Leading U.S. practitioners of gender-transition techniques knew all along that their treatments were based on “weak evidence” and “consensus” among like-minded doctors, recently unearthed emails reveal.
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) medical directors Madeline Deutsch and Stephen Rosenthal are co-authors of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care version 8 (SOC 8). Rosenthal also founded the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center (CAGC).
Judicial Watch sued to obtain Deutsch and Rosenthal’s emails after a public-records request for them from the Daily Caller was denied in 2023. Two years later, the group finally got them — all 2,491 pages’ worth.
It’s easy to see why UCSF tried to stonewall the Daily Caller’s request. Some of the emails reveal the gender-benders’ fear of and contempt for the website and its co-founder Tucker Carlson. In a 2022 email, UCSF’s Office of Communications Vice Chancellor Won Ha accused Carlson of “not follow[ing] ethical journalistic standards” and planning to produce “a negative story [about CAGC] based on falsehoods and misleading claims.”
In response, Deutsch wrote that she had “taken down” their website’s gender guidelines for minors and “also made a few light edits to the rest of our website to minimize any ability for the content to be weaponized.”
Rosenthal, meanwhile, hoped that “at some point [Carlson] can be sued.”
Had UCSF taken Carlson to court, the high-profile case might have exposed many of the embarrassing facts contained in the emails.
For example, when asked for comment for a 2022 New York Times story on the controversy surrounding puberty blockers, Rosenthal countered the Times’ assertion that a National Institutes of Health-funded study included a child who had begun using puberty blockers at age eight.
“We did not start a blocker on anyone age 8 years,” he wrote. “The youngest participant in the blocker cohort from our site was 9 years, 3 months.”
Yes, you read that correctly: UCSF gave puberty blockers to a nine-year-old — and Rosenthal was perfectly fine with that.
In a press release, Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) chairman Neil Patel said:
Normal people know that introducing permanent sex changes for nine-year-olds is sick. That’s why these people tried so hard to hide the information. Thanks to our partners at Judicial Watch, Americans can finally see what they were up to.
Other emails revealed Deutsch and Rosenthal’s awareness that the treatments they were offering lacked a scientific basis.
According to the Daily Caller:
A May 2022 email obtained through the lawsuit accused Rosenthal and his gender clinic colleague, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, of peddling “shoddy research” in a March 2022 op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The op-ed argued against legislative bans on child sex-changes and cited a highly criticized February 2022 study, authored by Diana Tordoff, as evidence that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones significantly lowered depression and suicidality amongst gender-confused youth.
In an email, Rosenthal told his accuser he concurred that the Tordoff study had “significant methodological concerns.” He also suggested he wouldn’t have referenced the study had he known that.
Four months later, however, “the Tordoff study was cited by WPATH in the SOC 8 as evidence supporting the benefits of child sex-changes,” penned the Daily Caller. Apparently, the study’s usefulness to the cause of “gender-affirming care” outweighed its methodological shortcomings.
WPATH’s method for deciding what to recommend in SOC 8 — known as the Delphi process — was hardly a dispassionate review of the known evidence. The Daily Caller reported:
Under the Delphi process, WPATH members anonymously voted for proposed clinical recommendation statements, rating them on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree). Statements were included in the SOC 8 if at least 75% of voters rated the recommendation 7 or higher, according to WPATH’s website.
WPATH’s use of the Delphi method was “deeply flawed,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director of Do No Harm, told the DCNF.
“WPATH’s use of the Delphi process to justify its guidelines on gender-affirming care is deeply flawed — not because of the method itself, but because of who was allowed to define ‘expertise,’” Miceli told the DCNF.
“When a consensus is built among ideologically aligned individuals who ignore conflicting evidence, the result isn’t science — it’s dogma dressed up as clinical guidance,” Miceli added.
Deutsch, in a 2021 email, confessed that “most of the recommendations in SOC8 are … consensus based or based on weak evidence.”
SOC 8 was, in fact, a thoroughly corrupt document. Under pressure from the Biden administration and the American Academy of Pediatrics, WPATH removed age restrictions for gender treatments so minors could more easily get them. And WPATH changed the language surrounding gender treatments to make them appear necessary rather than elective, so that insurance companies would cover them.
Deutsch also criticized SOC 8 for lowering its standards for determining which patients “need” sex-change surgery, arguing that it would “fuel … predatory practices by some surgeons in the field” and “[open] up the tap to … surgery on demand.”
Yet soon after SOC 8 was published in 2022, Deutsch instructed CAGC personnel to “change [their] workflows accordingly” to allow for “any qualified provider to attest to the patient’s need for and appropriateness for surgery.” Once again, usefulness to the cause overcame any concerns.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton hit the nail on the head with these words: “There is something rotten in the state of California.”