Transgender health group now says its guidelines for treating youth are only 'opinions' in 'intense debate'

Critics are alleging the American transgender health organization whose guidelines form the basis of Canadian gender care policies has made a significant shift amid a legal battle with the Trump administration.

In a new legal filing, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, says its guidance to doctors represents one side in a field of “intense medical debate.”

In a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging the group has made deceptive claims regarding the treatment of children, WPATH argues that the challenged statements in its influential Standards of Care are not presented as “bare assertions of fact but rather opinions” based on the scientific studies cited.

The group’s opinions are “non-actionable” and are protected by the First Amendment, and doctors bear “independent responsibility for their own advice,” WPATH’s legal filing reads.

Critics are calling the arguments a “remarkable humbling in attitude.”

“WPATH now agrees that pediatric transgender medicine is marked by ‘medical and scientific uncertainty,'” the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a group concerned with low-evidenced interventions that has been accused of being anti-trans by transgender rights advocates, said in a viral post on X.

“Yet for years, WPATH presented its guidelines as an unquestionable medical standard of care. The social and scientific costs of questioning their recommendations were steep and could be career-ending,” SEGM said.

“Parents have been told that the WPATH approach is not optional, but medically necessary and lifesaving,” posted Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and co-author of a controversial Trump administration report on the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria.

WPATH “has aggressively promoted that approach, including by suppressing and stigmatizing alternatives,” Sapir wrote on X.

“I think it’s disingenuous at best for WPATH to now frame its recommendations as merely one opinion in a legitimate debate.”

The chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, responded on X that WPATH “went to great lengths to convince insurance companies, doctors and parents that its standard of care was the ‘settled science.’ And now it’s claiming that the standard of care is worth no more than a student essay in a high school newspaper.”

WPATH did not provide a comment to National Post before deadline. In a statement to the trans news site Assigned Media, WPATH said critics are taking a literal and narrow interpretation of opinion.