The state of Florida is taking action against three prominent medical activist organizations for pushing transgender operations on minors in violation of consumer protection and racketeering laws.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics over an alleged coordinated push to encourage physicians to perform transgender procedures on minors despite the lack of evidence of their safety or efficacy.
“We believe these organizations failed to disclose the risks, limits, and evidence when promoting so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ for children. For years, these groups insisted the recommendations were settled science. But behind closed-doors, they knew the evidence was weak, the outcomes uncertain, and the risks very real,” Uthmeier said in a video shared on social media.
“Children were irrevocably harmed because truth was replaced with political activism.”
Internal WPATH documents released last year demonstrated the organization’s private reservations about promoting transgender procedures to distressed minors. The WPATH files contradicted the organization’s unbridled public support for the provision of hormone therapy and surgery for minors, which informed how the wider medical community approached the unproven procedures. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society are two prestigious organizations that followed WPATH’s lead on giving minors access to experimental transgender care.
“The years-long coordinated campaign by WPATH and other medical organizations to disregard the serious health risks of sex change interventions on minors will go down as the most egregious medical scandal in modern history,” said Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director at Do No Harm, a medical watchdog opposed to giving transgender operations to minors.
“These groups have obfuscated risk and misrepresented the low quality of evidence to support puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgeries for children—interventions that can cause lasting harm. It is encouraging to see our elected officials hold these organizations accountable for spreading misinformation. This is a critical step to restoring public trust in medicine.”
Florida is one of several Republican states to prohibit transgender procedures for minors. In June, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s state-level ban on the use of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors in a landmark victory for those seeking to prevent children from receiving the experimental procedures.
A growing number of children who have undergone medical gender transition have come forward to sound the alarm about being rushed into treatment. The detransitioners, who resumed identifying with their biological sex, have described lax standards of care and pre-existing mental health conditions that impacted their decision to undergo irreversible transgender care as minors.
Research from several European countries and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has exposed the lack of evidence behind activist claims that the benefits of gender transitions for minors outweigh the considerable harms.
“For years, WPATH and the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries for vulnerable kids in the name of medical ‘care,'” said Alleigh Marre, executive director of American Parents Coalition.
“These organizations are promoting radical transgender ideology to children, and masking it to parents as safe medical practices. Parents expect doctors to protect and care for children, not run experiments on their bodies.”
The Trump administration has successfully pressured multiple leading transgender treatment clinics into shutting down. The closures followed a directive from Attorney General Pam Bondi instructing the Department of Justice to enforce genital mutilation statues to protect children from gender transitions. The Trump administration has also moved to cut off Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals providing transgender procedures to minors.