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Setback for the Transgender movement: Michael Shellenberger on leaked files revealing medical malpractice on children and vulnerable adults

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Video interview below background information from EnvironmentalProgress.org

LEAKED FILES FROM WPATH REVEAL WIDESPREAD MEDICAL MALPRACTICE ON CHILDREN AND VULNERABLE ADULTS AT GLOBAL TRANSGENDER HEALTHCARE AUTHORITY

World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) members demonstrate a lack of consideration for long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments

Press Release: JDA Worldwide for Environmental Progress

Newly leaked files from within the leading global transgender healthcare body have revealed that the clinicians who shape how “gender medicine” is regulated and practiced around the world consistently violate medical ethics and informed consent. The files, which were leaked from within the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), were published by the US-based think tank Environmental Progress.

WPATH is considered the leading global scientific and medical authority on “gender medicine,” and in recent decades, its Standards of Care have shaped the guidance, policies and practices of governments, medical associations, public health systems and private clinics across the world.

However, the WPATH Files reveal that the organization does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along. Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of “gender-affirming care,” and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.

“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” said Michael Shellenberger, President and founder of Environmental Progress. “The experiments are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled. It’s not medicine since the first rule is to do no harm. And that requires informed consent.”

The raw files have been published in a report called The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, which contains analysis by journalist Mia Hughes that puts the WPATH Files in the context of the best available science on gender distress.

Environmental Progress has made all files available to read at the end of the report. The leaked files include screenshots of posts from WPATH’s internal messaging forum dating from 2021 to 2024 and a video of an internal panel discussion. All names have been redacted other than several WPATH members of public significance, such as Dr. Marci Bowers, an American gynecologist and surgeon who is the President of WPATH, and the Canadian pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger.

In the WPATH Files, members demonstrate a lack of consideration for long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments. Messages in the files show that patients with severe mental health issues, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and other vulnerabilities such as homelessness, are being allowed to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions. Members dismiss concerns about these patients and characterize efforts to protect them as unnecessary “gatekeeping.”

The files provide clear evidence that doctors and therapists are aware they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. Yet they consider life-altering medical interventions for young patients, including vaginoplasty for a 14-year-old and hormones for a developmentally delayed 13-year-old.

The WPATH Files also show how far medical experiments in gender medicine have gone, with discussions about surgeons performing “nullification” and other extreme body modification procedures to create body types that do not exist in nature.

A growing number of medical and psychiatric professionals say the promotion of pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments is a global medical scandal that compares to major incidents of medical malpractice in history, such as lobotomies and ovariotomies.

“Activist members of WPATH know that the so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ they provide can result in life-long complications and sterility and that their patients do not understand the implications, such as loss of sexual function and the ability to experience orgasm,” Shellenberger said. “These leaked files show overwhelming evidence that the professionals within WPATH know that they are not getting consent from children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, or their caregivers.”

Environmental Progress has written to every WPATH member named in the files, as well as additional members whose names have been redacted, to confirm their comments and offer a right of reply. Two people responded – one confirmed that the comments attributed to them were correct, and another did not deny their comments but refuted Environmental Progress’ interpretation of them. Mention of Environmental Progress’ outreach to members via email was then later seen in the form of comments on WPATH’s internal messaging forum.


Interview with Michael Shellenberger from Jordan B Peterson Clips

READ: THE WPATH FILES AND REPORT

All Links

Full WPATH Files and Report

FAQ

Panel Discussion Video

Executive Summary

Excerpts

Powerpoint 

 

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Addictions

There’s No Such Thing as a “Safer Supply” of Drugs

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By Adam Zivo

Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. We encourage our readers to subscribe to them for high-quality analysis on urban issues]

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.

Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.

But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.

The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.

Most doctors quickly abandoned the experiment, and it was shut down after just two years and several high-profile overdose deaths, including that of a 17-year-old girl. Media coverage portrayed safer supply as a generational medical scandal and noted that the British, after experiencing similar problems, also abandoned their experiment.

While the U.S. has never formally adopted a safer-supply policy, it experienced something functionally similar during the OxyContin crisis of the 2000s. At the time, access to the powerful opioid was virtually unrestricted in many parts of North America. Addicts turned to pharmacies for an easy fix and often sold or traded their extra pills for a quick buck. Unscrupulous “pill mills” handed out prescriptions like candy, flooding communities with OxyContin and similar narcotics. The result was a devastating opioid epidemic—one that rages to this day, at a cumulative cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Canada was similarly affected.

The OxyContin crisis explains why many experienced addiction experts were aghast when Canada greatly expanded access to safer supply in 2020, following a four-year pilot project. They worried that the mistakes of the recent past were being made all over again, and that the recently vanquished pill mills had returned under the cloak of “harm reduction.”

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Most Canadian safer-supply prescribers dispense large quantities of hydromorphone with little to no supervised consumption. Patients can receive up to 40 eight-milligram pills per day—despite the fact that just two or three are enough to cause an overdose in someone without opioid tolerance. Some prescribers also provide supplementary fentanyl, oxycodone, or stimulants.

Unfortunately, many safer-supply patients sell or trade a significant portion of these drugs—primarily hydromorphone—in order to purchase more potent illicit substances, such as street fentanyl.

The problems with safer supply entered Canada’s consciousness in mid-2023, through an investigative report I wrote for the National Post. I interviewed 14 addiction physicians from across the country, who testified that safer-supply diversion is ubiquitous; that the street price of hydromorphone collapsed by up to 95 percent in communities where safer supply is available; that youth are consuming and becoming addicted to diverted safer-supply drugs; and that organized crime traffics these drugs.

Facing pushback, I interviewed former drug users, who estimated that roughly 80 percent of the safer-supply drugs flowing through their social circles was getting diverted. I documented dozens of examples of safer-supply trafficking online, representing tens of thousands of pills. I spoke with youth who had developed addictions from diverted safer supply and adults who had purchased thousands of such pills.

After months of public queries, the police department of London, Ontario—where safer supply was first piloted—revealed last summer that annual hydromorphone seizures rose over 3,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. The department later held a press conference warning that gangs clearly traffic safer supply. The police departments of two nearby midsize cities also saw their post-2019 hydromorphone seizures increase more than 1,000 percent.

The Canadian government quietly dropped its support for safer supply last year, cutting funding for many of its pilot programs. The province of British Columbia (the nexus of the harm-reduction movement) finally pulled back support last month, after a leaked presentation confirmed that safer-supply drugs are getting sold internationally and that the government is investigating 60 pharmacies for paying kickbacks to safer-supply patients. For now, all safer-supply drugs dispensed within the province must be consumed under supervision.

Harm-reduction activists have insisted that no hard evidence exists of widespread diversion of safer-supply drugs, but this is only because they refuse to study the issue. Most “studies” supporting safer supply are produced by ideologically driven activist-scholars, who tend to interview a small number of program enrollees. These activists also reject attempts to track diversion as “stigmatizing.”

The experiences of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada offer a clear warning: safer supply is a reliably harmful policy. The outcomes speak for themselves—rising addiction, diversion, and little evidence of long-term benefit.

As the debate unfolds in the United States, policymakers would do well to learn from these failures. Americans should not be made to endure the consequences of a policy already discredited abroad simply because progressive leaders choose to ignore the record. The question now is whether we will repeat others’ mistakes—or chart a more responsible course.

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Health

RFK Jr. says ‘everything is going to change’ with CDC vaccine policy in Michael Knowles interview

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

When Michael Knowles asked new Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if anything will change regarding the public’s justifiable concern with the growth of vaccines, Kennedy quickly shot back, “Everything is going to change.”

Kennedy pointed to the Centers for Disease Control’s current flawed VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) online mechanism.

By way of example, he said, “None of the vaccines that are given during the first six months of life have ever been tested for autism. The only one was the DTP vaccine. And that one study that was done, according to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, found that there was a link.”

But “They threw out that study because it was based upon CDC’s surveillance system, VAERS, and they said that system is no good.”

“That begs the question, why doesn’t CDC have a functional surveillance system?” he asked. “We’re gonna make sure they do.”

“They don’t do pre-licensing safety testing for vaccines” he continued. “They’re the only product that’s exempt. So what they say is, if there are injuries, we’ll capture them afterward.”

However, “they have a system that doesn’t capture them. In fact, CDC’s own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries,” Kennedy said. “It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.”

“Why have we gone for 39 years and nobody’s fixed it?” he wondered, promising, “We’re gonna fix it.”

“We have DOGE (which) knows how to manage data. We’re going to be able to get into these databases and give answers to the American public,” Kennedy predicted.

“We’re going to do replication of all of our studies, which CDC has never done. We’re going to publish our peer review, which CDC has never done,” Kennedy vowed. “So people are going to have real answers for the first time.”

The new HHS head also discussed more broadly his mission after taking over the department’s helm, the mess created by the Biden administration, his job’s challenges, and recent developments thanks to DOGE.

“HHS is a $1.9 trillion agency. It’s the biggest agency in the government. And during the Biden administration, President Biden increased its budget by 38% and increased the workforce by 17%.”

“And by every metric by which we measure public health, health accelerated its decline.”

“When I came to HHS, what I found was a sprawling bureaucracy,” with functional duplication of departments, rampant redundancy and overstaffing, with various sub-agencies often acting in a territorial, self-protecting manner rather than a synergistic one.

“Perverse incentives” sometimes drive employee’s work,” he noted.

Despite his short tenure at HHS, with the help of DOGE, Kennedy has already released 20,000 “bureaucrats” from the department’s ranks.

“We’re going from 82,000 personnel to 62,000,” said Kennedy, carefully pointing out, “We’re keeping the scientists and frontline providers.”

Kennedy said that it has been really hard to fight against the problems at HHS and NIH over the last 40 years from “the outside.”

But “now I’m on the inside,” he declared. “This is the purpose of my life. It’s what I’m going to do over the next four years.”

He concluded:

President Trump promised to return the American dream to Americans.

A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person only has one.

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