understand that gender expression and gender identity are very individualized and. . . may change over time,” said Guerriero. “And we want to be part of that journey.”

A consistent theme in the WPATH videos is that whatever gender clinicians tell the outside world, in their own internal discussions many freely and proudly proclaim that they conduct no assessments, either of mental health or even of gender identity, and base treatment considerations on an individual’s cosmetic “goals.”

This may result in young patients being given medical interventions that will be difficult, even impossible to undo.

What Now?

In the first days of his administration, President Joe Biden ordered the expansion of access to so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors. His administration made it a priority thereafter. After all, since 2012 Biden was calling the transgender movement “the civil rights issue of our time.”

But in the first few days of his second term in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which instructed the agencies of the federal government to take steps to bring the practice of medicalized transition of minors to an end.

Since then, the Department of Health and Human Services has published “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” (Disclosure: I was a contributor to the report.) It came to the same conclusion as reviews conducted in several progressive European countries: The evidence for medically transitioning minors is very poor. The peer-reviewed HHS review also examined pediatric transition through the lens of widely accepted principles of medical ethics, concluding that the case against such transition is compelling.

I suggest change the subject when it comes up, only have these talks with relatives in small groups or one on one on the walks, during clean up &etc. Please do let us know in the comments if confused youth in the family have desisted or detransitioned. I predict we’ll see an uptick on that front this year. Enjoy the holiday, save the frustration with Webberley-like relatives for comments on my videos! Try to keep connections alive. As detransitioner Simon Price says below, we need to help build the off ramps from this highway to nowhere that misguided doctors constructed.

With so much news about men in women’s sports hitting the fan this week, the inevitable post pumpkin pie conversations about all things trans seems inevitable at gatherings. Dr. Helen Webberley appeared on several YouTube channels this week, accusing Andrew Gold (Heretics on YT) and Robbie Starbuck (eponymous channel) of using the poor, downtrodden, “bullied” trans youth for clicks and money. This is laughable and ironic, as she’s expanding her online reach into the US, claiming the “affirmative care” involving gonadatrophin agonists, aka puberty blockers, and wrong sex hormones are the solution to cross-sex ideation. But she uses the captured language of “born in the wrong body” and “trans identity.” She’s become the expert in dodging, conflating gender stereotypes with sex and using accusations of bigotry when her interviewer asks a pointed question about the inconsistencies, sketchy research on the topic or the fact that detransitioners tell us the truth about rushed decisions to permanently alter the urinary tract via “reassignment” surgeries.

At this point, she’s got her thumb in the dike while a tsunami of medical malpractice brews in the sea on the other side. In this video linked above, I list a few of the serious flaws in the De Vries et al 2014 study that resulted in the Dutch Protocol, that is the “affirmative care” practice Dr. Webberley feverishly promotes from a distance to her online patients. I forced myself to watch both of the above listed videos through to the end, nauseating as they were. As usual when I watch the performance of a true acolyte in trans cult, I noted the repeated phrases, captured language and severe reprimands Dr. Helen tossed out when challenged. Unfortunately, Andrew Gold and Robbie Starbucks did not have the details of this study memorized, as I do. In addition to the outrageous facts, such as the 2 deaths that occurred in the study, glossed over by De Vries and her team, there was no longitudinal follow up until recently, when half of the participants were “lost to follow up” and a significant number of the ones they did find had moved on to “non-binary” and other “gender incongruent” identities, demonstrating the fluctuating psychological state for many patients. Sadly, several also mentioned they regretted losing their fertility, remarking that their teen self couldn’t have understood such a decision. These individuals are now in their late 20s to mid-30s.

A few more relevant facts, the kind Dr. Webberley finds inconvenient:

The US Dept. of Health and Human Services requested peer review of their analysis of research on “affirmative care” of minor patients presenting with cross-sex ideation. The AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) and Society of Endocrinologists declined to participate. The American Psychological Association wrote a sketchy response in which many false accusations were lobbed at HHS.

From The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neill:

HHS published a review of the evidence regarding medical transition for minors in May, finding “extremely weak evidence” for any benefits from “gender-affirming care.” HHS sought peer reviw, submitting its report to medical professionals and pro-transgender health associations. Yet two of the three pro-transgender groups HHS approached refused to engage, and the remaining organization appeared not to have read the full report.

The back-and-forth appears in a supplement to the final review, published Tuesday.

“HHS offered the leading organizations advocating for these treatments an opportunity to have their experts participate in a rigorous peer-review process and point out whether the review might have made errors or omissions,” Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of the review’s nine contributors, told The Daily Signal. “As the supplement clearly shows, no such errors or omissions could be identified.”

“Perhaps that’s why advocates of these controversial drugs and surgeries prefer to silence critics and engage in smear campaigns,” he added.

(Ute’s note: Perhaps that’s why Dr. Webberley goes on the offensive to shut down any interviewer asking logical and reasonable questions about permanently life-altering treatments she promotes and profits from. She pretended in her interview with Robbie Starbuck that she hadn’t smeared female athlete, Riley Gaines, calling her a “bigot” in a tweet. She conveniently didn’t remember doing it.)

The HHS Review

The HHS review, which President Donald Trump ordered in January, found that most children will grow out of gender dysphoria, the persistent and painful sense of identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex.

The review notes that transgender medical interventions “carry risk of significant harms,” including sterility, lower bone density, brain impacts, diseases, and more. It laments a lack of research into whether therapy, rather than drugs or surgeries, can manage gender dysphoria.

The review does not present itself as a clinical practice guideline, but it makes the case that experimental “gender-affirming care” likely does more harm than good for minors.

Survey in Florida demonstrates doctors support limiting “affirmative care” for minors.

Also from The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neill, results of a survey of doctors in Florida, on their support or opposition to laws against blockers and hormones for minors there:

The survey asked doctors and the general public: “Florida has passed legislation that prohibits medical professionals from providing sex change interventions, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery, to individuals under 18. To what extend to you support or oppose that law?”

Most doctors (66%) said they “strongly support” (55%) or “somewhat support” (11%) such laws, while only 11% said they “somewhat oppose” them, and less than a quarter (23%) said they “strongly oppose” them. This support echoes that of the general public, 60% of whom said they strongly (49%) or somewhat (12%) support such laws.

Now, the perspective of one young man who desisted, after teen years socially “transitioning:”

Simon B. Amaya Price on Genspect Substack Blog

I was fourteen when I learned about the “gender unicorn” in my sex ed class, at fifteen, my pediatrician asked my father if he wanted “a dead son or a living daughter,” and my parents had to walk on eggshells knowing that the state would take me from them if they were too overt about their opposition to my transgender identity. I was blind to the reality: gender ideology is an underdog narrative with institutional support. I immediately felt like a stray dog pushed into a corner, with the coercive force of the government and major societal institutions at my back. I truly believed that either I was going to transition or die, and that the world was against me.

For much of the first year of my transgender identification, I saw a therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital. While she was somewhat helpful at first, she was rendered useless after I shared my transgender identity with her. She believed that she could not understand in any meaningful way what it was like to be transgender, despite her best efforts. And when one does not understand another, what use is there in attempting to provide advice?

My therapist was, at least implicitly, a believer in standpoint epistemology. That is, the belief that there are certain categories of information that are only accessible to people in particular identity groups. While at first this may appear reasonable - I, as a white man will never know the subjective experience of being Black, Asian, or Arab - standpoint epistemology further postulates that no amount of explaining will be able to give me a practical or actionable understanding of the reality faced by other races.

It may not be immediately obvious to the reader how ingrained standpoint epistemology is in our culture. Look for phrases like: “my truth,” “as a trans woman I...,” or “listen to trans voices.”

One soon realizes that most, if not all, transgender people construct an understanding of the world not based on empiricism and scientific thinking, but instead on standpoint epistemology. There is little point in talking to someone if the ability to possess certain knowledge is predicated on an immutable identity. A transgender activist’s debate with someone who disagrees then becomes not a good-faith attempt to change his mind, but instead a performance for the camera - and more importantly, an act of loyalty to the ideology.

Share

This creates a situation where transgender people can say what they want, and to be a “good person,” you must always take them at their word. This unearned trust is constantly abused. When surrounded by yes-men, thinking inevitably degrades, into emotion first, reason second. Rationality is replaced with rationalization. To stay secure in my transgender identity, I had to become a professional apologist for gender ideology – not unlike a religious apologist – appealing to faulty logic and poorly conducted studies. While unintelligent people may be unable to see the merits of the opposition’s arguments, intelligent people can convincingly win a debate, even if the other side is in the right.

Their only chance at winning is to fight dirty and silence the opposition. Even if only a few are consciously aware of this, the incentive structures have converged on their present strategy. Those who are amenable to reasonable discussion and new information will quickly find themselves in one of two situations: either they are cast out for asking questions, failing a purity test, or they kneel to the ideology, apologize, and stop questioning. I refused to do the latter, so now I get regular death threats.

(Ute’s note: This fits Dr. Webberley to a T.)

A fictitious minority has been constructed into which anyone, for any reason, can opt in. There are no objective measures for gender dysphoria, nor objective standards for who is and who isn’t transgender. Yet transgender identity is widely considered to be real, consequential, and oppressed. While these contradictions may seem obvious to an outside observer, true believers are. blind to them. That doesn’t mean they are wholly irrational: they do have reasons for thinking what they think, which are crucial to understand if we are to engage in dialogue with them, as Charlie Kirk died doing. We need to provide them with an off-ramp.

Simon is a desister, writer, and speaker, fighting gender ideology with classical liberal values. He has written for The Boston Globe, testified on bills nationwide, has spoken in communities across the country, and been featured in the Daily Mail, Boston Herald, and The Daily Signal. Simon is the Outreach and Events Lead at the LGB Courage Coalition.

Now, the words of a man who detransitioned years ago, to regret his harassment of women he called “transphobic.” He also regretted his medicalized path of hormones and surgeries:

Here are the words Davina Anne Gabrielle (original name unavailable) used in his last letter, “I also regret all of my previous activism on behalf of transgender causes, because I regret doing anything that might have encouraged anyone to follow in the same mistaken path that I have taken. Transgender persons are deluding themselves into believing they are empowering themselves by making it easier for them to change their sex, or by de-stigmatizing gender dysphoria…”

“Furthermore, I have come to the conclusion that transsexualism is a delusion, a psychological disorder, and a form of self-hatred. Rather than opening up new possibilities for me, it as constricted my life at every stage and in every way.

I say this because I have come to realize that all the causes of gender dysphoria are sociological in nature, and not biological. That means I no longer believe that anyone is in the ‘wrong body’, or is the ‘wrong sex’. The body into which nature places persons, and the sex it gives to them is always the right one. All feelings of being in the ‘wrong body’ or the ’wrong sex’ are caused by sociological factors, specifically the way in which sex and sexuality are socially constructed in this society. It is only because people internalize these social constructions that they experience conflict between minds and bodies.”

Read his words for yourself—there is much more in the letters. This strong language will not change his actions of the last decades. But perhaps his words will be educational to all who read them. As you can see in his final letter, he clearly expressed his wish for the entire letter to be posted on his Facebook page. This has not happened!

Davina’s Facebook page exists, but as of January, 2018 his wishes have not been honored. The letter was read to the crowd who attended the memorial service held on April 23, 2016 at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City. He clearly wanted all of this letter to be public knowledge. We found access to the farewell letter at the University of Missouri, K.C. archives. The letter to Lesbian Connection is available online http://eminism.org/michigan/20000127-gabriel.txt.

Final note from Ute: How many detransitioners, how many flaws in how may low quality studies, how many women abused by crossdressing men will it take for Dr. Helen Webberley to recognize the damage she’s caused to society. When will she recognize her own bullying and badgering of the people who courteously invite her on their channels?