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Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is praising the announcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it had joined with four states in a federal lawsuit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) over alleged deceptive trade practices.
“I commend Chairman [Andrew] Ferguson and the FTC for taking decisive action against WPATH,” Kennedy said Wednesday. “Medical organizations must follow the science, disclose conflicts, and put patients first. Children deserve the highest standard of care, parents deserve honest information, and the American people deserve accountability.”
The FTC joined the states of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas in the lawsuit that was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the agency announced Wednesday.
“Parents have a right to make informed decisions about their children’s health,” the FTC’s Ferguson posted Wednesday to social media. “The FTC will not allow parents and children to be deceived by medical organizations and providers who are prioritizing profit over children’s health and safety. While we can never undo the many harms caused by WPATH’s deception, we can prevent WPATH from making false and unsubstantiated medical claims in the future, and that’s what we intend to do.”
In detailing the allegations, Ferguson argued that WPATH “made deceptive and unsubstantiated claims about the necessity, safety, and efficacy of certain drugs and surgeries used to medically transition children.”
“Medical providers conveyed WPATH’s deceptive and unsubstantiated claims to assure parents of the benefits of medical transition services for their children,” the chairman added. “This enabled medical providers to make permanent, irreversible changes to the bodies of these children, often at enormous physical, personal, and financial cost.”
HHS released in November 2025 its report titled Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices, which documented critical problems in WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8). These guidelines, HHS emphasizes, “have shaped so-called ‘pediatric gender medicine’ in the United States and internationally.”
The nation’s health agency also notes, however, that, despite their far-reaching influence, WPATH’s guidelines have undergone “growing scrutiny of the evidence base, guideline-development process, and conflict-of-interest practices surrounding influential organizations promoting sex-rejecting procedures.”
In its lawsuit, for example, the FTC observes that, in SOC-8, which was published in 2022, WPATH omitted any mention of age restrictions for mastectomy and penis amputation in its guidelines for the so-called “gender-affirming care” treatment of children.
Two years later, however, in June 2024, the New York Times exposed court documents revealing that the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health – Rachel (born Richard) Levine, a man who claims to be a woman – pressured WPATH to eliminate the age minimums for some medical interventions in order to promote the Biden administration’s pro-“transgender” political agenda.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger also celebrated the announcement of the lawsuit by the FTC and the four states.
Shellenberger is the president and founder of Environmental Progress, which published a report of files leaked from both the internal messaging forum and a panel discussion of WPATH.
As Lumen-News reported in March 2024, Shellenberger discussed how he came to publish the leaked files.
“One or more people gave me the WPATH Files, and my colleagues and I attempted to summarize them as a series of articles,” he posted to X. “We quickly realized the topic was too sensitive, complex, and large to be dealt with as a work of journalism, and we moved the project to the research institute I founded seven years ago, Environmental Progress (EP).”
Regarding the Files’ authenticity, Shellenberger wrote:
The Files are authentic. We redacted most names and left only those individuals who are leading gender medicine practitioners to whom we sent “right-of-reply” emails. We know WPATH members discussed our emails internally. No WPATH leader or member has denied that the Files are anything other than what they appear to be.
Among the remarks by WPATH members leaked were those of Canadian endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger, who commented regarding the concept that children are capable of giving informed consent for so-called “gender-affirming” care: “We’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”
“WPATH members indicate repeatedly that they know that many children and their parents don’t understand the effects that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will have on their bodies,” Shellenberger wrote. “And yet, they continue to perform and advocate for gender medicine.”
The veteran journalist also pointed out the extent of the influence WPATH has exerted on the field of medicine in general.
“American Medical Association, The Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and thousands of doctors worldwide rely on WPATH,” he observed after the release of the WPATH Files, adding that the report is proof “that gender medicine is comprised of unregulated and pseudoscientific experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. It will go down as one of the worst medical scandals in history.”
Now, two years later, in response to the announcement of the FTC’s lawsuit, Shellenberger posted to social media on Thursday that the WPATH Files “reveal that its members know children cannot consent to sterility and loss of sexual function and yet promote it anyway. They must be stopped before they cause any more harm.”
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