Trump's DOJ, FTC going after 'everyone' facilitating medicalized gender transitions for kids

Whistleblowers, state attorneys general and researchers have laid the groundwork for the feds to go after medical professionals who practice so-called gender-affirming care on minors for consumer and billing fraud, they told a Federal Trade Commission workshop Wednesday.

FTC commissioners and Department of Justice officials responded, in so many words: We're on it, and we're thinking bigger.

Practitioners, gender clinics, hospitals, nonprofit advocacy groups, medical associations and drug manufacturers should expect to hear from the DOJ on alleged healthcare fraud, false statements, false billing and Medicaid claims, "scientifically dubious assertions" used as "cover" by clinics and Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act violations, a top official said.

The invite-only audience of around 200, including at least a dozen parents and "survivors" of youth gender transitions, repeatedly applauded as DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle rattled off the target list – "everyone" in the "multi-billion-dollar industry of harming our kids" – starting with nearly 20 subpoenas it has issued to gender clinics. 

Just outside the workshop on the National Mall, progressive advocacy group Fight for the Future hired a billboard truck to scold the FTC for its "extremely dangerous and certainly out-of-agency scope 'workshop' … an ideologically-motivated waste of taxpayer dollars without an opportunity for public comment by members of Congress."

The workshop was intended as a distraction from the administration's "failure to do their actual jobs of investigating big tech oligarchs and stopping data brokers from fueling murders," with FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson "instead bullying trans kids," Fight for the Future said.

Lmao so today the FTC is holding a "workshop" scapegoating trans kids & threatening their access to lifesaving healthcare. @fightforthefuture.org is driving this billboard truck past the building and it's BLARING "Protect Trans Kids" by me and @ryancassata.bsky.social WTF is wrong with them indeed

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— Evan Greer (@evangreer.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Mizelle said there's "no doubt in my mind" this industry is committing "one of the greatest frauds on the American public" by hiding the risks and inflating the benefits of medicalized gender transitions for minors. The FTC has a "very broad mandate" to investigate as well.

DOJ is also working with Congress to codify genital-transition procedures on girls as female genital mutilation, which is already prohibited by federal law, and for survivors to gain legal remedies, Mizelle said, urging parents and children to talk to DOJ officials at the workshop if they've been harmed or misled.

Three children's hospitals are reportedly under FBI investigation for female genital mutilation under this definition.

"There's a very good chance this will stop even in blue states" if President Trump's DOJ simply prosecutes for fraudulent diagnostic codes, according to whistleblower surgeon Eithan Haim, prosecuted by President Biden's DOJ for alleged health privacy violations by claiming Texas Children's Hospital was performing pediatric transitions in violation of state law.

"Working on it," Jordan Campbell, deputy assistant attorney general for consumer protection and founder of a law firm dedicated to detransitioners, responded to Haim, whose eight-month prosecution was quickly ended by Trump's DOJ.

Campbell joined DOJ last month from Dallas, with his family not yet in D.C., after founding a law firm two years ago limited to detransitioners' injury claims from their medicalized transitions, which are often preempted by statutes of limitation. 

"I saw that there was really nobody that would step up for them" among lawyers, he said, getting visibly emotional.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Leor Sapir, who researches medicalized transition protocols, warned that gender affirming circles were pivoting to a new talking point: the "assessment model" as a cure for the abuses in the "child-led model" where affirmation is automatic.

Systematic reviews have also found "very low quality" evidence for this purportedly more careful model, which is "not predictive of adult outcomes" and cannot overcome the core informed-consent problem, that children cannot really understand what it means to give up, say, normal sexual function by starting treatment, Sapir said.

Changing the lingo: 'survivors,' 'risks and purported benefits'

Government officials repeated key phrases intended to reorient the public's perception of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery to resemble the opposite sex in line with the workshop's view that the treatment is inherently dangerous and unscientific.

In addition to "survivors" as a more emotionally resonant term for detransitioners, FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak described the "risks and purported benefits" of medicalized transition, emphasizing the latter is not as settled as the former, such as decreased bone density and cognitive development, increased cancer risk, vaginal atrophy and sexual dysfunction.

She also repeatedly intoned that doctors are legally obligated to provide parents "complete and truthful information" on medicalized transitions, just as hers did when Holyoak's newborn daughter went into intensive care with a swollen heart, reaffirming Chairman Andrew Ferguson's justifications for FTC investigations earlier in the day.

Referring to the FTC's 2022 health products compliance guidance, Holyoak said gender transition claims must be scientifically substantiated, not just "a medical practitioner's experience" or "advisories" from organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and should acknowledge "significant safety concerns."

WPATH's Standards of Care 8, which the Biden administration covertly shaped to remove age minimums, more accurately represent "drastically evolving standards" than medical consensus given how much they have changed in just 25 years and their contrast with the drastic pullback on youth transitions from Europe to Australia, she said.

Proponents have repeatedly made false representations such as increased risk of suicide if pediatric transition is denied, as confirmed when ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio admitted there was no evidence for that during Supreme Court oral arguments over Tennessee's ban on youth medicalized transitions, Holyoak said.

Undue deference by doctors, 'code of silence'

The "suicide myth" is one of the most common justifications by practitioners when sued by former clients, DOJ's Campbell said, citing legal discovery in his previous cases.

The dubious surgery recommendation letters highlighted by child psychiatrist Miriam Grossman earlier in the day are more detailed than the "form letters" Campbell encountered, where doctors claim clients they just met satisfied WPATH conditions that require months of review and give them hormones on the spot. "They don't even play by the rules they purport to follow."

Because the basis of modern medicine is a "high level of trust and deference," gender clinicians have managed to escape real scrutiny from other physicians who would not want their expertise questioned either, according to Sapir, the researcher.

The result is that WPATH standards are embedded in "virtually every relevant aspect of U.S. healthcare," from insurers to medical schools, and medical associations have "repeatedly assured state and federal regulators" the standards are owed deference, even though they've never undergone a systematic review and largely counter Europe now, he said.

WPATH's Standards of Care 8 have "verified falsehoods" to this day, according to Solicitor General Edmund LaCour of Alabama. Its 2021 ban on youth gender transitions prompted a lawsuit whose legal discovery exposed the Biden administration's interference in WPATH, so the standards never completed the "Delphi method" of expert consensus, he said.

As a condition of access to its data, WPATH also required outside researchers to pledge not to use it against the gender-affirming cause and to also disclose in their manuscripts that WPATH didn't shape what they wrote, a glaring contradiction, LaCour said.

The public understandably wonders "where are the doctors?" amid all this deception, Haim said. They observe a "code of silence" on such treatments because physicians would be "targeted in the most vicious way possible," he said, noting the 10 years in prison he was facing for a supposed crime where the alleged victims were doctors and hospitals, not patients. 

Medical institutions became captive over decades to "radical left-wing ideologies" where dissenters face professional ruin and people without "radical values" never get hired, he said.