Australia’s most prolific child mutilators, the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service in Melbourne, adamantly claim that their proclivity for pushing children on a path to sterility and life-long medical issues is “science based”. They claim the so-called “gender affirmation model” is “high quality and evidence-based”.
Is it, though?
As the Cass Review in Britain found, the evidence base for such treatment is thin to non-existent.
This prompted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organisation for the doctors and practitioners who provide services to trans people, to release a blistering rejoinder. WPATH said that its own guidelines were sturdier, in part because they were “based on far more systematic reviews”.
Which turns out to be every bit as bullshit at the RCH’s claims.
Court documents recently released as part of the discovery process in a case involving youth gender medicine in Alabama reveal that WPATH’s claim was built on shaky foundations. The documents show that the organisation’s leaders interfered with the production of systematic reviews that it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC) in 2018.
Rather than an impartial review, seeing where the evidence led, WPATH appears to have pre-formed their conclusion, and made damn sure the ‘evidence’ would fit it.
From early on in the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed a desire to control the results of the Hopkins team’s work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, an executive director at WPATH, told Karen Robinson, the EPC’s director, that the WPATH board felt the EPC researchers “cannot publish their findings independently”. A couple of weeks later, Ms Kelly emphasised that, “the [WPATH] board wants it to be clear that the data cannot be used without WPATH approval”.
In other words, if the groomers didn’t get the result they wanted, they’d bury the whole thing.
Even after promising to back off after Johns Hopkins sternly warned about trying to exert undue influence on the review, WPATH weren’t giving an inch.
In August the WPATH executive committee wrote to Ms Robinson that WPATH had “many concerns” about these papers, and that it was implementing a new policy in which WPATH would have authority to influence the EPC team’s output—including the power to nip papers in the bud on the basis of their conclusions.
So far, the review team has only published one paper. Which, contrary to its explicit claims, involved WPATH “in the design, drafting of the article and final approval of [that] article”. More than six years after beginning the review, the EPC team does not appear to have published anything else.
No one at WPATH or Johns Hopkins has responded to multiple inquiries, so there are still gaps in this timeline. But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated […]
Another document recently unsealed shows that Rachel Levine, a trans woman who is assistant secretary for health, succeeded in pressing WPATH to remove minimum ages for the treatment of children from its 2022 standards of care.
Does anyone still really believe that the groomer lobby group is in the least interested in science or evidence?
