Catherine Oakley, senior director of legal policy at LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, described conversion therapy as causing 'nothing but devastating outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth, including adverse mental health effects, substance abuse problems, and suicidality' in an August 2024 interview with Newsweek.
The practice is banned in several states, citing the 'harm' it causes youth.
For years, I have argued that the Left didn't actually ban conversion therapy, they just embraced a radical -- much more harmful -- form of it known as 'gender-affirming care.'
By embracing that 'care' (and I use that term loosely), they did away with any semblance of the scientific process and eschewed every medical code of ethics in blind pursuit of the trans agenda. And in that process, they've harmed countless children.
As my colleague Brett wrote a month ago, the science just didn't support the push to mutilate and sterilize children, and one OB-GYN realized the horrors she was inflicting on mentally-unwell girls:
Gender affirming hysterectomies were a delight to perform. “These teeny tiny uteri [atrophied by testosterone] are so much fun to take out,” I would tell my assistant. Unlike hysterectomies for more traditional diagnoses such as abnormal uterine bleeding or pelvic pain, these uteri rarely came with pathology such as fibroids, adenomyosis, or endometriosis to make surgery more difficult.
...
I had just assumed somebody, somewhere was in charge of making sure that there was an evidence base that these extraordinary treatments that were being performed on young people – puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and double mastectomy – were supported by extraordinary scientific evidence that showed an incontrovertible long-term benefit.
...
It is an extraordinary claim that, based on an adult patient’s stated gender self-identity, they should have hysterectomy, mastectomy, penectomy, oophorectomy, vaginoplasty, rhinoplasty, cheek implants, brow reduction, chin and jaw reshaping, liposuction, breast augmentation, vocal cord shaving, and various surgeries to create nonbinary genitalia deemed medically necessary without any more specific evaluation than a supporting letter from a therapist.
I have not seen extraordinary evidence.
Now the Atlantic, in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling on that 'gender-affirming care,' is realizing the 'misinformation bubble' under which the trans activists were operating has burst.
The Supreme Court's questioning on youth gender medicine has provided "uncomfortable insight into how advocacy groups and medical associations have tamped down their own concerns about its evidence base," @helenlewis writes: https://t.co/rNfM59pyzR
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) June 29, 2025
But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.
At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”
Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.
I'm not as willing to call this a 'misinformation bubble' as Lewis is.
Because it wasn't.
From the start, it was politically motivated activism rooted in the Left's obsession with sexual identity and politics.
They didn't operate under a misinformation bubble.
They ignored the information. They ignored the science. And they attacked anyone who dared question any of it.
Including those victims of 'gender-affirming care' who detransitioned and spoke out against the horrors inflicted upon them.
In March of last year, I told you about Michael Shellenberger and Mia Hughes' excellent reporting on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) report, and here's some of what Shellenberger found:
And yet WPATH’s internal files, which include written discussions and a video, reveal that its members know they are creating victims and not getting “informed consent.”
Victims include a 10-year-old girl, a 13-year-old developmentally delayed adolescent, and individuals suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses.
The injuries described in the WPATH Files include sterilization, loss of sexual function, liver tumors, and death.WPATH members indicate repeatedly that they know that many children and their parents don’t understand the effects that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will have on their bodies. And yet, they continue to perform and advocate for gender medicine.
The WPATH Files prove that gender medicine is comprised of unregulated and pseudoscientific experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. It will go down as one of the worst medical scandals in history.
In 2014, the Atlantic published a piece titled 'Transgender People Face Outsized Barriers to Genital Surgery' in which they argued the requirement of two mental-health referrals prior to the procedure was 'unethical' and an unfair burden to trans people.
It shouldn't have taken a decade for the Left to come around to something I -- and countless others -- knew ages ago: 'gender-affirming care' is harmful to children. It was never rooted in science or medical ethics. This was a political agenda. It was all, always, political.
And for that agenda, far too many children have been irreversibly harmed.
Now the Left will do what it always does. As with COVID, or Joe Biden's cognitive decline, they'll pretend they too are hapless victims of 'misinformation' -- that they were lied to, misled, otherwise unaware of what it was they were doing so they can avoid accountability for their role in the harming of children.
I hate to burst their bubble, but we will not let them get away with this.
