WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The federal government and several states are suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) for its role in promoting “false and unsubstantiated” claims about the safety of “transitioning” gender-confused children.

Founded in 1979, WPATH bills itself as a “non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health.” It has developed “standards of care” instrumental in justifying underage “gender transitions” as “medically necessary,” used by governments and medical institutions alike.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it, along with the states of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, are suing WPATH, maintaining that its recommendations “misled parents and children about the medical consensus and medical necessity, as well as the safety and effectiveness, of such services, in violation of the FTC Act.”

The commission accuses WPATH of neglecting to “disclose side effects of certain pediatric medical transition services, including that cross-sex hormones can cause mood disturbances, vocal pain and limitations, pelvic pain, clitoral discomfort, vaginal pain, inability to orgasm, incontinence and erectile pain”; falsely frames transitions as suicide prevention (thereby emotionally manipulating parents into approving them), and its guidelines “label nearly every pediatric transition service as ‘medically necessary’ to maximize the likelihood that insurers will pay” for them.

“When an organization provides guidance designed to mislead families about the risks, benefits, or medical consensus behind a treatment, it undermines trust in those responsible for providing medical care,” said Commissioner Mark Meador. “Our action today is a straightforward application of the law to ensure that families receive accurate, evidence-based information as they seek to make some of the most important healthcare decisions for their children.”

Doctors and hospitals used junk science from WPATH to justify selling gender transition procedures to kids and their parents. Huge props to Andrew and his team for taking an important step in our efforts to end this outrageous practice. https://t.co/AgrgveUrLa

— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 17, 2026

Taking down WPATH would be the gender critical Battle of Stalingrad. https://t.co/tH61aZgCF3

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 17, 2026

WPATH has a record of working with left-wing activists in government to sell child transitions to the public. Emails revealed that cross-dressing Biden administration Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Richard “Rachel” Levine “strongly pressured WPATH leadership to rush the development and issuance of SOC-8 [WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8], in order to assist with Administration political strategy” and eliminate minimum-age guidelines for gender reassignment.

Those emails, released a part of an Alabama lawsuit, also detailed how WPATH incorporated policy language deeming “gender transition” procedures “medically necessary” into its official standards of care as a “tool” to pressure insurance companies to cover them rather than as an objective medical conclusion. Meanwhile, the group refused to publish the findings of Johns Hopkins researchers who concluded there was “little to no evidence” supporting WPATH’s desired findings.

A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

In 2024, National Health Service England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations,” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of [so-called] gender care for children.”

“While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices,” the report concluded.

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through so-called gender transitions had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who underwent physical and chemical alterations in an attempt to live as the opposite sex before returning to their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion. Such individuals have documented the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution to gender dysphoria.

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”