Yesterday Compact magazine published a lengthy review of conferences held by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. The review was only made possible because videos of the conferences held since 2020 were turned over as part of a lawsuit in Alabama.
In 2022, families represented by ACLU attorneys and other litigators sued the state over its pediatric gender medicine ban. The state responded by subpoenaing WPATH’s internal records after a judge established WPATH’s transgender-care guidelines were the linchpin for validating these medical practices as safe and effective.
Last year, all of those videos were given to author Benjamin Ryan who wound up writing this story about what he saw. The gist of his story is that WPATH exists within a highly political bubble of groupthink, one that sifts out anyone who dares to challenge the most extreme approach to gender medicine.
At the 2022 conference, Dr. Maddie Deutsch, then USPATH’s president, discouraged colleagues from referencing too many potential harms of treatment in public-facing materials, for fear they will be leveraged against the field. Deutsch, the medical director of the University of California San Francisco’s gender clinic, had the previous year led the charge to censure her former colleague, psychologist Erica Anderson, for airing dirty laundry. Anderson, who preceded Deutsch as USPATH president, had told journalist Abigail Shrier that some pediatric providers were providing “sloppy” care. During a tense subsequent exchange over talking to journalists, Anderson warned USPATH that stonewalling the press would only worsen the crisis facing the organization. Deutsch took a different course. She orchestrated a moratorium on USPATH leadership speaking to the media.
The example USPATH made of Anderson, who left WPATH in dismay and became one of the field’s few vocal dissidents, could help explain the remarkably little overt disagreement during the conference sessions. True, some may have occurred in private side conversations. But such a paucity of robust internal debate during sessions is, to say the least, uncommon at a medical conference. And this particular society, which unlike most traditional medical associations allows non-care-providers such as activists and lawyers to join, is evidently structured to operate by its own rules. The organization, Anderson told me, “shifted into high gear on advocacy as I decided to withdraw. There was no reasoning with them.”
One of the people pushing out the moderate voices was Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, formerly the director of a pediatric gender clinic in LA.
It’s likely no one has done more to push pediatric gender medicine toward more liberal prescribing practices than Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who until recently directed the gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Charismatic and indefatigable, the pediatrician has been particularly vocal in questioning the comprehensive psychosocial assessments WPATH’s guidelines recommend for minors seeking gender-transition interventions. What some have held up as invaluable safeguards, she has disparaged as stigmatizing and counterproductive.
Over the past decade, Olson-Kennedy’s vision for pediatric gender medicine has increasingly won out. It has effectively edged out more cautious WPATH leaders, most notably psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who coauthored the chapters on children and adolescents in WPATH’s 2022 guidelines. Edwards-Leeper also co-wrote with Anderson a 2021 Washington Post editorial in which they called out recklessness in the field and championed a re-commitment to psychological exploration with young patients.
Edwards-Leeper spent years playing the Cassandra foil to what she saw as Olson-Kennedy’s hubris. She told me she “repeatedly, like a broken record, warned colleagues” that the field’s unwieldy practices would inspire a backlash that, above all, would hurt the children they all sought to help. But WPATH leadership, Edwards-Leeper said, ignored her expressed concerns.
“I naively believed they would actually use their power to get the ship back on course,” she told me. They did not. So like Anderson, she finally gave up and left the organization. WPATH had closed ranks.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy is probably best known at this point for being the lead author on research which she sat on for years because she was concerned the outcome of the science didn't support her view of the topic. So instead of publishing the data, she just sat on it.
In October 2024, The New York Times reported that Olson-Kennedy had said she was withholding publishing the long-awaited results of a puberty-blocker study, and doing so for political reasons. Facing blowback, Olson-Kennedy asserted the Times had presented “an inaccurate and misrepresentative picture of the status” of the study. Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades-Ha told me via email: “We’re confident in the accuracy of our reporting. The story was based on National Institute of Health documents obtained via public records requests, as well as a lengthy, on-the-record interview with Dr. Olson-Kennedy.”
Olson-Kennedy’s team finally released the paper in question in a pre-print last May. Unlike a foundational Dutch study published in 2011, it documented no mental-health shifts. Olson-Kennedy’s team rationalized that the young people were largely mentally well to begin with and simply coasted on blockers. Journalist Jesse Singal remarked that this assertion flew in the face of claims by Olson-Kennedy herself that youths with gender dysphoria were often in emotional dire straits and in need of psychic relief from puberty blockers.
As Ryan suggests, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was constantly pushing for less focus on possible regret and more on providing affirming care.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy: “I think that a lot of this conversation...gets talked about through a lens of ‘How can we make sure people are really trans,’ right? And ‘They’re not going to regret their decision later?’” But “that’s actually not the discussion that I’m interested in… pic.twitter.com/c5sNnWLkZ1
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) April 1, 2026
But as regular readers may know, that focus didn't work out too well for her.
In 2024, Olson-Kennedy was sued for malpractice by a former patient after signing off on the girl’s mastectomy when she was fourteen. It turned out the young woman did want breasts later in life.
There's a lot more to the article including some videos posted by Ryan on X. But his overall conclusion is that WPATH exists in a bubble of groupthink where anyone voicing contrary opinions or concern is seen as essentially wrong-headed and generally ushered out the door. Gender activism, rather than science, has the upper hand but only the people who've been forced out seem to see it.
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