They are saying the quiet part out loud.
A damning new report from journalist Michael Shellenberger’s nonprofit Environmental Progress reveals leaked files from a leading transgender healthcare organization in which members of the group admit to not knowing the full ramifications of ‘gender affirming care’ and raise the issue of consent among minors.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by detransitioner Isabelle Ayala and her lawyer Jordan Campbell to discuss the so-called WPATH Files and what they show about the state of transgender medicine.
WPATH Files
On Monday, Environmental Progress released a report called The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, which contains newly leaked files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
According to its website, WPATH is an “interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health” whose members “engage in clinical and academic research to develop evidence-based medicine and strive to promote a high quality of care for transsexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals internationally.”
In a press release, Environmental Progress notes that WPATH is widely considered the scientific and medical authority on “gender medicine,” and the non-profit’s Standards of Care (SOC8) are responsible for the gender affirming policies and practices of governments and healthcare providers across the globe – including in the United States.
The leaked internal discussions and documents suggest that – contrary to the group’s public positions – members of WPATH privately have concerns over whether or not minors can truly consent to gender reassignment treatments and procedures that have permanent side effects.
Consent Conundrum
Shellenberger obtained video of WPATH’s May 2022 “Identity Evolution Workshop,” in which a panel of medical professionals engaged in an in-depth discussion about consent.
Two of the people in the workshop were Dan Metzger, MD, and Dianne Berg, PhD. Metzger is an SOC8-certified pediatric endocrinologist at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada. Berg, meanwhile, is a licensed psychologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She is also a member of the Child and Adolescent Committee of WPATH.
Below is a portion of the exchange:
METZGER: I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet. And… I know I’ve heard others in this kind of a… setting say, well, we think adults are like really slick biologically and, in fact, lots of people have very little medical understanding of stuff like that we just as medical professionals and mental health professionals take for granted. So, I think we have to be more concrete than we think we need to be…
I don’t know still what to do for the 14 year olds. The parents have it on their minds, but the 14 year olds, you just– it’s like talking with diabetic complications with a 14 year old. They don’t care…
So I think, I think when we’re doing informed consent, I know that that’s still a big lacuna of that we’re just, we do it. We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it in a serious way. That’s always bothered me, but, you know, we still want the kids to be happy, happier in the moment, right?
BERG: Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on all of the importance that comes up with the informed consent…. Because there’s such a backlog of therapists to do some of the mental health therapeutic support, I often see people who have already engaged in some sort of – and this is again with youth – who’ve already engaged in some sort of medical intervention. And so one of the things I do is I just kind of I’m sitting with the youth and their parents and I say, Oh, well, so tell me more about what you know about that medical intervention.
And kind of like what Dan was saying, you know, children and young adolescents, we wouldn’t really expect them… it’s out of their developmental range sometimes to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them…
But what really disturbs me is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for. And so I think informed consent has to happen very differently for parents.
Campbell, whose law firm focuses on representing detranistioners and others who have been affected by radical gender ideology, said the WPATH Files pull back the curtain. “They show that not only is this care not evidence based, it’s not safe and effective – and they know that,” he explained. “And yet they continue to publicly push this despite what they say in private.”
Ayala’s Experience
Ayala shared that she began ‘transitioning’ with cross-sex hormones at the age of 14. She is now ‘detransitioning’ and suing members of the medical team that oversaw her care. “I don’t really know I would have never known the full gravity of what would have happened to me,” she shared. “I could have never even predicted some of this stuff.”
Now 21 years old, Ayala outlined the lasting impact of the hormone therapy. “I’m just completely different from how I was and I’ll never be the way I was before I started testosterone,” she shared. “My bone structure is compromised due to the fact that I was a growing and developing teenager and actively taking testosterone. I’m dealing with things such as vaginal atrophy and irregular periods. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to have children. And there’s also just a lot of emotional things as well that go along with it.”
In the WPATH Files, doctors describe treating ‘trans’ patients with debilitating bowel problems and bleeding or excruciating pain during sex. One person described it as “feeling like broken glass.”
Even so, the public message from WPATH remains the same. “No matter the complications… the only solution is to continue ‘affirmation,’ and hormone therapy, and surgeries,” Campbell noted. “I hope that the WPATH Files achieve sort of the lifting of the veil and the awakening to the public of what’s actually happening.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ayala and Campbell by tuning in to episode 741 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.