TALLAHASSEE, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — Florida Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier has filed a lawsuit against the American Academy for Pediatrics (AAP), the so-called World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and the Endocrine Society, accusing them of deceiving the public on the safety of “gender transition” practices on confused minors.
The suit alleges that, for the sake of their “ideology and financial incentives,” the named organizations “developed a treatment protocol that irreversibly alters children’s bodies to conform to their anxieties” rather than “attempting to resolve the underlying causes of psychological distress,” which they justified with “a coordinated campaign to develop ‘clinical guidelines’ recommending sex intervention for pediatric gender dysphoria.”
“There has never been any credible evidence for any of these recommendations,” the suit maintains, but the organizations successfully created public perception to the contrary “by continuing to reference one another over an extended period of time.”
“Defendants’ reprehensible and immoral actions capitalize on the mental distress of children – as well as the natural affections and fears their parents – to help their members sell lucrative surgeries and drugs that irreversibly mutilate and chemically alter children’s bodies without providing any credible medical benefit,” Florida adds. “In their wake is a growing number of ‘detransitioners’ who feel ‘butchered by institutions [they] thought [they] could trust.’”
The suit says that this effort to protect the $4.1 billion sex intervention industry (projected to rise to $8 billion by 2030) violates Florida’s Deceptive & Unfair Trade Practices Act and “constitutes a pattern of racketeering activity under the Florida Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organization Act (the Florida RICO Act).” Florida is seeking $1 million fines per organization, a block on repeating their false claims in the future, and additional $10,000 fines per each instance of “transmitt[ing] false or misleading claims about the safety, reversibility, or efficacy of sex interventions,” which could potentially add up catastrophically for the defendants.
In 2023, @GovRonDeSantis signed legislation to ban so-called “gender-affirming care” for kids. Now it’s time for accountability!
Today, my office sued @wpath, @AmerAcadPeds, and @TheEndoSociety for mutilating kids and misleading families. pic.twitter.com/RrbIfYEFEq
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) December 9, 2025
“For years, these groups insisted the recommendations were settled science, but behind closed doors, they knew the evidence was weak,” Uthmeier said in his announcement of the action. “They knew the outcomes [were] uncertain, and the risks very real. Parents were not told the full story. In fact, some parents were told that if they didn’t put their kids through permanent, life-altering, sick procedures, like double mastectomies and castration, that their child would commit suicide. Not only is that unethical and dangerous medicine, but it is against the law.”
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”