There is a medical scandal unfolding in Canada that is unrivalled in history.

Across this country, doctors are inducing endocrine disorders into healthy children. They prescribe puberty blockers that weaken bones and disrupt normal development. They give massive doses of cross-sex hormones that have the potential to sterilize and carry serious long-term health risks.

Surgeons amputate the healthy breasts of teenage girls, invert the penises of young men—sometimes before their first sexual encounter—remove functioning reproductive organs, and even sew appendages made from forearm flesh onto women’s groins.

It sounds like a horror film. But they call it medicine. “Gender-affirming care.”

A Culture-Bound Contagion

These are not cancer patients or people suffering from life-threatening illnesses. These are healthy young people given a vague psychiatric label: “gender dysphoria”

The symptoms of this imprecise activist-crafted disorder overlap with depression, anxiety, autism, or even just puberty. Many caught in the wide diagnostic net are simply gender nonconforming homosexuals who haven’t yet had the time to settle into their sexuality.

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To make matters worse, gender-affirming clinicians ignore the obvious social contagion of trans identities that is raging all around us.

In a single decade, we’ve seen a surge of adolescent girls declaring themselves boys. We’re told this is due to societal “acceptance.” But if that were true, where are the women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, lining up for shots of testosterone and bilateral mastectomies now that society finally accepts them for the men they always were?

They don’t exist. Because what we’re witnessing is not a long-suppressed minority finally comfortable coming out of the closet—it is a powerful culture-bound syndrome: a social contagion triggered by the messaging of trans activism, striking the very same demographic that history shows is always most vulnerable: adolescent girls.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that boys and young men are affected by this contagion too, though to a lesser extent. But the harm they suffer is no less tragic.

People often ask how I can be so sure that it’s a social contagion, but honestly, it’s not even complicated. In the early 2010s, trans activism, trans influencers on YouTube, and even, unforgivably, our schools, started bombarding young people with the messaging that if you hate your body, that could be a sign you’re trans.

Then, right on cue, there was an explosion of adolescents who hate their developing bodies showing up at gender clinics declaring themselves to be trans.

Simple cause and effect. It’s hardly rocket science.

The Spiral of Silence

So this brings me to an important question: why did decent people go along with all this? Why did Canadians accept the absurdity that children could be “born in the wrong body,” that it was acceptable for schools to teach students a political ideology with no grounding in truth as if it’s scientific fact, and that amputating healthy organs could be ethical medical care?

The answer is fear. Fear of being called transphobic.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence” explains this. It states that people influence each other's willingness to express opinions. When individuals observe that their views align with popular opinion, they become more confident in voicing their stance.

Conversely, those who perceive their opinions to be unpopular tend to be silent for fear of ostracism. This creates a spiral in which those with the approved opinion get louder, and those with opposing views become increasingly afraid to speak.

That’s exactly what happened across the western world when trans activism made describing reality a crime, and swiftly punished anyone who dared oppose the reckless medical experiment of transing kids. Canadian society suddenly found itself, in the 2010s, in the grips of a powerful climate of fear, resulting in a spiral of silence.

Our mainstream media also played an important role. Through cowardly one-sided reporting and a steadfast refusal to investigate the scandal of pediatric gender medicine, CBC, CTV, and all major outlets (with the exception of the National Post) created the illusion that support for this reckless experiment on healthy young people was widespread.

Thus, they fortified the silence.

If people had been free to express their natural horror, there would have been uproar the moment Canadians learned that surgeons were amputating the healthy breasts of teenage lesbians or inverting the penises of young gay men. Instead, silence.

The Terrible Fraud of WPATH

If you want to understand this medical scandal, you have to understand the group that sits at its core: the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.

Now, I happen to know a thing or two about WPATH. And I’m going to give you just a glimpse of the astonishing levels of fraud and corruption inside the world's leading transgender healthcare group.

First of all, don’t be fooled by the carefully crafted facade: WPATH is not a respectable scientific organization. It is an activist group masquerading as a professional medical association. And yet its Standards of Care set the framework for gender medicine across Canada.

It’s safe to say 2024 was a terrible year for WPATH.

First, Michael Shellenberger and I released The WPATH Files—a report based on leaked communications from the group’s internal messaging forum. In those leaks, WPATH members admit children cannot consent to these irreversible interventions. They admit the risks of sterility. They show utter disregard for the Hippocratic Oath. And worst of all—they know they are causing harm, and they do it anyway.

Next, the UK’s Cass Report exposed that WPATH, along with the Endocrine Society, manufactured a consensus on gender-affirming care. They produced guidelines built on the flimsiest of evidence. Those guidelines were then copied and repeated, triggering a cascade of equally flimsy policy statements from medical associations all over the world. This created the illusion of consensus. But at the center of their tangled web of circular citations lies an empty shell—devoid of anything resembling good science.

When trans activists say that every major medical association supports paediatric gender medicine, they are referring to this citation cartel.

In fact, Cass rated WPATH’s guidelines, and all based upon them, as lacking developmental rigor. Another review rated WPATH’s guidelines unanimously as “do not recommend.”

But somehow, the nation of Canada didn’t get that particular memo.

But June 2024 brought the bombshell. Documents unsealed in a U.S. court revealed the unbelievable levels of fraud and corruption that went into the making of WPATH’s Standards of Care, version 8, published in 2022.

The world learned that in 2018, at the beginning of the SOC-8 process, WPATH commissioned a series of systematic reviews from Johns Hopkins upon which to build their recommendations.

But things didn’t go quite as planned. When the preliminary results started to come in, WPATH quickly realised that there was no evidence, so they blocked the Johns Hopkins team from publishing the negative reviews.

Then they went ahead and published their Standards of Care 8 as if the reviews had shown evidence.

I hardly need say that this is simply not how independent reviews or guideline creation works.

This is not science. This is fraud.

But that’s not all.

When WPATH first published its Standards of Care in September 2022, the adolescent chapter included explicit minimum ages for youth to access these irreversible interventions.

To be clear, these were shocking recommendations: 14 years old for cross-sex hormones, 15 for double mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation and facial surgeries, and 17 for penis inversion.

But then something remarkable happened: less than twenty-four hours after publication, those age limits quietly vanished. The online document was altered, and the lower limits were gone.

The unsealed court documents solved the mystery. By now, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that this change wasn’t based on new evidence. In actual fact, Admiral Rachel Levine, a trans-identified man and WPATH member, who was at the time Biden’s assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, pressured WPATH to remove the recommendations, fearing that hard age limits would undercut the legislative battles that the Democrats were fighting at the state level.

This is not science; this is politics.

What this all boils down to is this: when WPATH calls the Standards of Care 8 evidence-based, they’re lying. And when WPATH calls Standards of Care 8 scientific, they’re lying.

Yet Canadian clinics, from coast to coast, proudly follow WPATH’s SOC-8.

And you don’t even need to read the unsealed court documents; just take one look at the actual Standards of Care itself. You’ll find an entire chapter on eunuch as a valid gender identity, requiring gender affirming castration, and a chapter on nonbinary that describes “gender nullification” surgeries to create smooth, sexless bodies or experimental “bi-genital” surgeries designed to create two sets of genitals for people who identify as both sexes—like the man in Ontario who just won the right to have one such surgery paid for by the Ontario taxpayer.

And this is what passes for medicine in Canada today.

Flawed Studies, Buried Truths, and Dangerous Lies

But the fraud extends beyond WPATH..

In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics also issued a fraudulent position statement endorsing placing healthy children on this unproven medical pathway.

The AAP misrepresented an entire body of research on adult homosexuality and applied it to “gender identity” in children—evidence with no relevance at all. Yet that document became the foundation for policy. And almost every major medical association followed suit, including the Canadian Pediatric Society.

And what of the research? The entire puberty suppression experiment is built upon two linchpin Dutch studies published in 2011 and 2014. Yet those studies were so riddled with flaws that their results should have been completely invalidated.

As most of you will already know, replication is the bedrock of science, and there have been two attempts at replicating the supposedly positive findings of the Dutch—one in the UK and one in the U.S.—and both attempts failed.

But that’s not even the worst part. Both times, the researchers involved tried to bury the negative results and only published years later when forced.

Think about that: their experiment on healthy children failed to show evidence of benefit, and instead of immediately halting the treatment, they did everything in their power to hide the research so the experiment could continue.

These are the “experts” we are told to trust.

Now, we’re always hearing trans activists say that “gender-affirming care” is life-saving. So what about the suicide narrative? The despicable ultimatum delivered to parents in paediatric gender clinics—“Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?”—was never based on evidence. It was always activist misinformation, grotesquely overblown and used to emotionally blackmail parents into consenting to irreversible interventions.

In December 2024, before the Supreme Court of the United States, ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio had to admit the truth: there is no suicide epidemic. Which means there is no truth to “transition or suicide.” With that admission, gender clinicians lost the only medical justification they ever claimed for sterilizing healthy young people.

Because here’s the dark reality: there are only two fields of pediatrics where treatment carries the potential to sterilize a child—oncology and gender medicine. In oncology, without treatment, the child will likely die. Activists tried to frame gender medicine in the same way. But it was always a lie.

Now let me take a moment to debunk two more common lies told by trans activists: that puberty blockers are fully reversible and that they have been proven safe.

Trans activists love to claim that puberty blockers are safe because they have been used for decades to treat precocious puberty—a disorder where a child goes into puberty at a very young age.

This is an apples to oranges comparison.

Puberty blockers for precocious puberty manage a diagnosable endocrine disorder.

But in gender medicine, puberty blockers induce an endocrine disorder in healthy adolescents on the basis of a self-declared identity.

In precocious puberty, the drugs are stopped at the age when normal puberty begins.

In gender medicine, the drugs are started when normal puberty has already begun. Then almost 100% of the time followed by cross-sex hormones so the kids never go through puberty.

And it’s not even true that puberty blockers have been proven safe in the decades of their use. There are over 10,000 adverse event reports filed with the FDA by women who claim they were harmed taking Lupron for either precocious puberty or short stature.

Now, puberty blockers were originally intended to be a pause button—a way to buy time for these kids to think before making irreversible choices. But as is so often the case in medicine, the new treatment had unintended consequences.

Before affirmation and puberty blockers, most gender distressed youth desisted from their trans identities during or after puberty. But the moment puberty blockers were introduced, almost every child put on the drugs progressed to cross-sex hormones—meaning puberty blockers aren’t reversible at all but instead lock in a trans identity and set the stage for lifelong medicalization.

Basically, puberty was the natural cure for gender dysphoria. Therefore, if you block puberty, you block the natural cure.

Yet gender-affirming clinicians ignored, and continue to ignore, this dramatic iatrogenic effect.

Now add to this the mountain of systematic reviews, and reviews of those reviews—from the UK, Sweden, Finland, Canada, Florida, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—all reaching the same conclusion: there is no good-quality evidence to support these drastic interventions. None.

I hope you can see by now why I opened with the statement that there has never been a medical scandal to rival this one. To be sure, history is littered with examples of the medical world getting things wrong and harming patients in a quest to heal, but there has never been a scandal that has involved so much institutional fraud and corruption leading to so much damage to innocent young people.

Yet this province—the province of Alberta—is the only Canadian province that has made any attempt to shield young people from a field of medicine that has catastrophically lost its way. Thank you, Premier Danielle Smith.

And, unforgivably, Egale Canada, along with other trans activist groups, are trying to block those essential protective measures. Shame on them.

Breaking the Spiral of Silence

So let me be absolutely clear.

“Gender-affirming care” is not medicine.

Healthy young people being subjected to irreversible life-altering interventions that lack scientific justification cannot be called medicine.

These are vulnerable youth—many autistic, depressed, or simply muddling through puberty—who only need time to grow and mature. They’re not trans; they’re just impressionable and confused, and they’re coming of age in an era that sells them medical body modification as the remedy for their adolescent angst.

This is the scandal of gender affirming care. And history will not be kind to those who stayed silent.

But courage is contagious. When even one person speaks, it gives others permission to find their voice. It breaks the spiral of silence. Gatherings like this are sparks capable of igniting wildfires of bravery.

I am speaking here today to defend the most basic of rights: the right of children to a childhood grounded in truth, the right of every young person to grow up healthy and whole.

So if you take one thing from my words today, let it be this: never be afraid to speak the truth about this medical crime. Never allow activists or institutions to silence you. Because silence prolongs this scandal—but courage has the power to end it.

Mia Hughes is the author of The WPATH Files, and director of Genspect Canada.

Join Mia at the Bigger Picture Conference, THIS SATURDAY where she will be speaking on the false beliefs fueling medical harm.

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