What is the WPATH "leak" and why is conservative media trying to position it as a “groundbreaking medical scandal”?

Transplaining the "WPATH Files", a series of screenshots from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health that are being deliberately misconstrued by anti-trans campaigners

Apr 02, 2024

Author’s note: Some of the links in this piece are from websites, petitions and articles with severely transphobic rhetoric. If you visit the links, please do so with care.

On March 4th 2024, right-wing activist and author Michael Shellenberger released what he calls “the WPATH Files” – a series of heavily decontextualised screenshots of chats from the internal forums of the WPATH – the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

The report is hosted on the website of Environmental Progress as an analysis by Mia Hughes, where the screenshots are preceded by over 35,000 words of what can only be politely described as an editorial rant from Shellenberger. Overcome by an inflated sense of self-importance, the report terms itself a “groundbreaking medical scandal”. Perusing through the report makes it clear that there is no “scandal” – the actual screenshots are medical professions discussing edge cases in gender-affirming healthcare concerning fertility, libido, and fatality risks – as is common in ALL fields of medicine.

That is precisely why it needs to be preceded by 35,000+ words of inflammatory commentary by Shellenberger – without it, the screenshots are just normal risk-assessment conversations between doctors that is not unique to gender-affirming healthcare. No actual media expose, debunk, or whistleblower report that follows the ethical standards of journalism presents a 35,000+ word opinion piece to the reader prior to presenting even its most preliminary evidence. It is at best, a vicious thought dump with an intention to provoke.

Journalist Erin Reed performed a thorough fact check of the document, and found 216 instances of “factual inaccuracies, erroneous citations, misinterpretations of what is leaked, and purposeful omissions contradicting the author’s central editorialized claims.”

These inaccuracies include citing and evaluating decade old papers that have since been disproven, and quotes from a global “Beyond WPATH petition” that Shellenberger claims is proof that this leak has “sent shockwaves through the medical profession.” Upon closer look, this freely available online “petition”, has only 2,754 signatures, some from yoga instructors, DJs, and “concerned parents”. For statistical context, there are over 130,000 medical professionals just in Australia. While signing this petition does not require professional accreditation, joining the WPATH does mandate professional standards.

Who is actually in the ‘WPATH’?

The WPATH, headquartered in Illinois, USA, is a global membership-based professional organisation dedicated to the understanding and care of the health and wellbeing of trans and gender diverse people. Membership to the WPATH is interdisciplinary – it includes professionals in medicine, law, public policy, social work, mental health counselling, and family studies.

WPATH advocates for affirmative healthcare for trans and gender diverse people that is focused on our social, physical, and emotional wellbeing, which necessitates interdisciplinary collaboration and public policy advocacy, since it is policy that ultimately governs the rights, funding, and access to healthcare. Their purpose is to share and advance the care of trans and gender diverse people within professions such as governance, public policy, and law, alongside the medical and scientific field.

The WPATH has an Australian wing – AusPATH – the Australian Professional Association for Transgender Health, which provides standards of care for trans and gender diverse people in Australia, alongside position statements on public policy, law and science that relates to the community.

Notes on the media coverage:

Environmental Progress, which hosts the “report”, is a misleadingly named organisation that actually dabbles in quite a bit of climate denialism, pro-nuclear activism, and racist fearmongering. Environmental Progress, much like founder Shellenberger, applies a “two-truths-and-a-lie” technique (except with a LOT more lies) to spread disinformation, stating partial truth, and then spinning it out of context and arriving at terribly wrong conclusions, all while positioning themselves as the “moral do-gooders”.

Most of the re-publishing of this report is by similar media houses who preach the spirit of “free thought”, while making some sort of underhanded point that by lying about commonly accepted scientific truths, they are “challenging the status quo”. One such platform is UnHerd, which brands itself a bi-partisan platform funding research and publishing work that is “unheard and unpublished elsewhere' ' – a classic example of weaponising rhetoric that is used by marginalised communities to advocate for themselves, against them. UnHerd published a shorter opinion piece on the report by Shellenberger himself.

Every anti-trans organisation and their allied journalists re-published the report, trying their best to fluff the “scandal.” Riley Gaines tweeted about it, the Alliance Defending Freedom called it a “deep-rooted media scandal” in their press release, and Genspect chimed in too, saying this will “go down as one of the worst medical scandals in history.” Legacy media in the UK picked it up, ripely timed as the UK parliament debated puberty blockers, and stopped NHS funding for puberty blockers for children. The Guardian UK published an opinion piece by Hannah Barnes, author of Time to Think and other longform “investigative” journalism that debates transgender lives, where she posits this “leak” as a justification for the implementation of the Cass Review’s recommendation of stopping NHS-funded puberty blockers for children. The Telegraph UK published an opinion piece with carefully cherry-picked, inflammatory connections to cancer and psychosis, and quotes Shellenberger’s report calling gender-affirming healthcare “neither science nor medicine.”

In Australian media, this “leak: has gotten its usual inflammatory press attention. The Australian Christian Lobby wrote a media release, and the Daily Telegraph and SkyNews have run an article referring to gender-affirmation as a “MEDICAL MISTREATMENT EPIDEMIC.”

Why is this important in Australia?

While this particular “leak” has not blown up in Australia yet, the politics surrounding trans and gender diverse people in this country has no doubt, been polarised. The incendiary rhetoric surrounding trans rights in Australia has been borrowed from US and UK politics, fanned by the media around politically important periods – such as the hearings surrounding the Religious Discrimination Bill in 2021-2022, and the 2022 Federal Elections. Just last week, the ACL has also used the UK’s ban on puberty blockers to solidify their opposition to the NSW Conversion Therapy Ban Bill.

On March 13th, The Australian Christian Lobby’s Victoria branch published a media release highlighting some of the report’s inflammatory claims, referring to the leaked files as “a wake-up call for the Victorian government regarding gender-transitioning treatments.” The ACL’s Victorian State Director, Jasmine Yuen, mentions the Royal Children’s Hospital, which is a primary provider of gender-affirming healthcare to young transgender people in Victoria, as one of the gender clinics that rely on the WPATH for guidelines on standards of care and treatment for trans and gender diverse children and adolescents. The Royal Australian College of General Practioners (RACGP), the peak body for GPs in Australia, who are the first step towards getting referrals for gender-affirming care, also follow the WPATH guidelines, but are not mentioned in the media release. Only mentioning the Children’s Hospital is strategic on the ACL’s part – in line with generating moral panic about gender-affirming care for children.

This month is the anniversary of when Posie Parker came to Australia, and in Melbourne, her band of “gender-critical feminists” rallied with Nazis at the steps of the Victorian Parliament, protected by the Victorian Police from a counter-protest by trans people and our allies. While the “WPATH leak” has not been blown out of proportion into an isolated scandal yet, it is bound to come up as a justification for more right-wing media and political rhetoric that is built upon fear-mongering against trans people, particularly children.

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On the rhetorics of expertise and activism:

In my attempt to peruse through the 35,000+ editorial preceding the leaked screenshots, I found a couple of things quite interesting:

Environmental Progress positions itself as some kind of moral leader against WPATH and the pursuit of gender-affirming care. Shellenberger says as much in the Preface to the report, that he felt “duty-bound” to publish the files and ensure it gets a wide audience.

His preface also provides a justification for the “social contagion” theory – the idea that peer and online influence is making more people trans. To position oneself as a moral leader, one first needs to identify a moral crisis, which in Shellenberger’s case, he manufactures through his editorial’s seemingly polite inflammation.

He strikes soft blows about things that sound like he truly cares – the report talks about children, particularly young girls, as people who have been particularly vulnerable in the medical system’s history of misdiagnoses like hysteria, and neglect regarding eating disorders and self-harm, which is true. He then proceeds to use this vulnerability to fan a moral panic, arguing that because more young AFAB people are trying to access gender-affirming healthcare than before, that affirmative healthcare is a “maladaptive coping mechanism”. Then it devolves into some rather creepy apotemnophobia about chopping off “healthy breasts.”

Notably, affirmative surgery is not available to trans children, anywhere in the world. As I mentioned before, two-truths-and-a-lie seems to be the approach, it makes the rhetoric more believable. Like all efficient transphobia, it relies on a two-fold fearmongering by infantilisation and induced moral panic – one that speaks of trans and gender diverse people as both “troubled people who don’t know what’s good for them” AND “groomers destroying our children”.

Shellenberger describes the WPATH as a group of “activists”, to solidify their argument to discredit the organisation’s purpose as multidisciplinary professional experts. Barnes’ headline for the Guardian UK refers to the WPATH as a “US gender group”, as opposed to a peak body of professionals.

Sure some members might be activists. Many professionals working in gender-affirming healthcare are likely to be organisers of some kind; they are, after all, conscionable members of the public and may be seen in a rally or two. As a long-term public policy professional, I do not think being an “activist” and a “professional” are necessarily separable parts of a person, nor that those parts are competing for priority. Such is the nature of marginalisation, of having heavily policed and politicised identities – professional work on our part is inseparable from the advocacy for justice for our communities.

Due to the current political climate particularly in the UK and the US, even the right to provide and practice gender-affirming healthcare can be considered an act of political dissent, or protest – and is therefore classed under “political activism”. What makes it “political” is not anything inherent to providing life-saving care, but an imposed politicisation of trans and gender diverse lives by forcing us into everyday media spectacles and social and physical precarity.

I am, of course, also not claiming that the professional and scientific expertise of the WPATH should not be questioned. All expertise, and all science, by its very nature, is subject to continued enquiry, experimentation, dispute, and commentary. In fact, as most people in the LGBTQIA+ community know all too well, scientific expertise such as research and clinical trials, peer-reviewed journals, and even public policy institutions often play catch up in providing the highest standards of care of marginalised people. Science and medicine have also been wrong about us before, and have been disproven and corrected by scientists, activists, and lawmakers. Science has always been a rhetorical field, and therefore subject to trust and lack thereof – but the burden of that is not going to be relaxed by scapegoating transgender people and our health and wellbeing.

Expose style “gotcha” by organisations that specialise in dealing out disinformation, like Environmental Progress, does exactly that. It takes the lack of trust in public institutions and scapegoats queer and trans people for them – and because it is more convenient for many people than to fight the systems, people take to it and cling to it.

“Leaks” like this establish a culture of misinformation and humiliating public trials, where the burden of proof falls on the precarious trans and gender diverse community, even though the proof already exists and is wilfully ignored to manufacture moral panic. It makes a spectacle out of trying to humiliate trans people. It takes apart scientific procedures of proving and disproving truth/s, sprinkles a dash of incendiary rhetoric to fan the flames of a manufactured cULtuRE waR, and blows our lives up into media-scandals – all while positioning itself as a “moral good”.

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Srishti (they/he) is a writer, researcher, and former adviser for Foreign Policy and LGBTQIA+ Affairs. Their cultural commentary lies at intersections of politics, visual information, and technology. For more of their work, you can follow them on Instagram and X, and subscribe to their Substack.

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