Asa Radix, MD, PhD, MPH
President
World Professional Association for Transgender Health
1061 East Main St., Ste. 300
East Dundee, IL 60118
Dear Dr. Radix:
On December 30, 2025, the Department requested a timely and substantive response from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) regarding its position on sex‑rejecting procedures for children and any planned updates to its Standards of Care. To date, the Department has received nothing. For an organization that rarely wants for words on this subject, the silence is telling—and deeply disappointing.
The Department’s landmark report “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” initially released on May 1, 2025, and finalized on November 19, 2025, documented substantial evidence of harm for minors from sex-rejecting procedures. In particular, the Review documents in detail the creation of SOC-8 was fraudulent and marked “a clear departure from the principles of unbiased, evidence-driven clinical guideline development.” The Review explains how WPATH suppressed systematic reviews of evidence, failed to manage conflicts of interest, and relied on legal and political considerations rather than clinical ones. The Department has since acted to end sex-rejecting procedures on minors, including by ending federal Medicaid and CHIP funding of sex-rejecting procedures on minors.1
One would expect that an organization like yours holding itself out as a steward of national medical standards might have something to say when evidence calls its guidance into question. Surely an association so confident in its position would welcome the chance to defend it.
Others have chosen to engage. In February, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) updated its position on sex-rejecting procedures on minors.2 ASPS found that the evidence base supporting sex-rejecting procedures to be “low quality/low certainty” and that “there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.”3 At minimum, WPATH should be willing, as ASPS was, to engage with the evidence and state its position plainly.
Recent developments further call into question WPATH’s integrity. As you know, the Biden administration and activists used WPATH’s eighth and latest “Standards of Care” (SOC-8) as evidence of a faux medical consensus used to bully doctors and parents into silence and insurance companies to provide payment for pediatric sex-rejecting procedures. On July 28, 2026, however, mirabile dictu, WPATH now describes SOC-8 as “non-actionable opinions about subjects on which there is ‘medical and scientific uncertainty’,” citing United States v. Skrmetti—a case in which the Biden administration had cited WPATH SOC-8 in support of the claim that the State of Tennessee had denied children “medically necessary” care.
Now that WPATH admits uncertainty surrounding the evidence in support of sex-rejecting procedures for children, this is cold comfort to the countless children who have been irreversibly mutilated and rendered permanently infertile based on SOC-8, widely mischaracterized as a legitimate and evidence-based standard of care. But it is not too late for WPATH to explain itself and change course to align with the evidence.
Accordingly, this letter serves as a request for the following:
- A clear, current statement of the WPATH’s position on sex‑rejecting procedures for minors;
- Identification of updates, revisions, or corrections to WPATH’s position, guidance, or educational content;
- A concrete timeline for any forthcoming changes.
The Department expects your written response within 10 business days. Continued silence will speak for itself as a choice to place commitments to radical ideology ahead of evidence-based medicine and the children WPATH claims to protect.
Sincerely,
/s/
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Footnotes
1 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HHS Applauds FTC Action to Protect Children from Deceptive WPATH Guidelines, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-applauds-ftc-action-against-wpath.html; HHS Ends Federal Medicaid and CHIP Funding for Sex-Rejecting Procedures for Children and Youth, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-ends-medicaid-chip-funding-sex-rejecting-procedures-children.html; and HHS Releases Report Exposing Fraudulent Insurance Coding For Sex-rejecting Procedures On Minors, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-report-insurance-coding-sex-rejecting-procedures-minors.html.
2 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HHS Leaders Commend the American Society of Plastic Surgeons for Disavowing Pediatric Sex-Rejecting Procedures, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/asps-gender-dysphoria-statement.html.
3 American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Position Statement on Gender Surgery for Children and Adolescents, https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/health-policy/positions/2026-gender-surgery-children-adolescents.pdf.