Unsealed Court Documents Show That Admiral Rachel Levine Pressured WPATH To Remove Age Guidelines From The Latest Standards Of Care
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.
The SoC 8 was supposed to have been created via something called the Delphi process. As the document itself explains: Consensus on the final recommendations was attained using the Delphi process that included all members of the guidelines committee and required that recommendation statements were approved by at least 75% of members. Suffice it to say that making a sudden, major change so late in the game calls into question whether that process was fully adhered to.
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.
Bad medicine.