“They have young teenage patients showing up at the hospital with vaginal atrophy, uterine atrophy, bleeding pain,” says Canadian journalist Mia Hughes, the author of a 70-page report that scrutinizes a series of leaked internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
“This is brand new territory. We’ve never done this to teenage girls before. They’re just making it up as they go along. They’re layering other drugs on top of the testosterone to try to cope with the very side effects that the testosterone has caused, never at any point questioning: is it a good idea to give these girls testosterone?” Ms. Hughes says.
In this episode, she breaks down what was revealed in these leaked files.
Watch the video:
“Health care is supposed to improve health, not destroy it,” Ms. Hughes says.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Mia Hughes, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues.
Mia Hughes:
Thank you so much. My pleasure.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve been talking about the WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] files, which you published with Environmental Progress. You spent a lot of time putting them together and making sure what you published was correct. Then you’ve spent a couple of months talking about it. What has crystallized in your mind at this point? What are the most important things?
Ms. Hughes:
There are four points with the contents of the files. First and foremost, these are doctors who know they are harming children. Every time I talk about this one particular part of the report, it makes me rather angry, because it is so obvious that they know they’re harming children. Their panel discussion was leaked, and they’re all talking about children and adolescents.
There is a pediatric endocrinologist, and he and his colleagues are talking about the difficulty of speaking to children about puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and the potential loss of fertility that comes with this treatment pathway. It’s a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but you’re talking to a blank wall. He says, “First of all, it’s difficult because we’re explaining it to children who haven’t had high school biology yet.” Right off the bat, you can see that they know these children don’t understand.
Then he says, “When I’m talking to a 14-year-old about fertility preservation, I know it’s like talking to a blank wall. They'll be like, ‘Oh, babies are gross, you know?’” I was once a 14-year-old girl, and I know that that would have been my reaction. Absolutely, for sure, that would have been my reaction. In fact, all the way to my mid-20s that would have been my reaction.
Then I hit age 30 It was like somebody flipped a switch inside me. I needed to have a baby right away. I had three children. I was a stay-at-home mother. I was breastfeeding. I was co-sleeping.
This part particularly upsets me because they’re taking away from these children that chance to grow and mature and go down a normal developmental path like most people do. They know that they’re doing it, but it doesn’t stop them from doing it.
They also know that there’s fertility regret. The doctor says that he sees it in his own patients that come back to him in their 20s when they’ve met someone and they want to settle down. He callously says to them, “Oh, the dog’s not doing it for you anymore, is it?” That means they thought they would always be happy with a dog when they were age 14 and this doctor was sterilizing them.
Now, in their 20s, they want to have a baby and they can’t because of what these doctors have done. What is crystal clear in my mind now is they know what they’re doing. They know that there is significant regret. They know that these children don’t understand. Yet, they still do it and it doesn’t stop them from doing it.
Speaker A:
It’s like talking about diabetic complications with a 14-year-old. They don’t care. They’re never going to die. They’re going to live forever, right? So, I think when we’re doing informed consent, I know that that’s still a big lacuna. We do it, we try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it in a serious way. That’s always bothered me. But, you know, we still want the kids to be happier in the moment, right?
Ms. Hughes:
The second point is that it’s crystal clear in my mind this is not healthcare in that you think of healthcare as improving health, which is the point. You go to a doctor because you have something wrong, an illness, and you expect the doctor to improve your health, alleviate your suffering, and maybe heal you. That’s not what this is.
You can see that in the conversations in the WPATH files about the harm of cross-sex hormones which are the iatrogenic effects. Iatrogenic means the treatment causes the illness. This is evident when there are conversations about the effect of testosterone on the female body that is not supposed to have large doses of testosterone.
They have young teenage patients showing up at the hospital with vaginal atrophy, uterine atrophy, bleeding, and pain. They don’t know what to do about it, because this is brand new territory. We’ve never done this to teenage girls before. They’re making it up as they go along.
They’re layering other drugs on top of the testosterone to try to cope with the side effects that the testosterone has caused. They never at any point question, “Is it a good idea to give these girls testosterone?” Nobody ever asks the most crucial question. Healthcare doesn’t destroy health. Healthcare is supposed to improve health, not destroy it.
The third point is, like the fertility question, they can’t acknowledge the harms. They see the harms, because they see detransitioners. If you hear how these people talk about detransitioners, it’s so infuriating, because they trivialize their experience. They downplay the trauma and they downplay the harm that they’ve done by calling it another step on the gender journey, or something like that. But then they also try to pass the blame on to the victim.
Marci Bowers, the president of WPATH, says that detransitioners have to own and take active responsibility for the decisions that they make, particularly if they are permanent medical decisions. She is completely oblivious to the fact that all of the blame lies on WPATH and the gender-affirming care providers, because WPATH is the group that removed all the guardrails.
WPATH is the group that advocated for these young people to have unfettered access to an experimental treatment protocol with no safeguards whatsoever. Then a whole bunch of innocent kids come along and they get harmed, and then WPATH blames the victims instead of looking at themselves and realizing that they are the ones who did all the harm.
The last point is, there is no sign of the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic Oath, to cause you no harm, has left the building. It’s not present in WPATH at all. You can mostly see that in the conversations about non-binary surgeries. Most people think non-binary is blue hair and they/them pronouns, but there’s a much more sinister side to it, and that’s the surgical side.
They are creating smooth, sexless bodies for nullification. They’re creating second sets of genitals, or customized mastectomy scars, without any concern for the impact on the person’s health. It’s not even an experiment, because nobody is tracking these outcomes or monitoring techniques or patient health. Nothing. There’s no sign of the Hippocratic Oath.
Mr. Jekielek:
How is it possible that we are here today? In this country, they are still using this approach which is quite different from what’s happening in the UK, especially since the shutting of the Tavistock Clinic and the Cass Review report coming out. People are saying, “My God, what have we done?” There is a moratorium on these types of procedures. We’re not there yet in the United States. In a few states, there is action in that direction. Again, how is this possible?
Ms. Hughes:
It remains a constant source of amazement to me that the medical world could have been so duped by WPATH. I think it’s because the medical world exists within the wider culture. It is definitely a cultural issue, in that the modern trans rights movement is a civil rights movement like no other.
It has infiltrated all layers of society with a very aggressive approach, in that all disagreement is considered bigotry and transphobia that must be viciously punished and swiftly send a message to everyone else. Nobody has ever been allowed to disagree with anything the modern trans rights movement has said. That’s part of why society let this happen.
WPATH has done a brilliant job at presenting themselves to the world as a real scientific and medical group. The stunt that they pulled is incredibly impressive. They had a few decades to build it up to when not much was going on and they were very obscure. But then when they rebranded in 2007 as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, they self-identified as a global leading healthcare group.
Mr. Jekielek:
Can you go back to its origin, then up to that point in 2007 where WPATH rebrands? Then please tell us what happened next.
Ms. Hughes:
They started in 1978 as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association [HBIGDA]. It’s not an easy acronym to remember. Back then, it was a very obscure field of medicine. I would like to think that they were actually pursuing science, or at least attempting to find the best scientific way to help the people who were suffering from what we now call gender dysphoria. Whether or not that’s a real diagnosis is up for debate. But what we can all agree on is that the suffering is real and the pain is real.
In the early days, HBIGDA was trying to find a way to alleviate that suffering. I believe they have always been dubious and misguided. But something happened to HBIGDA around the late 1990s, which was exactly the same time that the modern trans rights movement was starting to form and come together. Trans activists started to join HBIGDA. The group’s goals became predominantly political and less scientific.
Throughout the first decade of this century, more and more activists joined HBIGDA, and in 2007, they changed their name. They rebranded and they self-identified as a world-leading transgender healthcare group. From that point on, politics ruled the day. The science has always been weak and the evidence has always been weak.
But from 2007 onwards, it was all about political goals in that they called it de-psycho-pathologization, which means they decided to reframe gender identity disorder. They decided to reframe transgender as a perfectly natural, healthy state of being. They said, “It’s natural, it’s healthy, it’s to be celebrated. It is definitely not a psychiatric disorder.” They made that decision.
In 2010, they made this announcement, “Being transgender is not a mental disorder. It’s not a psychiatric disorder.” After they made that decision, from that point on, you could only affirm gender identity. If somebody said that they were trans, that was great. They said, “Celebrate it. Affirm it. It’s wonderful. It’s brilliant.”
The disorder then becomes the distress that you feel because you are transgender, and because your mind and body don’t match. They think you can’t do anything about the mind because that’s innate and it’s to be celebrated. The only thing you can now do is alter the body with hormones and surgeries.
From that point on, we have the gender affirmation model. Gatekeeping is transphobic, and safeguarding is transphobic. There should be access to drugs and surgeries on demand for anyone who says they are transgender. But the problem is, this is back in 2010. This was a different landscape. It was still a rare disorder. We still didn’t have the teenage cohort that later came in.
This might not have been that devastating if the social contagion had not exploded in the 2010s. The modern trans rights movement was getting ready to unleash the relentless messaging and propaganda that some people can be born in the wrong body. Everybody possesses a gender identity. You can be a boy with a girl brain, or a girl with a boy brain. In 2014, the modern trans rights movement unleashed that messaging upon children and adolescents.
When they did that, nobody stopped to question what would happen if we untethered a whole generation of children and adolescents from reality at a crucial stage in their identity development. Nobody asked that question. We now know the answer to the question that was never asked. The answer is that you get a social contagion.
You get an epidemic of young people mistaking their normal pubertal woes— the distress of being a teenager, maybe discovering a homosexual identity, maybe being autistic, whatever discomfort and distress they have—as a sign that they are transgender, precisely because of the messaging that the modern trans rights movement is bombarding them with. When that met the WPATH agenda of no safeguarding and unfettered access to hormones and surgeries, when those two things collided, we ended up with a catastrophe.
Mr. Jekielek:
The WPATH files are obviously highly ideological. How has this become the approach of many important medical associations in the world?
Ms. Hughes:
That is the remarkable thing, because I can understand why us non-medical people were duped. I can understand why we fell for it, because we don’t know anything about science or studies. But the fact that the entire medical world fell for it completely will never cease to amaze me. It astonishes me, because basically it all stems from WPATH.
In 2001, they produced Standards of Care 6. That was the first ideological Standards of Care, their guidelines. You could see the shift when they removed the mental health referral letters. Then Standards of Care 6 influenced the Endocrine Society’s 2009 guidelines.
Those guidelines were drawn up largely by WPATH members who were also members of the Endocrine Society. You’ve got overlap and you’ve got crossover already. The Endocrine Society guidelines 2009, are also not based on any science whatsoever. They are based on ideology.
The 2012 WPATH guidelines then cited the Endocrine Society guidelines, which cite WPATH Standards of Care 6, so you’ve already got circular citations. They’re citing each other, giving each other legitimacy when in the center there’s an empty shell devoid of anything that looks like science. But from that point on, because you have those three and they look like legitimate guidelines, incredibly, all of the other major medical associations looked to those guidelines and just regurgitated them.
They didn’t investigate and ask, “Is what they are saying true?” What they were saying was really remarkable. They were saying that an experimental treatment pathway that can leave adolescents infertile and missing body parts should be the first line of treatment. This can only be described as a period of mass psychosis where large portions of society lost sight of reality.
They live in an alternate reality because WPATH and trans activists are so aggressive in punishing anyone who questions them. This mass psychosis can be sustained because nobody is allowed to ask any questions. In the report, I talk about the chain of trust. I got this idea from Dr. Steven Levine, someone I completely adore. He was one of the early members of HIBIGDA.
He actually left HIBIGDA in 2002 when he saw that activists were overrunning the group and that they were no longer pursuing science. He says that in medicine there is something called the chain of trust. When you are in med school or you’re a resident or you’re a doctor practicing, you simply do not have time to make sure that every treatment protocol, every drug, and every set of guidelines is legitimate. You don’t have time to research all of the studies, all of the drug interactions, and the FDA approval. You don’t have time for all that.
You have to trust that someone above you has done all of the rigorously researched science, and that the information you are being given is the best available science. WPATH has broken the chain of trust in medicine because they present themselves as being a scientific organization. They have standards of care that have hundreds of citations. It all looks legitimate.
The busy doctor or the busy med student accepts it because this professional body that looks legitimate says that this is the best way to treat children and adolescents and vulnerable adults. They accept it. But the chain of trust was broken. Europe has now figured that out.
They’ve looked at the evidence. They realize, “There’s no evidence at all to support this.” But in North America it’s going to be very difficult for these organizations to admit that they have been duped and that they got this wrong. On an institutional level, it’s going to be very difficult.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why do you think it will be more difficult for the American organizations than the UK organizations, or Sweden, Norway, and Denmark?
Ms. Hughes:
In all of the European nations that have pivoted away from the adolescent puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones, they have done so because their own national health boards have spent years examining the evidence and the treatment protocol and found there is no evidence, and you cannot justify doing this to children. They don’t have all of these very powerful medical associations like you do in North America, who took a stand trusting WPATH starting in around 2012. It’s going to be very embarrassing for them to admit their mistake. They have typically vilified their own members who try to speak up.
There have been a number of pediatricians inside the American Academy of Pediatrics who spoke up and got vilified for doing so. First of all, you’ve made a terrible mistake, and a lot of people were harmed because you made that mistake. Then on top of that, you vilify the people who tried to warn you that you made that mistake, it makes it even more difficult to then look at the mistake that you made. It is the powerful medical associations that are sustaining this and sustaining WPATH. Europe just doesn’t have that problem. They don’t have these associations. They just looked at the evidence.
Mr. Jekielek:
Traditionally, the condition was called gender identity disorder. It was more often men who really struggled and eventually might have taken some steps to try to deal with it. But it wasn’t this idea that they were actually transforming themselves into the other sex. Today, it’s mostly younger girls because of this social contagion. There’s this idea that you can transform into the other sex. They really believe that they can become the other sex based on what the adults say. Please tell us about this.
Ms. Hughes:
Yes. They used to be realistic to a certain extent in this field of medicine. When it was gender identity disorder, the sufferer never believed themselves to be a member of the opposite sex. It was just that there was a deeply felt discomfort with the body. Now, hormonal and surgical interventions are supposed to alleviate that suffering. But you’ve got to understand that there is more than one pathway to developing issues with your gender.
The vast majority of men who seek hormonal and surgical interventions are heterosexual men with a paraphilia called autogynephilia, which means they are aroused by the image of themselves as women. But a significant part of that fantasy is actually becoming a woman. It’s not dressing like a woman. It’s not being treated as if you are a woman. It’s actually becoming a woman. That is the fantasy.
The autogynephilic men are the ones who shaped the modern trans rights movement. They are front and center in the modern trans rights movement, so that’s where this magical thinking comes from. These men desperately desire, more than anything else in the world, to be women. When they created a rights movement that enabled them to actually become women, they revived the concept of gender identity.
They push the idea on everyone that we all have a gender identity and that you can be in a male body, but have a female gender identity. Therefore, you are just as much a woman as your mother. That’s why we are now so detached from reality. It is because these men desperately desire to be women.
But the problem with that is children then get the same messaging. That means that a boy is told that he can become a girl. Of course, the boy is going to believe you, because he’s a child. He doesn’t understand the world yet. He’s going to trust what adults tell him. You see this in the case of Jazz Jenny. Have you watched the reality TV show, “I Am Jazz?”
Mr. Jekielek:
I have not, but I’m aware of the case and some of the medical complications.
Ms. Hughes:
Right. I'll try to give you a brief recap. This story was filmed for all the world to see. This was about a young boy who liked a sparkly bathing suit, princess gowns, and Barbie dolls, so his mother told him that he was a girl. She changed his name, changed his pronouns, and raised him as a girl.
The reality tv show “I am Jazz” starts when Jazz should be in puberty. But he’s not in puberty because they blocked his puberty. That’s the first thing that you see. He is a teenager and his friends are all dating, but Jazz has no feelings, no crushes, and no sexual feelings at all because they blocked his puberty.
Then he starts taking estrogen and starts to develop and he looks like a girl because they blocked his puberty and they put him on estrogen. But he can’t date because none of the boys at his high school are interested in dating the girl with the penis. He says that in the show, “None of the boys want to date the girl with the penis.”
He puts his life on hold until he can get the surgery to invert his penis and turn it into something that looks like a vagina. He thinks that after he has this surgery he will be a girl just like any other girl and all of his problems will be solved. The surgery was performed by the now president of WPATH, Marci Bowers.
It’s botched because he had his puberty blocked and he had to have a far more complicated surgery. It’s botched and he has complications. Then after the fact you see the light go out of his eyes, because you see reality hit. He’s still not the same as the other girls.
The boys are still not interested. He tells one boyfriend about the surgery, and the boyfriend actually physically recoils on camera, because an inverted penis is not a vagina. We all know that.
But poor Jazz had no idea. Jazz thought that he would be like all the other girls. He was sold a lie by the adults in his life, by the doctors that treated him, and now there’s no going back now. There’s no going back.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a heart-wrenching story. What’s happening with the mother here? This whole story is also on camera.
Ms. Hughes:
When I’m in this debate, and when I’m researching, I try to be as generous as I can with the parents of teenagers who suddenly announce that they’re trans. We cannot place any blame on these parents whatsoever, no matter what decision they make.
Jeanette Jennings is something else entirely because she diagnosed her own son. Jazz was displaying very extreme, gender non-conforming behavior. Jeanette Jennings pulled the DSM-IV off the library shelf, found gender identity disorder, diagnosed her own son as suffering from gender identity disorder, and then went and found a therapist that would affirm her son as her daughter. Then she puts him on television.
I do not accept that. I do not extend my generosity as far as Jeanette Jennings, because I think she really did make this decision for her son. Perhaps she was trying to alleviate his suffering at that moment. Because when you’re a child and you’re different, that is difficult, no question. However, she made a terrible decision. It is honestly child abuse.
Then she made the decision to have it all filmed and broadcast to the world, which brings us back to the social contagion. Because of the reality show “I am Jazz,” there was the Jazz effect. Not only did she do this to her own child, but she also played a major role in triggering the social contagion that has ravaged the adolescent population ever since. “I am Jazz” started broadcasting in 2015.
Mr. Jekielek:
We started with mostly men and it was rare. Today, we’re in this situation where it’s mostly young girls, and it’s not rare at all. In fact, there has been a hockey stick effect on the graph, and it’s still going up. Obviously, it’s not just the mom or child. There are the producers and other people involved in getting a show like this onto primetime television.
Ms. Hughes:
First and foremost, they believe in the concept of the transgender child, which I do not. All of the people involved in the making of the show, “I Am Jazz,” believe in this non-existent type of child. If they had a good intention, perhaps it was that if other children are also struggling, and they are transgender, they can see themselves represented in this show.
Therefore, that will make their life easier and they will be more comfortable coming out. I think that was the intention, if I give them the benefit of the doubt.
However, the problem is that nobody making this show seems to have had any idea of how social contagion works. Richard Dawkins is here at this conference, and we can talk about this based on his understanding of the meme. Way back in the 1980s, Richard Dawkins was talking about the meme, which is like a unit of cultural information that spreads from mind to mind. It goes viral from mind to mind to mind. We are social creatures, so ideas, behaviors, and emotions spread from person to person.
They course throughout the social network. The likes of, “I Am Jazz,” the concept of the transgender child, the concept of adolescent transitioning are ideas that seeped into society and spread from mind to mind to mind. What happened back then was a whole bunch of teenagers were struggling. Puberty is no fun for anyone. Then there was this idea that if you hate your body, it could be a sign that you are transgender.
Think about the fertile mind. That idea has to land in a fertile mind. There is no more fertile mind than the pubescent mind for the idea that if you hate your body, it could be a sign that you are transgender. Every kid going through puberty probably hates their developing body.
What happened is a whole bunch of innocent teenagers interpreted their distress through the lens of gender that was provided to them by, “I Am Jazz,” and by the modern trans rights movement. They came to the wrong conclusion. I see this in every graph for the referrals to gender clinics. There are almost no referrals in 2014. In 2015, when “I Am Jazz” first came out, you see an enormous spike, the inflection point, and then we’re off. We then had an epidemic.
The remarkable thing is we’ve seen plenty of social contagions in the past. We’ve had epidemics of anorexia, bulimia, and cutting. In the 1980s, we had multiple personality disorders. Way back in the 19th century, we had hysteria. We’ve had social contagions before, and we understand that teenage girls are typically at the forefront of every social contagion in history.
Yet, we failed to recognize this 5,000 percent increase in teenage girls identifying as trans in the space of one decade. We failed to see that that was a social contagion. Again, that is because of this mass psychosis. Society lost touch with reality and believed in this fictional world in which there’s such a thing as a transgender child. Therefore, when the 5,000 percent increase suddenly happened, we were not able to see that.
We were all expected to celebrate it because it was all of these transgender children who in times past could never have come out because society was not accepting. Now they can all come out. But that explanation doesn’t work at all. If it is a randomly occurring trait, it has to be randomly occurring throughout the population.
It can’t just strike teenage girls predominantly between age 15 and 17, many of whom are lesbian, and many of whom are autistic and have multiple psychiatric comorbidities. That is not how randomly occurring traits present themselves in society. That is how social contagion presents itself in society.
Imagine if we had a 5,000 percent increase in middle-aged men suffering from breast cancer. Basically, this was originally a disorder that struck predominantly middle-aged men, and then all of a sudden it’s striking teenage girls. Flip it the other way around.
If we had a 5,000 percent increase in middle-aged men suffering from breast cancer, the medical world would investigate this and ask, “What’s the trigger? What’s the cause?” But nobody thought to ask the question, “Why is this happening to these teenage girls?” That’s because of trans activism and the climate of fear that the trans activists created that prevented people from asking even the most basic questions and prevented people from protecting these girls.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why don’t you believe in the concept of a transgender child? You probably don’t believe in the concept of preferred pronouns either. Please clarify that for us.
Ms. Hughes:
With the concept of the transgender child, it’s very simple. I believe that being transgender is not something that you are, it’s something that you do.
It is a type of person brought into existence by medical technology where you can alter your body with hormones and surgeries. But that is a decision that only an adult can make.
Because a child could never possibly understand the lifelong ramifications of sacrificing their fertility, sacrificing their sexual function, and sacrificing their healthy body parts, so a child could never make that decision. Therefore, there cannot be such a thing as a transgender child.
Many people think it’s okay to socially transition a child. Like Jazz, you tell a little five-year-old boy that he’s a girl. You give him female pronouns and you give him a female name. They raise the child thinking, “If this is not a transgender child, the child will tell me. The child knows best.”
Without understanding the power of social transition, the moment you tell a little boy that he’s a girl, the moment you call him she, and the moment you give him a girl’s name, you lock in that gender identity. There’s no going back for this little boy. You’re untethering him from reality when he’s so young that he doesn’t understand anything about the world yet.
He thinks he is a girl and he believes you.
We should never socially transition any children, no matter how strong their gender nonconformity is. Children deserve a childhood grounded in truth. Raise your child in reality. Tell your child the truth. Let them know that they’re not transgender.
Let them become a fully mature adult, at least to age 25. The brain is not finished maturing until age 25. Then, if there’s still a desire to transition, I still think that there need to be strong guardrails around the treatment pathway, because of how experimental it is, because of the lack of science, and because it’s irreversible and has a very dramatic impact on your functioning as an adult. But it’s a decision that only an adult can make, so therefore there cannot possibly be such a thing as a transgender child.
With the pronoun thing, I use accurate sex pronouns at all times. The moment you call a man, “she,” you are suggesting that a man can become a woman. We all instinctively use accurate sex pronouns. We know that she means a woman and he means a man. If you call a man she, you are playing along with this idea that it is possible for a man to become a woman, and it’s not. In my mind, that is not true.
The truth matters. I don’t accept their idea of misgendering. But I don’t use accurate sex pronouns to be offensive. I do that because truth matters. The ideology that says a man can become a she is truly one of the most dangerous and harmful ideas in society today. It’s doing immeasurable harm to young people and I will not be a part of this.
Mr. Jekielek:
In Canada right now, there are people who are working on having both sets of sexual organs or facsimiles developed. I believe the Canadian health system is required, at least in one case, to pay for that. Please explain this for us.
Ms. Hughes:
Nowhere is there a better example of how far off the rails gender medicine has gone than these two cases in Ontario. In the WPATH files, there are conversations about this type of surgery. Both cases are in Ontario. The first case actually didn’t get that much media attention. It slipped under the radar.
It’s about a woman who identifies as non-binary, so she believes herself to be both male and female. She wanted to have the most gruesome of all surgeries called phalloplasty, where they take the skin and the flesh from the woman’s forearm and shape it into an appendage and sew it onto her groin as some sort of pseudo-penis.
But usually, when they do that, they have to remove all of the internal reproductive organs, including removing the vagina, the ovaries, the uterus, because there’s a cancer risk, apparently. But this woman, because she identified as non-binary, wanted to have both sets. She wanted to keep her vagina and have the appendage.
They initially turned her down and said they wouldn’t pay for it. Then she kicked up a tiny bit of a fuss. They gave in right away and they approved it. That’s it. Case closed. Then that opens the door to other people wanting the same type of surgery.
On the flip side, we have a man who identifies as non-binary, but with a feminine dominant identity. He’s non-binary, but somewhat feminine, whatever that means. He wants to keep his penis and have a surgically created vagina. Normally, when they do that, they use the penile tissue. They invert the penis and they use the penile tissue to line the cavity of the pseudo-vagina.
But he wants to keep his penis and have a vagina, so he had a vagina made out of a section of his colon. Initially, Ontario Health said, “No, we’re not paying for it,” so he appealed. The basis of his appeal was that forcing a non-binary person to go through binary surgery is conversion therapy under Canada’s conversion therapy ban. Remarkably, the appeal board ruled in his favor.
The appeal board quoted WPATH all the way through the ruling. There’s a non-binary chapter in WPATH’s latest standards of care, version eight, and it’s about individually customized bodies. These are surgeries to create individually customized bodies. The Ontario Health Authority looked to WPATH. WPATH says, “Yes, this is medically necessary, life-saving care.
Then the Ontario Health Authority insurance appealed one more time. They said, “No, we are not paying for this.” The ruling just came out. The final decision is that, “Yes, it is medically necessary. It’s gender-affirming care.”
The Ontario taxpayer must pay for a very mentally unwell man to have a surgically-created vagina using a section of his colon.
Just to add insult to injury, we are paying for him to have it done in Texas because we don’t have surgeons that do this ghoulish Frankenstein surgery in Canada. We pay for this man to go down to a very dubious gender clinic in Texas to have it done there.
It’s important for people to understand what happens when you never say no to trans activists. Because, the truth is, WPATH is not a medical group. It’s not a scientific group. It’s a group of extremist trans activists. These non-binary surgeries are an example of what happens when you don’t ever say no to them and you let trans activists do whatever they want. This is medicine with no rules. There’s no greater violation of the Hippocratic oath.
Mr. Jekielek:
If there are no barriers, there is this escalation that you are describing.
Ms. Hughes:
Of course, what’s next? It’s impossible for me to think about what’s next. What goes beyond the non-binary surgeries? In Quebec, we have that story about a 21-year-old man who had two or three fingers amputated because he didn’t feel like he should have all his fingers. Maybe that’s the next frontier.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about what’s next, but from the other side. In the UK, since the WPATH files came out, we also have the Cass Review report, a very comprehensive look into this whole phenomenon and the lack of medicine around it. How does the Cass Review report intersect with what WPATH has done? Then where do we go from here?
Ms. Hughes:
My WPATH report came out in March and then the Cass Review report came out in April. The Cass Review report is the culmination of four years of investigation into the Youth Gender Service in London. It is as comprehensive as it gets. It is complete, rigorous, and chock full of systematic reviews and evidence. It’s grounded in real science.
Everything that it said vindicates what we said a month earlier about WPATH and how there is no science and this is an unregulated medical experiment on adolescents and children. The Cass Review report was so damning in that Dr. Hillary Cass found that children had been let down. A branch of medicine with absolutely no good quality science to back it up had been placing children on an irreversible treatment pathway with no scientific justification whatsoever. The children had been let down and they were coming to terrible harm.
Most of the Cass Review report was very measured and written in very neutral language. But there were a few pages where it really did feel as though they were just taking a shot at WPATH, because they were angry with WPATH. Everything that I explained earlier about the circular citations, the lack of scientific evidence, and that it’s all WPATH’s fault—that is all in the Cass Review report. They did a review of all of the guidelines and they found that there’s no science to them whatsoever.
They criticized the complete lack of scientific rigor that went into the formulation of their standards of care. Nothing in the Cass Review report contradicted what I said. Europe has abandoned WPATH. We can say that with certainty now.
Europe has pivoted away from WPATH. They do not follow WPATH standards of care, and they’re not afraid to say so. They’re not afraid to criticize WPATH. We now have to bring that spirit to North America. That is the major challenge.
I’m in Canada. The Cass Review report got almost no media attention whatsoever. We still have Justin Trudeau, although health is provincial. There are signs that provinces may, one by one, pay attention to the evidence, like with Alberta banning puberty blockers. There’s a line in the Cass Review report where Dr. Cass says, “Some activists wanted the NHS [National Health Service] to practice social justice medicine, but that’s not how the NHS works. The NHS is interested in evidence-based medicine.”
We here in North America are still practicing social justice medicine, which is in complete contradiction to all of the scientific evidence. Now, we have to wake up our politicians and our provincial health departments. It’s going to be an uphill struggle. But eventually, this has an end date. Maybe in the U.S. it happens with malpractice lawsuits.
Maybe it happens with the two American states that have increased the statute of limitations to 30 years after the child turns 18. If you transition a child, the statute of limitations is open until that child turns 48 years old. That’s the way to do it.
You don’t need lawsuits because just the threat of lawsuits makes health insurance companies very uneasy and they typically stop funding the procedure. Perhaps that’s the answer. In the meantime, we must make these medical institutions face up to the harm that they have done, and face up to the mistake that they have made.
Mr. Jekielek:
Mia Hughes, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Hughes:
Thank you so much. The pleasure’s all mine.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Mia Hughes and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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