With the most progressive countries in the world now denouncing so-called Gender Affirming Care, the WHO appoints radical trans activists to write a gratuitous global guideline
On December 18th, 2023 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the development of a “guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people”, seemingly as a last ditch effort to collect “trans kids” and vulnerable adults for an ailing movement while the most progressive countries in the world rapidly distance themselves from so-called Gender Affirming Care.
No mere concerned parents, justice-minded lawyers, ethical doctors, or ordinary, mentally stable transgender people are to be involved in creating guidelines for the optimal health of people with transgender ideation. Instead, 21 activist “scholars”, activist doctors and, well, just activists are to comprise the Guidelines Development Group (GDG) charged with writing a guideline that will inform the care of gender-confused people around the world.
This approach seems to defy the world’s rapidly-declining appetite for gender change affirmation, and instead to desperately shore up the medical industry’s preferred interventions, no matter how self-evident their barbarism and disastrous effect on families and societies.
One of the purported experts chosen to write the guideline is Canadian academic and radical activist Florence Ashley, author of a 2023 paper titled Genderf*cking Non-Disclosure: Sexual Fraud, Transgender Bodies, and Messy Identities as well as a soon to be released paperback book, Gender/F*cking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body.
It isn’t simply for the shock value of the book, which features “critical essays, erotica, and stitched-up memories” and “explores sexual arousal as a site of knowledge about the self and world”, that Ashley’s participation in the unnecessary global guideline is a huge red flag. Ashley’s entire life, it seems, has become devoted to undermining concerned parents of children captured by transgender ideation.
“Over the last few years, I’ve been writing about the conviction among cis parents that being trans is a social contagion that has climbed to heights of pandemic proportions. I have dedicated myself to proving the fallacy of the suggestion.”
In a highlighted excerpt from the book, Ashley states: “Over the last few years, I’ve been writing about the conviction among cis parents that being trans is a social contagion that has climbed to heights of pandemic proportions. I have dedicated myself to proving the fallacy of the suggestion.” This publicly declared self-blinkering, contempt for concerned parents, and insolence to the safeguarding of children who often DO desist from “gender identities” is enough to discredit not only Ashley, but also the entire GDG selection exercise.
Further, Ashley’s statement, “holding open the possibility that every cis person is at a stage of becoming towards transness”, reeks of bias toward a “trans nation” that relies on the forceful persuasion of children and vulnerable adults to bring it to fruition. This is an individual, and an attitude webbed throughout the GDG, fraught with the extreme bias that warrants exclusion from the guidance writing process according WHO’s own Handbook for Guideline Development.
Beyond Florence Ashley’s rather hostile “everything trans” and openly anti-parent convictions, the cherry-picked writing crew for this strong-armed global medical guidance is dripping with the bias that the WHO is bound by its own policies to avoid.
About a quarter of the proposed GDG members are past presidents or founders of WPATH, CPATH, EPATH or PATHSA
The conflicts of interest we’ve found include the following:
- about a quarter of the GDG members are affiliated with or financially supported by the WHO itself
- over half are members of WPATH or offshoots thereof
- about a quarter of the proposed GDG are past presidents or founders of WPATH, CPATH, EPATH or PATHSA (and yet inexplicably excludes the only former WPATH president who has shown objectivity)
- about a quarter are affiliated with GATE (Global Action for Trans Equality), for which The Arcus Foundation— a billion dollar trans lobby group and a division of the Stryker Corporation– is listed as a donor
- about a quarter are authors of WPATH’s SOC 8, which has been thoroughly discredited in part for recommending a surgical “eunuch” state for children, should they request it
- 2 of the 21 proposed guideline writers are leaders of PATHSA, a very small offshoot of WPATH in South Africa
- ALL publicly present as 100% in favour of “gender affirming care” to the exclusion of effectively addressing mental health comorbidities or conditions, childhood trauma, suppressed or undeveloped homosexuality, and social contagion as alternatives to the adoption of and even medicalization of a “gender identity”
- NONE have publicly acknowledged the existence or needs of detransitioners, desisters or “trans” regretters, despite the skyrocketing numbers in these cohorts.
Pointing out the glaring conflicts of interest among the 21 individuals set to dictate “trans and gender diverse healthcare” for the entire world is like a lively game of ethical whack-a-mole. Moreover, this “trans lobby boys club”, by the nature of their own affiliations and public messaging, seem to be fueled by validating this messaging and, in doing so, are offering increasingly invasive medical procedures to other people’s children. Breaches of child safeguarding occur in the shadows, just as this misguided one-sided guideline is attempting to do.
So what can we do? As a start, we can send emails as organizations and individuals to the WHO citing the biases we see among the GDG authors and the lack of relevance and urgency for the guideline to begin with. It is worth emphasizing that, at present, the world is exhibiting signs of recovery from the transgender craze, and the WHO’s guidance is arguably not needed at all, and will be harmful if it causes countries to regress back to unquestioning affirmative care.
We can call for the WHO to “pause the process (including the postponement of the February 2024 Geneva meeting), and go back to the drawing board”, as suggested by SEGM (Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine) in a recent article on this stealthily fast tracked guidance.
If these efforts fail, we may be driven toward discrediting the WHO’s guidelines, but to begin with, we indulge the hope that the WHO can correct its course to act ethically and credibly in the selection of the Guideline Development Group.
The WHO is accepting comments from the public until Monday, January 8th. Please feel free to draw from this article and/or from ODC’s comments to the WHO to help inform your own.
Here’s what we wrote:
Attention WHO,
Our Duty Canada is a Canadian chapter of Our Duty International, a volunteer organization committed to supporting parents of children and adolescents experiencing what we refer to as gender ideation. Part of our mission is to work toward increasing public knowledge and to pressure our socio-medical-political systems into conducting themselves from an evidence-based perspective.
We are writing today to officially express our dismay on the WHO’s development of the “guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people” and the Guidelines Development Group (GDG) chosen to write said guidelines.
Upon reading through the biographies of GDG members provided to the public, we were able to pinpoint many biases among its members, not the least of which being that 11 out of the total of 21 designated guideline writers- just over half- happen to be affiliated with GATE (Global Action for Trans Equality), WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare) and/or the WHO itself. This member selection seems to show that the WHO seeks a foregone conclusion to this group’s work, one that will do inestimable harm to individuals and families, but that will generate surgical and pharmaceutical profits.
Members of the GDG who have worked with or whose individual projects are sponsored by the WHO include Yan Yan Arana, Eszter Kismödi, Alicia Kruger, Felisbela Maria de Oliveira Gaspar and Gail Knudson.
Members of the GDG who are past presidents or board members of WPATH (or one of its offshoot organizations) and/or are co-authors of its widely scrutinized SOC 8 include Sanjay Sharma, Walter Bockting, Walter Bouman and Chris McLachlan.
Members of the GDG who are affiliated with GATE include Cianán Russell, Erika Castellanos and Eszter Kismödi JD, LLM.
Further, Chris McLachlan and Elma de Vries are both members of a small group of individuals who run the Professional Association of Transgender Health South Africa (PATHSA). This in itself is quite curious. Certainly there are viable candidates for the Guidelines Development Group around the world so why approve 2 of 21 members who both belong to a relatively small advocacy group in South Africa?
We would also like to note that several members of the GDG show biases as longtime transgender activists and are trans or non-binary identifying themselves. The presence of trans or non-binary identifying individuals within the GDG is not problematic on its own, as long as these individuals show an ability to promote solutions to gender confusion that do not happen to affirm their own identities. Should the guideline proceed, we would suggest Dr. Erica Anderson, Scott Newgent, or Aaron Kimberly as exemplars of balanced transgender individuals.
Currently, the Guideline Development Group members seem to lean exclusively toward radical promotion of gender identities in their work, their activism, and their lives, Florence Ashley being one shocking example.
In Ashley’s biography, provided by the WHO to the public, a 2022 publication, “Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis” was cited. However, in another article Ashley has described medical/psychological gatekeeping of access to cross-sex hormones as “dehumanizing,” apparently totally discounting their long term health and behavioural effects and the ensuing cost to social contracts and public health care systems, and also ignoring the distinction between such treatments being sought by mature vs. immature patients.
In addition, Ashley’s most recently published work, in December of 2023, “Genderf*cking as a Critical Legal Methodology” can be found through an added link within the bio.
“Genderf*ckers are unintelligible and illegible under the hegemonic narratives and counternarratives of gender that circulate in the self-proclaimed Western world. They f*ck with gender by refusing or failing to heed the call “to neatly locate ourselves within gender categories.” Indeed, many genderf*ckers f*ck with gender by quite literally f*cking beyond the confines of gender’s reproductive imperative.”
These excerpts appear to promote promiscuity and may advance the desensitization of children to sexual content, which is a precursor to the early sexualization of children, which is sometimes followed by abuse.
With such a large portion of the GDG being activists and advocates who lobby for gender affirming care as the first or only option for trans and gender diverse individuals, this leaves little room for the forthcoming guidelines to avoid bias and actually enhance the health of confused or traumatized individuals who typically seek sexual transition services.
We know that many individuals who identify as transgender or gender diverse will come to change their minds over time, and regret changes to their bodies to the extent that they litigate in pursuit of damages from the medical personnel involved.
This is why it is critical that ANY guidelines that these vulnerable young people or their care providers are asked to follow allow for and accommodate the potential for regret.
We ask that the WHO’s process for the “guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people” be paused or slowed to ensure that all outcomes for trans and gender diverse people are considered in its writing. We ask that the GDG membership be replaced with credible advisors who do not show bias toward an “affirmation only” approach in their vocational and personal affiliations. As an example, we recommend American psychologist Dr. Michael Bailey or American Child Psychiatrist Miriam Grossman MD, or Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala or Jamie Reed, who have a record of forming their perspective on the basis of evidence.
Further, in order to support all potential outcomes for trans and gender diverse people, we ask that one or more members of the GDG be individuals who have detransitioned or hold regret around their medical or social gender transition and/or professionals who support such individuals. Here we suggest natal males Ritchie Herron or Lois Cardinal, who also brings a valuable indigenous perspective, or natal females such as Prisha Mosely.
We do hope you will consider our comments and either halt the guideline process or create a more diverse and not transgender activist GDG to undertake its writing, as it can have such a huge impact on so many lives should it be followed by the mental health and health care service providers around the world.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Our Duty Canada
