(LifeSiteNews) — The fever is beginning to break.
The New York Times has published a number of op-eds and news reports cautiously criticizing aspects of so-called “gender-affirming care” over the past several years, but their February 24 report by journalist Jesse Singal, titled “Medical Associations Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care,” is a full broadside against the trans activist institutional capture of the medical field.
Trans activists, writes Singal, have claimed for years that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex change surgeries are essential and evidence-based:
It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatments as “medically necessary,” “lifesaving” and “evidence-based.”
READ: Newsom downplays LGBT issues in an attempt to appear less radically left than other Democrats
But this is changing. Singal notes that “something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.”
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons came out earlier this month “advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that ‘there are currently no validated methods for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment.”
The American Medical Association, a staunch advocate of transgender “treatments,” followed shortly thereafter, stating that, “In the absence of clear evidence, the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should generally be deferred to adulthood.”
There is more than a little self-interest in these sudden about-faces, as Singal wryly observed:
These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. Ms. Varian and her lawyer argued that her psychologist and plastic surgeon in suburban New York, despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity, failed to safeguard her by going forward with a double mastectomy when she was 16. (Many gender medicine practitioners and advocates believe that to carefully scrutinize or even explore claims of a transgender identity is to engage in de facto conversion therapy.) The jury’s $2 million award will most likely give pause to hospitals and clinics that continue to provide these treatments without substantial guardrails.
Singal has been a longstanding critic of the manufactured consensus on transgender “medicine,” and he noted that this is an opportunity to take a hard look at how we got here. Institutional trust is collapsing, and the ideological capture of medical institutions by trans activists is contributing to that. The Cass Review, he writes, revealed that many organizations merely relied on the guidelines of other organizations, creating “an apparent consensus on key areas of practice for which evidence remains lacking.”
There are also policy positions that strike a normal reader as simply insane. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, stated in 2018 that children as young as four and five “know their gender as clearly and consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” citing a single study. “It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on ‘rigor of development’ and six out of 100 on ‘applicability,’” writes Singal.
This institutional capture was spearheaded by a small group of members. Singal writes:
Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach … This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.
The shakiness of the guidelines didn’t matter, though – they were cited numerous times in news accounts and court documents as evidence that the most important pediatric association in the country supported youth medical transition.
Despite all this, these medical organizations have been front and center in the battle against legislation in red states that restricts sex change treatments for children, including the American Medical Association (which has now retracted its support) as well as the AAP and the American Psychological Association. Even as European countries moved away from these alleged treatments, American groups insisted that a rock-solid consensus existed.
Singal noted that anyone who posed questions about this “consensus” was immediately and viciously attacked as a bigot. Singal, who describes himself as “left of center,” has faced the wrath of trans activists for years. But as he noted, even the evidence cited by activist medical professionals is incredibly shoddy:
The A.P.A. presents a particularly striking case of why transparency is important. In 2024, it published what it touted as a “groundbreaking policy supporting transgender, gender diverse, nonbinary individuals” that was specifically geared at fighting “misinformation” on that subject. But when I reached out to the group this month, it pointed me to a different document, a letter written by the group’s chief advocacy officer, Katherine McGuire, in September in response to a Federal Trade Commission request for comment on youth gender medicine.
The documents, separated by about a year and a half (and, perhaps as significantly, one presidential election), straightforwardly contradict each other. The A.P.A. in 2024 argued that there is a “comprehensive body of psychological and medical research supporting the positive impact of gender-affirming treatments” for individuals “across the life span.” But in 2025, the group argued that “psychologists do not make broad claims about treatment effectiveness.”
READ: Maryland school district agrees to pay parents $1.5 million, allow opt-outs for LGBT books
How did we get here? The answer is obvious, and Singal provides it: “[P]olitical forces are the culprit.” What does this mean? That, too, is obvious: “You cannot automatically trust what these organizations say at a given moment. Not unless they provide a lot more information about their decision-making processes.”
LGBT groups and their media allies have already issued a series of missives to blunt the damage of his reporting, claiming that he is peddling “lies.” But trans activists are losing the New York Times, and the lawsuits – and the massive judgements against perpetrators of “youth gender medicine” – are just beginning. Some major medical organizations have already seen the writing on the wall and are fleeing the sinking ship. More will follow.
