'At a closed-door meeting in 2021, ACLU attorney Chase Strangio declared, “If we take away these health care options, kids are going to die.” The scrappy litigator uttered this dire proclamation in an address at the biennial conference of USPATH, the US branch of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. Strangio has played a pivotal role in the transgender movement’s general refusal to offer concessions on the chief principles animating its cause. Most central, and controversial, has been the demand that minors identifying as transgender have access to gender-transition treatments, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
Speaking to USPATH, Strangio entreated attendees to infuse legal and political advocacy into their work as doctors and mental-health providers. This battle cry was tempered with a foreboding vision of a dystopian future, one with “so many catastrophic outcomes” and a legal landscape for transgender people in which it could become “impossible for us to survive.” Bans on pediatric gender medicine—which at the time of the meeting had passed in only one state—were just “an entry point,” Strangio prophesied, to “banning care for all trans people.”
The subsequent years would actually deliver a more drastic cascade of defeat than Strangio envisioned. Today, bans of gender-transition interventions for minors blanket more than half of US states. And the second Trump administration has run roughshod over this beleaguered field, using the might of multiple federal agencies to bring it to heel. In the face of this onslaught, WPATH has not budged. And having asserted itself as the decisive authority on caring for youth identifying as transgender, WPATH’s leaders have made their organization’s own reputation inseparable from pediatric gender medicine’s. If one goes south, so goes the other.
Now we have a new, wide-open window into the workings of this influential and secretive organization, thanks to a pivotal legal case in Alabama. In 2022, families represented by ACLU attorneys and other litigators sued the state over its pediatric gender medicine ban. The state responded by subpoenaing WPATH’s internal records after a judge established WPATH’s transgender-care guidelines were the linchpin for validating these medical practices as safe and effective. A portion of the resulting trove was unsealed in 2024. In June 2025, the remaining subpoenaed cache was unsealed. In the fall, all those files landed on my computer. This is the story those records—almost all of them previously unreported—told.'
Continues in the link below.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-gender-medicine-set-itself-up-for-disaster/
Substack.
'This particular Substack acts as a companion piece to my Compact article. In it, I have placed clips from all the conference videos I quote or specifically reference in the article. Those clips are compiled in full in the video above. And each individual clip is published in order below.'
https://benryan.substack.com/p/i-obtained-100s-of-conference-videos?triedRedirect=true