Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall led 21 other state AGs in an amicus brief defending the state’s ban on child sex changes and blasting the World Professional Association of Transgender Health’s (WPATH) guidance for transgender-identified youth.
The AGs come from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
Transgender activists have sued the Attorney General of Alabama over a 2022 law that banned sex change surgeries, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers on patients under 19. The law, which went into effect May 8 of that year, was blocked by U.S. District Judge Liles Burke. (RELATED: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear Says He Opposes Sex Changes For Kids Despite Vetoing A Ban)
During arguments on the case, plaintiffs repeatedly referred to WPATH’s medical guidance for transgender people. Judge Burke granted defendants a subpoena of WPATH’s internal documents related to the process by which WPATH came up with their guidance for transgender people, especially minors.
“One could scarcely dream up a more radical organization to outsource the regulation of medicine to than WPATH,” the AGs write in the brief.
In 2022, WPATH set standards of care for those with a “eunuch” gender identity, recommending hormone suppression, orchiectomy (removal of the testicles) to stop production of testosterone, the possibility of a penectomy to alter the body to match the patient’s self-image and hormone replacement with testosterone or estrogen. WPATH even cited information from the Eunuch Archive, an online forum which contains stories of child castration, pedophilia and sexual torture.
WPATH is stonewalling a judge’s demand for internal docs on how it came up with its guidelines for transgender-identified kids.
“Their credibility will be sunk,” Joseph Burgo of @genspect told the @DailyCaller of the subpoena.https://t.co/uQ6mPxvEB2
— Sarah Weaver (@SarahHopeWeaver) May 5, 2023
“And just as with eunuchs, WPATH’s Standards consider sterilizing sex-modification procedures to be medically necessary ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors suffering from gender dysphoria,” the brief reads.
Due to a dearth of medical evidence for transgender operations, multiple European countries have restricted certain treatments for youth. England’s National Health Service (NHS) advised against social transition for children, and banned puberty blockers in most cases in October, and shut down its only clinic that provided transgender procedures to minors in July. The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board (NHIB/UKOM) decided in March that transgender surgeries, hormones and puberty blockers are experimental. Finland and Sweden have also found that there is insufficient evidence that the benefits of these “treatments” outweigh the costs for children.
WPATH, however, recently pushed to remove any minimum age requirement to undergo sex change surgeries or cross-sex hormone therapy. Amy Tishelman, one of the authors of the 8th edition of WPATH’s guidelines, said WPATH changed the guidelines so doctors wouldn’t “be sued because they weren’t following exactly what we said.”
The medical organization has been stonewalling efforts to reveal their methods for months, in a move some experts told the Daily Caller in May indicates that they have something to hide. The results of the subpoena have the potential to call into question the entirety of WPATH’s guidelines, which form the basis of transgender medicine in the U.S.
Leading hospitals across the country use this guidance to craft their medical practices, including Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Brigham and Women’s.