WPATH exposed again

At what point will clinicians admit that this activist body has no scientific credibility?

Helen Webberley, a doctor who has twice had her licence to practise revoked, believes in magic. In a recent interview on Andrew Gold’s podcast Heretics, Webberley recalled her first encounter with a trans-identified patient in 2015. Apparently, this man wanted to begin a medical process that would make his male body more like his female ‘soul’. While most believers in ‘gender identity’ tend to use terms such as ‘essence’ or ‘feeling’ or ‘self-understanding’, Webberley is happy to say the quiet part out loud. ‘Soul’ it is, then.

The widespread acceptance of the view that the mismatch of soul and body ought to be treated with medicine rather than therapy is largely down to the influence of WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health), an international body that creates guidelines and standards of care for ‘gender-affirming’ medical practices. In March 2024, files were leaked to journalist Michael Shellenberger which proved that many health professionals associated with the organisation were aware that gender-affirming care was not scientifically or medically sound. Mia Hughes wrote a comprehensive report about the revelations called The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults. It has to be read to be believed.

That should have been the end of WPATH. But ideology is a stubborn parasite, not easily expelled. This week further revelations have been published by The Free Press following analysis of videos taken at WPATH’s closed-door conferences. The footage was released due to a lawsuit in Alabama in which families of gender-distressed children are challenging the validity of WPATH’s authority. As with The WPATH Files, the remarks by gender clinicians released in the subpoenaed videos prove that many of them are fully aware of how ethically dubious their approach has been.

For example, in a discussion on ‘nonbinary’ surgeries, endocrinologist Leighton Seal is recorded admitting that: ‘We are doing procedures here where we don’t have outcome data’. His concern appears to be for the genderist doctors who are left ‘vulnerable’ by the lack of scientific backing, rather than the patients who are being gulled into experimental and unevidenced procedures. Another treatment provider then chips in: ‘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.’

Winging it makes some sense when one considers the sheer flimsiness of this branch of pseudoscience. The entirety of WPATH’s so-called expertise is grounded in the myth of ‘gender identity’. Rather than insisting on dangerous medical intervention, why aren’t leading clinicians in the field investigating whether this special ‘soul’ exists at all? If children are convinced that they are possessed by forest spirits, we do not treat them as though their delusions are correct. We explain to them, patiently, that forest spirits do not exist.

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