The WPATH Files Released.

What does it mean for Australia?

This week we have seen the release of a document that was long awaited in the world of gender critical politics. The WPATH Files, written by Mia Hughes, is an exposé of The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH,).

The WPATH Files has been published by Michael Shellenberger’s organisation Environmental Progress and reveals that there is a surprising absence of scientific rigor and ethical guardrails in an organisation with massive influence over Australian paediatric medical practice and human rights law.

The Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for trans and gender diverse children and adolescence, that is authored by the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, shows the dependence our hospitals have on WPATH standards of care (SOC);

[T]he recommendations made in this document are based primarily on clinical consensus, along with previously published standards of care from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), treatment guidelines and position statements and findings from a limited number of non randomised clinical studies and observational studies. P2

The WPATH Files consists of a 71 page summary and 171 pages of leaked forum discussions, workshops and other files, where members of the WPATH organisation speak candidly and shockingly about their own disturbing clinic practice and crumbling ethical framework.

People have been sounding the alarm on WPATH for a number of years, with almost no attention from the mainstream media.  In 2021 Genevieve Gluck broke the story in Reduxx that the WPATH Standards of Care 8 (SOC8) now included eunuch gender identity under the trans umbrella, and that the eunuch section of the guidelines reveals a disturbing link between WPATH members and paedophilic men who fantasise about castrating boys.

WPATH’s SOC8 unashamedly uses men’s sexual fetish forum, the Eunuch Archives, as a key source in informing the clinical practice around castration as type of affirmation surgery for men who identify as eunuchs. SOC8 states;

the greatest wealth of information about contemporary eunuch-identified people is found within the large online peer-support community that congregates on sites such as the Eunuch Archive (www.eunuch.org), which was established in 1998. WPATH SOC8

Mia Hughes describes the Eunuch Archives as a place where “anonymous men with castration fetishes congregate and share their child castration fantasies.”

Reduxx has previously reported that the Eunuch Archives includes stories of “sadistic sexual abuse of children”, and a member of the Eunuch Archives been convicted of child pornography charges.  Even more shockingly, Genevieve Gluck’s investigation revealed that WPATH member Dr. Thomas W Johnson, who is chief author of the SOC8 eunuch chapter, uploaded surgical videos to the Archives, under the alias of “Jesus”, apparently for the pornographic use of the members of the Eunuch Archives.  

While WPATH calls its treatment approach to gender medicine “innovative”, Mia Hughes points out it only does so because the treatment is unable to aspire to the very low bar of experimentation, “because a real experiment involves control groups and diligent follow-up” (p27).

The resistance to ethical and rigorous medical practice around gender medicine was highlighted in Australia when NSW Children’s Hospital Westmead conducted a study on patients presenting at their gender clinic, where the “physical and mental health of 79 patients” was tracked to map the “outcomes of children who presented with gender distress and gender dysphoria”.

The Four Corners program “Blocked”, was scathing of the study, as were other sections of the ABC who called it “controversial”. Other outlets called the research “anti-trans”. I will remind the reader that the ABC has an active relationship with ACON and it’s AWEI scheme, under which they are rewarded for a positive spin on trans rights claims. “Gender affirming treatment” is a trans rights social justice claim.

Dr Maci Bowers, president of WPATH, who is most famous for having performed the castration surgery on Jazz Jennings from the popular TV show I Am Jazz, has openly admitted that children who experience pubertal suppression at tanner stage 2, as Jazz did, and follow the treatment pathway to cross sex hormones (which almost 100% do), remain “completely unable to orgasm”.  Jazz has continued to experience mental distress.

WPATH Files highlights that WPATH was instrumental in erasing “gender identity disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5) in 2013, and replacing it with “gender dysphoria”. In declassifying the condition as a disorder, the diagnosis of gender dysphoria deems that all comorbidities around gender dysphoria (of which the Westmead study pointed out there are many) are a result of “minority stress” (ie. transphobia).

According to WPATH methodology, paediatric intervention is cosmetic in aim, with the rationale that the person will “pass” more convincingly and experience less transphobia, and therefore the comorbidities that are caused by transphobia will be reduced. This is a very bizarre theory of medicine.

Top Psychiatrist Dr Stephen Stathis, Medical Director of Child and Youth Mental Health Services at Children's Health Queensland has admitted that the evidence base that paediatric intervention with blockers, cross sex hormones and eventually surgery abates psychiatric comorbidities around a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is “weak”.

The governmental has become a key player in the WPATH treatment model of gender dysphoria, because the DSM5 diagnosis removes the disease from the person and places it in the population surrounding the person.  The cultural control mechanisms that are attached to the WPATH theory of gender dysphoria have been too tempting for our governments to resist. The protection racket around these mechanisms and the mythology that underpins them are proving well-resourced and merciless.  

In the same year that the DSM was updated to include gender dysphoria, 2013, the Labor Gillard government amended the Australian Sex Discrimination Act to repeal the definitions of man and woman so as not to exclude a “transgender woman” from the category of woman. No social justice case has ever been taken up with such rigour by any government in history.

The amendment to the SDA has recently been quoted by the Sex Discrimination Commission in her submission to the upcoming court case of Tickle Vs Giggle, where a trans identified male is claiming discrimination for being thrown off a female only app. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner claimed in her submission, that “sex” is not a biological concept.  The Commissioner rests this assertion on the change in the SDA and subsequent changes in the definition of sex in laws passed in Australian states and territories. She suggested that the ordinary meaning of sex has become one based in self-identity.

Unfortunately, the state and territory change to sex in law, that the Commission references, have been passed by locking citizens out of the democratic consultation process with the faulty “minority stress” argument that WPATH authored.

In pushing through Self ID on birth certificates in Queensland, former Queensland Attorney General Shannon Fentiman refused to meet with independent women’s groups, claiming in a speech to Parliament, that the women were trying to "cloak their transphobia in the guise of women’s safety”.

Gender identity is being used by governments to bypass democratic processes and erase the hard-won protection categories that are underpinned by long battles of civil action and broad popular support.  Gender identity as a protected minority category, gives the government the power to re-define sex, and decide which “women” are worthy of protections and which “women” are not.

When a Victorian lesbian group (Lesbian Action Group) was recently ruled against in their application to hold a single sex event for lesbians, the leader of the former lesbian advocacy group Dykes on Bikes, said they were “overjoyed at the findings from the AHRC to reject this so-called ‘Lesbians born female only’ event. This decision proves that transphobia does not deserve a seat at the table in our community”.

No lesbian advocacy group in Australia can attract government funding without adopting WPATH mythology that the recognition of human sex past gender identity is life threatening transphobia. In Victoria a “trans woman” is any man who identifies as a woman, he does not need to have had any of the horrific WPATH treatment protocols that we are inflicting on children.

Historically, minority protection categories are placed in the law to address what JS Mill, called “the tyranny of the majority”. The liberal state technology that has been developed to alleviate the individual from social tyranny (minority stress), is civil rights protections. These protections have been won by women, minority racial populations, the disabled, and homosexuals, through grass roots pluralist activism. 

Gender identity has become a minority protection category in Australia through a change in a US diagnostic manual, under influence of a professional body with a host of dodgy connection. Even if WPATH is an organisation of perfect clinical practice, their influence over Australian law and clinical practice is unethical at best and unconstitutional at worst.

Despite the lack of evidence of the WPATH model of medical intervention into juveniles, the Australian Human Rights Commission has submitted an opinion to the case of Tickle Vs Giggle outlining that they have intervened in multiple court cases to secure this endocrine intervention in minors as a social justice objective.  This intervention is done, often in the absence of parental consent.  The AHRC describe their intervention in children’s endocrine health as securing “procedural steps that trans children are required to adhere to in order to obtain access to gender affirming hormonal treatment”.

Given that even The Guardian are raising concerns this week, many will be hoping that the WPATH files will show some real cracks in the feet of clay that so many of us have been tapping at for years. Alternatively the WPATH Files will be ignored and vilified by those who are deeply invested in the lucrative industries of medicalisation and cultural control that WPATH has invited so many into.

Gender identity needs to be pulled out of our law like a noxious weed from a native forest, we can ignore it, we can pretend we don’t see that it is strangling the seedlings, we can hang the botanists who sound the warnings, but ultimately it is best we just see it for what it is, and get on with the distasteful work of telling the truth out loud, and of feeling the shame that is due to a society who has failed to protect its most vulnerable.