WPATH & Rachel Levine: Child-Catchers

Yet another horrifying twist in the ever-burgeoning WPATH scandal.

New information has revealed a further shocking aspect to the increasingly disturbing scandal of the ‘WPATH files’.

The current US Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, is a trans-identified male who ‘transitioned’ in 2011 when he was 53 years old.

In 2019, addressing the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, he openly stated that he’s glad he ‘transitioned’ later in life because he would otherwise not have fathered his children. “If I’d transitioned when I was young, then I wouldn’t have my children”, he said. “I can’t imagine a life without my children... How could I regret that?”

Yet he seems perfectly happy to deny other people the chance to be a parent. Since taking office in 2021 he has been a vociferous advocate of medical interventions for dysphoric children and he seems very eager to treat gender-confused kids with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, Levine claims that children can experience ‘the wrong puberty’ and frequently talks about ‘the value and importance’ of medical interventions for dysphoric children, describing them as ‘lifesaving’ and ‘medically necessary’.

Furthermore, Levine has actively opposed the legislation passed in some US states which bans the medicalisation of gender dysphoric minors and he has worked with trans activist groups to block legislation that would have prevented the state from funding child ‘sex changes’.

In February 2023, The Daily Caller reported on newly unearthed emails in which Levine discussed the ‘potential revenue’ and the ‘return on investment’ of employing a social worker specifically for dysphoric or gender distressed children at a Pennsylvania hospital.

The emails, obtained by parental rights campaigner, Megan Brock, date from 2018 when Levine was Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health. His exchange was with Dr Rollyn Ornstein, a paediatrician at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital. Their correspondence concerned the potential employment of a social worker for the hospital’s gender clinic and they discussed whether funding the role would generate enough money to make it worthwhile. Both clinicians agreed that the surgeries which would be generated by employing a dedicated social worker for gender confused children would mean that the role could pay for itself.

Levine commented that surgical referrals might be limited to ‘top surgery’ - ie double mastectomies - for minors. Ornstein replied, “I am trying to give them some numbers to help them realize the eventual ROI (return on investment)… Even if the patients under 18 who go for surgery might be limited, the patients we start with will eventually be over 18…so I still think it’s worthwhile”.

In March last year, Levine was invited to speak at a medical conference, the Paediatric Grand Rounds Session, at the Children's Medical Centre in Hartford. He told the conference that so-called ‘gender-affirming’ treatment for children has the ‘highest support’ of the Biden administration, praising the procedures being carried out and promising that they will be ‘normalised’.

Last week, as first reported by The New York Times, shocking new revelations were made demonstrating Rachel Levine’s determination to force gender dysphoric kids down a pathway to lifelong medicialisation.

New information has emerged, apparently showing that Levine, Biden’s Assistant Secretary of Health for the Department of Health and Human Services, was instrumental in WPATH removing all age requirements for the medical treatment of dysphoric children from its guidelines.

WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, describes itself as “Non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender”. Its goal, it says, is to “Promote evidence based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health”. Purporting to be experts in ‘trans healthcare’, WPATH is extremely influential, advising governments and medical services all around the world.

In September 2022, WPATH published its Standards of Care Version 8. The original document included minimum ages for so-called ‘gender affirming’ treatments and surgeries for minors; 14 for the prescription of cross-sex hormones, 15 for a double mastectomy, 16 for breast implants and cosmetic facial surgery and 17 for hysterectomy, orchidectomy (castration), and metoidioplasty (the surgical construction of small neo-phallus from existing genital tissue).

Following the document’s initial release, WPATH abruptly issued a correction and published a revised version of the guidance. In this revised version, the minimum age requirements for these irreversible and life-altering surgeries had been removed entirely.

This week, documentation has been ‘unsealed’ as part of a legal case currently ongoing the US, Boe v. Marshall, one of numerous law suits regarding the medical treatment of gender distressed minors. One of the items submitted into evidence is a document called ‘Appendix A To Supplemental Expert Report Of James Cantor PhD’.

James Cantor is an American-Canadian clinical psychologist, sexologist and academic, specialising in hypersexuality and paraphilias. According the CBC News, Cantor has testified in over 25 legal cases related to gender ideology.

In the documents submitted to the Boe v Marshall lawsuit, Cantor maintains that WPATH removed the age guidelines due to direct pressure from Rachel Levine and the American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP). He substantiates this claim with internal communications from WPATH members who were involved in the creation of the Standards of Care Version 8.

Cantor maintains that, “Assistant Secretary Levine also attempted to and did influence the substantive content of SOC-8, based on political goals rather than science. Specifically, Assistant Secretary Levine, though [sic] a staff member, pressured WPATH to remove recommended minimum ages for medical transition treatments from SOC-8.”

Again, he provides evidence of this claim in the form of emails sent by those involved. These include messages which discuss commentary from Sarah Boateng, Levine’s chief-of-staff, in which it is expressed that Levine’s “Biggest concern is the section in the Adolescent Chapter that lists specific minimum ages” for medical treatment.

(Jesse Singal has detailed these communications in his Substack article on this scandal.)

James Cantor also claims that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) influenced the removal of the minimum ages, having issued an ‘ultimatum’ to WPATH that a refusal to delete age minimums would result not only in the AAP withholding endorsement of its guidelines, but that it would also publicly oppose them.

But the story doesn’t end there. Further leaked communications show that WPATH tried to suppress the findings of research which it had commissioned.

In 2020, WPATH commissioned John Hopkins University to carry out a systematic review of existing research on cross-sex medical treatments. The study found ‘little to no evidence’ to support the medicalisation of gender-distressed children and adolescents. So WPATH blocked researchers from publishing their findings.

In March this year, journalist, Michael Shellenberger, published a shocking 242-page report known as ‘The WPATH Files’. authored by researcher Mia Hughes. Relying on documents sourced from an internal whistleblower, the report brought to light a chilling scandal within the organization. It describes medical malpractice on a massive scale and a total lack of any medical ethics; minors encouraged into treatments and procedures they could not possibly understand or properly consent to, homeless and schizophrenic people undergoing ‘sex change’ surgeries and even “Extreme body modifications performed with no medical justification”.

As Malcolm Clark writes in The Critic, “WPATH is little more than a pressure group made up of a mixture of saucer-eyed trans activists and self-professed experts in disciplines like endocrinology, psychiatry and surgery. “Experts” who just happen to pocket huge profits from the mutilation and sterilisation of deluded people who are convinced they were born in the wrong body. Yet by a combination of external bullying and internal feeble-mindedness, some of the world’s top medical authorities from the BMA to the American American Academy of Pediatrics have given WPATH the stamp of approval.”

The power held by WPATH and its ideological champions, such as Rachel Levine and the AAP, has persisted for too long. Medical practices, particularly those involving children, need to be rooted in evidence rather than driven by ideology.

First, do no harm.