Transgender medical symposium showcases radical quackery

The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) is the leading enabler of transgender medical quackery in the world.  It was the WPATH “standards of care” paper that originally provided the academic cover for the seemingly instantaneous mainstream adoption of “gender affirming” medicine. The Standards of Care, now on their eighth iteration, have been used to inject transgenderism into medical education, care, and training by respectable medical entities across the nation including the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Without WPATH, “gender affirming” medicine simply wouldn’t exist at the scale it does today, but even though millions of Americans are aware of and participate in the debates surrounding transgenderism relatively few are familiar with the organization that started it all.

Last month, WPATH and its supporters gathered for their 2025 annual symposium in New Mexico. WPATH is extremely cagey about these symposiums. Last year, the Capital Research Center attempted to purchase a digital admission ticket with access to recordings of speeches, panels, and research presentations, but WPATH returned the funds and refused the sale. This year, there was no ticketing option to obtain digital recordings at all, but the online schedule for the symposium is publicly available and tells the story of WPATH 2025.

A grim outlook

The attitude was not optimistic. The schedule shows that numerous plenary sessions, research presentations, and film screenings were dedicated to politics and policy rather than medical research.

The very first plenary session of the symposium was titled “Policies Impacting Trans Health” and featured Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the former executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, and Dr. Carl Streed Jr. a professor of medicine and researcher focusing on LGBTQ medicine at Boston University and the president of the U.S. chapter of WPATH. No doubt the session focused on the numerous legal and policy defeats the transgender movement has suffered over the last several years.

The biggest of those defeats, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender surgical and chemical procedures for children, was the subject of Heightened Scrutiny, an hour-and-a-half long film that was screened in the morning every day of the symposium. The film, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival followed the story of Chase Strangio, a transgender lawyer at the ACLU who argued the case, and ended up losing spectacularly after conceding to the court that “completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare” among gender-confused youth, despite claiming that suicide prevention was the primary justifications for allowing “gender affirming care” procedures children. Some might also remember Strangio for his controversial calls in 2020 to ban the sale of a book on the harms of transgender medicine; and for interviews where he described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Despite the massive loss in court, WPATH was apparently proud to showcase Strangio’s story and determined to keep “gender affirming” medicine in the mainstream, particularly as it pertains to children. Even though marketing transgenderism towards children is clearly the cause of the transgender movement’s legal and cultural defeats, a total of 18 events and presentations on the WPATH 2025 schedule specifically focus on research and policy related to transgenderism and children.

A session on day two of the gathering titled “Fostering Gender Literacy and Centering Trans Joy in Young Children: Insights from the GenderFlex Study.” It featured the leading authors of an ongoing research project at the University of Minnesota’s Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health that aims to discover “accurate, inclusive measures of gender identity that children are able to understand in order to self-report their own identity.”

The Eli Coleman Institute is named for Dr. Eli Coleman, lead author of the WPATH Standards of Care who has admitted under oath that “social factors” play a huge role in convincing children that they’re transgender, and that WPATH’s Standards of Care did not adhere to academic standards regarding conflict of interest. The goal of the research, once the medical-speak is stripped away, is to examine which of series of questionnaires meant to measure “gender identity” were responded to most positively by a sample of 100 children ages five to eight. The study is still pre-publication, so not much information is available, but a copy of the abstracts from the 2023 WPATH symposium shows that the preliminary results of the study found that “Children seemed to prefer questions with open-ended, inclusive responses. For example, when asked why the open-ended question was their favorite, one said, ‘Because I got to pick my gender.’”

Other presentations, like “Intersex Exceptions in U.S. Laws Restricting Medical Care for Transgender Minors” focused on the policy-side of the transgender question. This session presented research showing that that 28 states have passed legislation restricting transgender procedures on children, and claims that the legislation is “discriminatory” because each bill included exceptions for operations on children with genetic variations in sex characteristics (VSCs), or hermaphroditism. The “research” is little more than an exercise in counting and copy-pasting legislation as an excuse a to publish a political diatribe under the guise of academic research, but it was enough to earn four of its thirteen authors an entire mini-symposia at WPATH.

It was not the only example. Other mini-symposiums titles included: “The President Said There’s No More They/Them: Caring for Prepubescent Gender Diverse Children Amidst Governmental Attacks on Transgender People,” “Correcting Disinformation on Transgender Care in the Courts,” and “Strategic Solidarity: Leveraging Interdisciplinary Resistance to Save Gender-Affirming Care.” All of these sessions were hosted by the leading authority on transgender medicine in the world, one that supposedly conducted extensive, thorough, and objective medical research to determine the authoritative best practices for transgenderism across all fields of medicine.

WPATH shouldn’t be taken seriously

The 2025 symposium schedule provides good reason to doubt WPATH’s objectivity and clearly shows why WPATH is so unwilling to provide recordings of their symposium to the public. WPATH is a secretive organization that should be trusted to decide medical policy of any sort. But it is being held up as an authoritative voice equal to other well-established medical institutions.

How many seminars on “Leveraging Interdisciplinary Resistance” or “Transforming Health Outcomes Through Lived Experience and Community Engagement” do you think the American Association for Cancer Research or the American Neurological Association hosted this year?

Luckily, WPATH standards are increasingly viewed with suspicion and disdain by medical professionals. Last year the United Kingdom officially broke with WPATH recommendations and banned transgender medicine for minors after the infamous Cass Review study found that there was little to no evidence that medically transitioning minors helped them in any way. Closer to home, numerous hospitals have closed entire wings dedicated to transgender medicine for both minors and adults. Kaiser Permanente recently announced that all 40 of its hospitals would be halting gender-related surgeries for minors, and in August the University of Michigan Medical Center announced it would stop providing hormone therapy and puberty blockers to minors entirely. As mentioned above, at least have also passed legislation banning transgender surgeries and hormone injections for minors.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/transgender-medical-symposium-showcases-radical-quackery/