When the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care Version 8 was released in September 2022, a very strange thing happened: WPATH removed references to minimum age requirements for various medical interventions, describing the change as a “correction” in a notice that now reads, weirdly: “This correction notice has been removed as it referred to a previous version of the article, which was published in error.” Whatever happened, exactly, it’s clear that until late in the game the document did have age minimums until, suddenly, it did not.
Thanks to a rather remarkable document just unsealed as part of Boe v. Marshall, one of the many American lawsuits over youth gender medicine, we now have a potential explanation for why the age guidelines were removed: direct pressure from assistant secretary for health of the Department of Health and Human Services Admiral Rachel Levine (who is a trans woman herself) and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The document is titled “Appendix A To Supplemental Expert Report Of James Cantor, Ph.D. In it Cantor, a Canadian sex researcher, critic of youth gender medicine, and frequent expert witness on behalf of those attempting to ban or or restrict it (including in this case), claims that “Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine strongly pressured WPATH leadership to rush the development and issuance of SOC-8, in order to assist with Administration political strategy.”
More worryingly, Cantor charges 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.”
Here, too, he has evidence from anonymized emails written by those involved in the SoC 8:
Sarah Boateng, who is Adm. Levine’s chief of staff [said the] biggest concern is the section below in the Adolescent Chapter that lists specific minimum ages for treatment, she is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in DC, and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care. She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out and perhaps an adjunct document could be created that is published or distributed in a way that is less visible than the SOC8, is the way to go.
[T]he Levine angle is important and alarming. It demonstrates an indisputable conflict between how WPATH has portrayed the SoC 8 — as a document steeped in evidence and careful deliberation on the part of experts — and how the guidelines were actually formulated.