A Scandal Beyond Belief

For the last six years, I’ve been trying to alert Canadians to the medical scandal unfolding in our paediatric gender clinics, which is a difficult task because the truth is so extraordinary that it simply defies belief.

Doctors in these clinics are treating a type of young person that contradicts all existing knowledge about child and adolescent development. They pump this fictional patient cohort with toxic, unproven drugs in the complete absence of scientific justification, and then they usher them into the operating theatre to have healthy body parts needlessly amputated.

So I’m delighted to be here today in the only Canadian province that has made any attempt to shield young people from this field of medicine that has so catastrophically lost its way.

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And I’m especially delighted to be taking part in an event with the theme of fundamental truths because this is actually a topic I think about all the time when I’m reading the mainstream coverage of paediatric gender medicine, when I see the trans activist response to puberty blocker bans, or when I listen to practitioners in the field of so-called “gender affirming care” talk about their patients.

Because everything they say is wrong. Dangerously wrong. But they are completely incapable of seeing it.

That’s because the entire field of paediatric gender medicine is built upon faulty foundations. And basic logic tells us that when the first step in your reasoning is wrong, everything that follows will also be wrong.

So now I’m going to share with you the three fundamental truths that everyone involved in the scandal of paediatric gender medicine has either forgotten—or is choosing to ignore.

Three fundamental truths that are the key to bringing this scandal to an end.

Fundamental truth #1 – There is no such thing as a transgender child.

Now that’s a simple but highly controversial statement. So let me explain.

First of all, to state the obvious: it’s not possible for a child to be born in the wrong body. That shouldn’t need saying, but such is the time in which we live.

And it is not possible to have a girl brain in a boy body, or vice versa. This is absurd nonsense that we somehow allow to be taught to our children as if it’s fact.

But nonsensical political slogans aside, to believe in the existence of transgender children, you have to believe three impossible things.

First, you have to accept that a child who is still young enough to believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy has a fully formed, stable identity — something even most adults struggle to attain. I’m 47, and I still haven’t found mine.

You must believe that a child who lives in a world of fantasy and magic somehow knows, with certainty, who they truly are.

Second, you must believe that a child can distinguish stereotypes from this deep inner identity, meaning that they can tell the difference between liking certain clothes and toys and having an authentic identity that somehow makes them a member of the opposite sex.

And third, that this invisible subjective identity is so important that it overrides biology and the material reality of the child’s body.

That all requires an enormous leap of faith. It requires that you reject all the existing knowledge about childhood development — decades of high-quality replicated long-established research.

And you must take this leap of faith because political activists demand it. These activists do not have any science to support their claim that transgender children exist; they have nothing but political slogans.

The reality is, every story of a “trans child” consists of nothing more than stereotypes — little boys who like Barbies and princess gowns, or tomboys with short hair and a dislike of dresses.

And yet, at the behest of a political movement that has no grounding in truth, we tell these innocent children that their likes and preferences mean they are members of the opposite sex.

And because children have a great capacity for imagination and magical thinking, and because they trust the adults who are tasked with guiding them safely through the world, these children believe it.

Astonishingly, many people today think it is harmless to lie to an effeminate little boy and tell him that he’s really a girl; or to tell a tomboy that she’s really a boy.

On the surface it may appear to be the compassionate thing to do to relieve the child’s suffering, because after all, it is not easy to be different from your peers.

But at some point in the future, these children collide with reality. And that reality is called puberty. It’s actually quite easy to turn a little boy into a convincing girl just by putting him in a dress and giving him a girl’s name, or vice versa, but the illusion becomes unsustainable once the hormones begin to surge.

So now the child must be medicalised — the natural developmental stage of puberty blocked with potent endocrine disruptors followed by powerful wrong-sex hormones.

Which brings me nicely to my next fundamental truth.

Fundamental truth #2 – Not a single adolescent is capable of consenting to the medical interventions on offer in paediatric gender clinics.

The treatments euphemistically packaged as “gender affirming care” involve drastic, irreversible interventions that have the potential to rob a young person of their health, fertility, sexual function, or future ability to breastfeed.

No adolescent has the cognitive capacity to understand what that means.

And crucially, the clinicians prescribing these interventions know this.

In the leaked WPATH Files — internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, that Michael Shellenberger and I released last year — a leading Canadian paediatric endocrinologist admitted that discussing fertility preservation with 14-year-olds is like, and I quote, “talking to a blank wall.” He also admitted that he sees significant regret about fertility loss in his patients as they reach adulthood.

Now, I know this to be true because at 14, I, like so many other women, was that blank wall. All the way to my late 20s, I was adamant that I would never want children.

Then, at age 30, it was as if someone flipped a switch inside me and I needed to have a baby right away.

And today, at 47, I am the proud mother of three children who have brought more joy into my life than my teenage self could ever have imagined.

This is a completely normal life trajectory; it is the reason we would never offer vasectomies or tubal ligation to adolescents, no matter how strenuously they may insist that they will never want to be parents.

Everything we know about adolescent development tells us that this life stage is defined by change and experimentation.

It is a period of identity exploration, when young people try on different selves — when beliefs are held with passionate conviction one day, only to be discarded the next.

And because we know that adolescents do not have fixed, stable identities, we should also know that permanent, irreversible medical interventions that imprint adolescent identities onto the body could never be appropriate or ethical.

Fundamental truth #3 – Ideas, behaviours, and emotions are contagious.

It has long been recognized that the messaging adolescents are exposed to as they come of age and form their identities is vitally important.

Because, humans are social creatures. We mimic the behaviours of those around us, absorb the emotions circulating through our social networks, and, consciously or unconsciously, shape our identities around the ideas and people we encounter in our lives.

And no group in society is more malleable, or more impressionable, than adolescents.

In the 1980s, there was a global contagion of bulimia, triggered by magazines and talk shows running stories warning teenage girls and young women about this new and concerning eating disorder.

Media coverage inadvertently caused the behaviour to spread by planting the idea into the fertile minds of millions of adolescent girls and young women under immense pressure that they could binge and purge to meet the the era’s expectation of thinness.

Bulimia was the culture-bound syndrome of the 80s and 90s. Celebrities shared their battles with it. Characters suffered from it in television shows. And every story sucked more girls and women into the epidemic.

But that was the pre-internet era. In the digital age, social contagions are turbocharged.

The most striking parallel to what we are witnessing today, that actually happens to be my favourite, occurred more recently, with the outbreak of TikTok tics that began in Germany.

In 2019, German psychiatrists observed a sudden surge of adolescent girls presenting to clinics with abrupt-onset Tourette-like tics. This immediately raised alarm bells. Tourette’s typically affects boys and begins in early childhood. This was an entirely new patient population.

So researchers scrambled to find the trigger and quickly identified the index case. Adolescent girls with these sudden-onset symptoms began appearing in German clinics just three months after Jan Zimmermann, a young Tourette sufferer, launched a YouTube channel that exploded in popularity. The girls displayed the exact same symptoms as Jan: the same outbursts and catchphrases.

The phenomenon soon migrated to TikTok, where it spread like wildfire.

Researchers coined a new term for what they were observing: mass social media–induced illness — a modern iteration of the long-recognized phenomenon of mass sociogenic illness.

So now let’s go to 2014, when paediatric gender clinics across the Western world witnessed an eerily similar event. All of a sudden, those waiting rooms also began to fill with an entirely new patient cohort: adolescent girls, when, historically, the patient population (like Tourette’s) would have consisted of predominantly young boys.

The surge was so sudden, and the inflection point so obvious, that in a sane era clinicians would have scrambled to identify the trigger of what was clearly a social contagion.

Instead, in the age of trans rights, no one even bothered to look.

And just like TikTok tics, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to find the answer. All it required was a glance at the cultural messaging of the time.

Because 2014 was the year Time magazine put Laverne Cox on its cover with the headline: The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.

And with that, the modern trans rights movement launched.

Trans-identified celebrities were everywhere, trans characters appeared in children’s books and television shows, trans influencers proliferated with astonishing speed online. Schools began teaching gender identity ideology as if it were scientific fact. And in a perfect-storm scenario, smartphones and social media exploded in popularity at exactly the right moment — creating the ideal superspreading environment for this seductive idea to go viral.

The message adolescents received was simple: If you hate your body, that could mean you’re trans.

And right on cue, legions of confused adolescents who hated their developing bodies began showing up at gender clinics believing themselves to be trans.

Just like the TikTok tics. A mass social media–induced illness.

Except on this occasion, instead of scrambling to contain the epidemic, doctors picked up their syringes and scalpels and set about permanently medicalising the innocent youth caught up in this powerful cultural storm.

And activists marched in the streets demanding that these young people be allowed to sacrifice their health, fertility, and body parts — while swiftly demonising anyone who dared point out the obvious parallels to social contagions of the past.

When Ideology Drives Good People to Evil

Which brings me to my final point. I want to say something about those activists and all the people driving this scandal.

When Premier Danielle Smith enacted laws to protect the youth of Alberta from this deeply unethical experiment, she faced a tsunami of fury from trans activists. An NDP MP accused her of launching “hateful attacks on trans kids;” a union leader called the law “cruelty disguised as policy,” and a member of Canada’s Senate said the legislation was “unscientific and immoral” and “only designed to hurt” these young people.

Not a word of that is true. Yet those activists believe it with a ferocious passion.

Because they are blinded by ideology and they have forgotten the three fundamental truths I’ve shared today.

They are the quintessential True Believers. They live in a fictional world and they are fighting to protect a non-existent type of child from an imaginary enemy.

Theirs is a moral quest of good versus evil. And they mistakenly believe themselves to be on the side of good.

But this is not a story about good versus evil. It’s a story about ideology versus reality.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote: “To do evil, a human being must first believe that what he is doing is good.” Ideology, he warned us, is what gives evildoing its justification—and gives the evildoer the steadfastness and moral certainty to carry it out.

It is ideology that drives doctors to commit acts of evil beyond comprehension: to amputate the healthy breasts of teenage girls, to block the natural development of innocent children, and to rob young people of their fertility and sexual function before they can even comprehend what that means.

When the Canadian Medical Association launched a legal challenge to Alberta’s puberty blocker ban, its president dismissed the law as “political interference,” explaining — and I quote — that “medicine is a calling,” and that doctors are compelled to care for and promote the well-being of patients.

But that statement reveals the problem. The CMA remains blind to the scandal unfolding in plain sight—operating under the comforting illusion that good intentions alone are enough to protect patients from harm.

Yet noble intentions are no safeguard against harm.

History is littered with medical scandals, and at the centre of each, there were well-intentioned doctors who left a trail of devastation in their quest to help patients.

The doctors who prescribed Thalidomide didn’t do so with the intention of causing major birth defects.

The obstetricians who sent expectant mothers for prenatal X-rays didn’t deliberately set out to cause childhood leukemia.

And the recovered-memory therapists of the 1980s truly believed they were helping victims of child sex abuse, when, guided by ideology, they implanted false memories of incest into the minds of hundreds of thousands of women, shattering families and destroying lives.

There can be little doubt that paediatric gender medicine is destined to take its place in history alongside these medical catastrophes.

Because the fundamental truths make one thing unmistakably clear: not a single one of these kids is trans; and not a single one can possibly grasp the lifelong consequences of these interventions. And if they cannot comprehend the consequences, then these treatments are not appropriate for a single young person. Not one.

So this means all that is required to end this scandal is to remember the fundamental truths every one of us has always known — and to have the courage to speak them clearly, without apology, until they are heard.

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

In early December, the Toronto chapter of Pflag—an LGBT+ advocacy group—sent out a survey request to its supporters on behalf of Statistics Canada. The federal agency is seeking feedback from “subject-matter experts” on how to disseminate the data on “transgender and non-binary children and youth (aged 0 to 14)” collected in the 2021 national census.

The consultation guide explains how a 2018 policy direction on Modernizing the Government of Canada’s Sex and Gender Information Practices turned reality on its head by making gender identity—a subjective and contested belief—the default statistical category, while treating biological sex as optional and to be recorded only “when required.”

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After collecting data on both sex and gender identity in the 2021 census, the federal agency is seeking advice on dissemination approaches that benefit “transgender and non-binary children and youth.”

“Children and youth are often assumed to be cisgender from birth until they ‘come out’ as a different gender on their own accord,” explains the federal statistical agency, leaving no ambiguity about the ideological leaning of the consultation guide’s authors.

The guide takes as a given that transgender children exist as a coherent population and that compiling data on them is a legitimate and worthwhile exercise, asserting that “[r]esearchers also suggest that, like cisgender children, transgender and non-binary children may recognize their own gender identity as early as 2 to 3 years old,” and these “transgender and non-binary children have similar gender development compared with their cisgender peers.”

After further preamble about “gender fluidity, cisnormativity, and transnormativity,” and the suggestion that restrictions on access to experimental puberty blockers and hormones “in some provinces” reflects a lack of “understanding or acceptance for gender diversity,” the actual survey questions commence.

What follows is Genspect Canada’s official submission to Statistics Canada on the topic of “Transgender and Non-binary Children and Youth.”

1. IMPLICATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE AND IDENTIFICATION OF GENDER IDENTITY

To the best of your knowledge, what age are children able to express and communicate their gender identity to others? Do you have any comments on the information presented above?

Canada’s Department of Justice defines gender identity as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender…their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.”

This definition relies on an abstract and highly contested concept that lacks empirical grounding. Although the concept emerged on the fringes of psychiatry in the 1960s, it was reframed and popularized by trans activism in the 1990s then embedded in public policy and law. There is no scientific evidence demonstrating the existence of “gender identities”; rather, the concept is belief-based, unfalsifiable, and therefore falls outside the bounds of testable science.

In light of this, it is highly inappropriate to apply this controversial political concept to children.

Decades of developmental research show that young children think concretely and lack the abstract introspection required to form a deeply felt internal sense of being a boy or a girl. While children can distinguish between the two sexes—male and female—by around age two, until roughly ages six or seven they rely on visible, external cues such as clothing, hair, and activities, and often believe sex can change with context (e.g., that a boy becomes a girl by putting on a dress).

In the current era of gender identity ideology—where children are taught that everyone possesses an innate gender identity that determines whether they are boys or girls—gender-nonconforming children are at heightened risk of misinterpreting their nonconformity as evidence that they belong to the opposite sex. Adults increasingly present children with pseudoscientific claims about being “born in the wrong body,” such as can be found in the hugely popular children’s book I Am Jazz, which contains the line, “I have a girl brain but a boy body; this is called transgender. I was born this way.” This is activist pseudoscience presented to young readers as fact. Children have a great capacity for imagination and magical thinking, and if a trusted adult presents this information, the child will believe it—yet not a word of it is true. This dangerous false messaging has the potential to confuse children and untether them from the reality of their bodies, leading effeminate boys to believe they are girls and vice versa.

Childhood-onset gender dysphoria—previously gender identity disorder of childhood—is a psychiatric diagnosis applied to children who experience significant distress related to their sex. A common but oversimplified explanation attributes this distress to an innate, mismatched gender identity, leading to the claim that such children are “transgender.” This framing is ideological and obscures the well-documented complexity of this patient population. Decades of clinical research show that extreme childhood gender nonconformity is not a marker of a transgender identity but is instead strongly associated with eventual homosexuality. In the absence of medical intervention, the majority of children now labeled “trans kids” would be expected to grow up to be gay or lesbian, provided their psychosexual development is allowed to proceed without disruption from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery.

In truth, there is no such thing as a transgender child. There are only gender-nonconforming children attempting to make sense of themselves amid widespread confusion and pseudoscientific messaging. These children deserve a childhood grounded in reality, with the time and freedom to grow, mature, explore, and ultimately discover their sexualities during adolescence. Statistics Canada is therefore compiling data on a category that does not reflect a real or developmentally coherent phenomenon.

2. DATA COLLECTION METHODS

What do you think about proxy data collected about the gender of children and youth? What about proxy data collected for very young children (e.g., aged 0 to 3)? At what age are proxy responses more likely to reflect a child’s gender identity rather than their assumed gender based on their sex at birth?

Proxy data on the “gender” of children and youth are not meaningful, because children do not possess gender identities nor any stable identities of any kind that can be observed, inferred, or accurately reported by a third party. For children, the concept of gender identity is developmentally incoherent, and it is absurd even to consider collecting such data for toddlers and very young children (e.g., ages 0–3). Any proxy responses that suggest a child is “transgender” simply reflect adult assumptions, interpretations, or beliefs. The only developmentally valid and empirically grounded information worth collecting for this age group is the material reality of the child’s sex. Seeking to measure or classify children by “gender identity” is therefore inappropriate and unsupported by developmental science.

Should Statistics Canada be using an age cut-off to report on gender diversity or report on people of all ages? If an age cut-off should be used, what would you suggest Statistics Canada apply and why?

For example, an age cut-off at 10 years old, with the two-category gender variable available for the entire population, including children aged 9 years and under (i.e., using boys+ and girls+).

As stated above, children do not possess gender identities and therefore “gender diversity” is not a valid or meaningful category in childhood. As a result, questions of age cut-offs are unnecessary: there is no age at which reporting on gender diversity in children becomes appropriate. For all children under 15, Statistics Canada should limit data dissemination to the material reality of sex, using standard age groupings.

3. IMPACT ON GENDER DIVERSE CHILDREN AND YOUTH

If Statistics Canada were to disseminate data on transgender and non-binary people under the age of 15, how might this be received by these populations, and their families and allies? How might this be received by the public, specialists in the fields, service providers, policymakers, or other stakeholders?

As stated above, disseminating data on “transgender” or “non-binary” children means releasing data on a category that lacks developmental and scientific validity. Among families and activist allies who subscribe to gender identity ideology, such data would likely be welcomed as institutional validation and used to legitimize early social and medical interventions. For other families, particularly those with gender-nonconforming children, it risks sowing confusion, pressure to label, and the misinterpretation of healthy childhood gender-nonconformity as evidence of a transgender identity.

Policymakers and service providers may mistakenly treat the data as objective evidence of an innate population in need of specialized services, despite the data reflecting adult beliefs rather than child characteristics. More broadly, public dissemination risks entrenching a contested ideological framework in policy and practice, lending unwarranted authority to a concept that developmental science does not support.

If Statistics Canada were to maintain the current practice of disseminating gender diversity data solely for the population aged 15 and older, how might this decision be received by these populations, their families and allies? How might this be received by the public, specialists in the fields, service providers, policymakers, or other stakeholders?

Advocacy groups would likely view this decision as exclusionary and harmful, interpreting it through a rigid ideological framework that treats gender identity as innate and fully formed at all ages, with little regard for childhood and adolescent developmental research. The broader public and many specialists with an understanding of developmental science would be more likely to see the age limit as a reasonable boundary. At Genspect Canada, we would go further and question the validity of collecting and disseminating data based on subjective, unfalsifiable identity claims even for those aged 15 and older.

What would be the benefits or risks of disseminating gender diversity information about children and youth under the age of 15? What would be the benefits or risks of not releasing this information?

As already stated above, disseminating gender diversity data for children under 15 carries significant risks and no meaningful benefits. The primary risk is that Statistics Canada would be reifying and legitimizing a developmentally incoherent and scientifically unfounded category, encouraging the misinterpretation of normal childhood gender nonconformity as evidence of a transgender identity. Such dissemination risks confusing parents, pressuring children to adopt developmentally inappropriate labels that can lead to major medical interventions, and lending institutional authority to an ideological framework rather than reflecting an objective reality.

By contrast, not releasing this information avoids embedding an ideological construct into official statistics and prevents the manufacture of misleading data that could drive inappropriate policy, services, or interventions. As noted above, withholding such data does not represent a loss of meaningful information, because the category itself does not capture a real or stable phenomenon in childhood.

4. ENSURING SAFE AND RESPECTFUL DATA USE

Information about transgender and non-binary children and youth may be considered sensitive, as these populations and their families are often marginalized—and at times targeted—by groups that seek to dismiss their existence and limit their rights. Limited access to reliable information about transgender and non-binary children and youth may create gaps in the general public’s understanding of the populations, which may lead to unintentional misconceptions.

Do you anticipate that disseminating data on transgender and non-binary children and youth under age 15 could result in a negative reaction from certain groups? If so, is there any specific data that you believe would be more likely to create such a reaction? Do you have any suggestions about how to present the information to the general population in a way that avoids potential misconceptions about transgender and non-binary children and youth?

Concern about disseminating gender diversity data on children is not about denying anyone’s existence or limiting rights, but about child safeguarding and adherence to developmental science. Applying labels such as “transgender” or “non-binary” to children means imposing ideological narratives on children before they are old enough to understand what the terms mean. This is especially harmful given that these identities so often come hand-in-hand with lifelong medicalization. Any negative reaction to this data will stem from the act of inappropriately categorizing children in this way. Avoiding misconceptions requires recognizing the developmental limits of childhood and refraining from presenting contested identity concepts as established facts about children.

To the best of your knowledge, are there any legislative or legal considerations or risks of both releasing or not releasing information about transgender and non-binary children and youth under age 15?

We do not know of any.

5. RESEARCH AND LIVED EXPERIENCE

Are there scientific articles that provide important insights into gender identity development among transgender and non-binary children and youth that could inform this research project?

The following is a list of scientific articles demonstrating why it is inappropriate to apply the label of transgender to children and adolescents:

Jorgensen, S. C. J., Athéa, N., & Masson, C. (2024). Puberty Suppression for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria and the Child’s Right to an Open Future. Archives of sexual behavior, 53(5), 1941–1956. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02850-4

Levine, S. B., Abbruzzese, E., & Mason, J. W. (2022). Reconsidering Informed Consent for Trans-Identified Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults. Journal of sex & marital therapy, 48(7), 706–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2046221

Zucker, K. J. (2018). The myth of persistence: Response to “A critical commentary on follow-up studies and ‘desistance’ theories about transgender and gender non-conforming children”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 19(2), 231–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1456390

Byrne, A. (2022). Another myth of persistence? Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02183-9

Singh, D., Bradley, S. J., & Zucker, K. J. (2021). A follow-up study of boys with gender identity disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 632784. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784

Kohlberg, L. (1966). A cognitive-developmental analysis of children’s sex-role concepts and attitudes. In E. E. Maccoby (Ed.), The development of sex differences (pp. 82–173). Stanford University Press.

Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction Of Reality In The Child (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315009650

Do you have lived experiences about your own gender identity development that you would like to share?

At Genspect Canada, we think the concept of gender identity is a harmful oversimplification that impedes self-understanding and prevents gender-distressed individuals from accessing safe, ethical, non-invasive care.

Do you have experiences related to the gender identity development of family members or close friends that you would like to share?

At Genspect, we regularly hear from families in our parent support groups. A consistent pattern reported by parents is that previously well-adjusted, often gender-nonconforming adolescents—particularly girls—suddenly announced a transgender identity after extensive exposure to online trans influencer content and/or after a peer announced a transgender identity. Many parents describe rapid shifts in identity, language, and beliefs that closely mirror prevailing online narratives, rather than emerging gradually from long-standing distress.

We also hear from detransitioners through our Beyond Trans support group who describe having interpreted ordinary adolescent discomfort, mental health struggles, or same-sex attraction through the lens of gender identity ideology, often encouraged by adults and peers. These experiences highlight the powerful role of social influence and online messaging in shaping identity claims, and underscore the importance of caution when interpreting such claims as evidence of an innate or stable identity, particularly in young people.

6. KEY DATA GAPS

This consultation also seeks to determine if the type of data collected by Statistics Canada meets the needs of data users.

Do you, your department or organization require data specific to transgender and non-binary children and youth to inform, develop, or improve research, programs, policies or services? Are there specific research topics of interest to you, your department or organization? If so, what are your data and research needs?

Neither Genspect Canada nor the families we support require data categorizing children as “transgender” or “non-binary” to inform programs or services. What is urgently needed instead is rigorous research into the social, cultural, and technological factors driving the recent and unprecedented rise in young people identifying as transgender.

Of particular interest are the roles of social media platforms, online peer communities, and digital algorithms in shaping identity formation. In 2019, when German clinics observed a sudden surge of adolescent girls presenting with Tourette-like symptoms, researchers quickly identified popular TikTok influencers with Tourette syndrome as the transmission vector and coined the term mass social media-induced illness (MSMI) to describe the phenomenon. A similar level of scientific urgency is warranted here.

Research priorities should include the impact of exposure to gender identity ideology on child development, the mechanisms of social contagion in adolescent transgender identification, the influence of parental ideological beliefs on children being labeled transgender, and the effects of celebrating trans-identified influencers and celebrities as role models for vulnerable youth.

It is essential to study these upstream cultural drivers; downstream data collection is meaningless.

7. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Is there anything else that Statistics Canada should consider prior to disseminating information on transgender and non-binary children and youth? Please include any additional feedback that you may have.

At Genspect Canada, we ask that Statistics Canada not dismiss our perspective as “denying the existence of trans kids.” The position outlined above is grounded in well-established developmental science, psychosocial theory, and child-safeguarding principles, and seeks to better understand, rather than erase, the vulnerabilities of gender-distressed children and adolescents. Reducing complex developmental phenomena to an oversimplified identity risks obscuring consideration of causation and limiting scientific inquiry. Engaging seriously with our evidence-based viewpoint would provide a richer, more accurate understanding of this young cohort than the current oversimplified and inappropriate concept of gender identities ever could.

Genspect Canada

Mia Hughes is Director of Genspect Canada and author of the WPATH Files

On August 14th, McMaster University Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI) published a statement asserting that “gender-affirming” medical interventions for youth are medically necessary. This phrase carries profound clinical, ethical, and legal implications. Yet, during a recorded interview on September 8th, Dr. Gordon Guyatt—a signatory to the statement—acknowledged that he had not read the statement carefully and that he “would never use the term medically necessary.” He further conceded that he does not believe the treatments are medically necessary.

Despite this admission, the statement remains publicly available in its original form. This is unacceptable. McMaster has a duty to uphold basic standards of academic integrity and scientific accuracy. Allowing a demonstrably false and misleading claim to remain in the public domain erodes public trust and carries potential legal consequences, particularly as Egale continues to cite the “medical necessity” of these interventions in its challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26 restricting their use.

The danger of parents and the public being misinformed about the nature and risks of these interventions is even more alarming. Parents asked to sign consent forms for their children’s irreversible medical interventions are entitled to accurate information. McMaster’s statement conveys the false impression that there is scientific consensus and evidentiary certainty where none exists.

For these reasons, Genspect Canada calls on McMaster University to:

1. Formally retract the August 14th statement and remove it from all university platforms.

2. Issue a public clarification acknowledging that Dr. Guyatt did not write nor approve the phrase “medically necessary,” and that the evidence base for these interventions remains uncertain and contested.

3. Reaffirm McMaster’s commitment to evidence-based, politically neutral science.

McMaster’s global reputation was built on intellectual honesty and the birth of evidence-based medicine. Protecting that legacy now requires decisive corrective action.

Sincerely,

Mia Hughes
Director, Genspect Canada

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.

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When I talk about how I treated my gender dysphoria without transitioning, people say I wasn’t really trans. They say I mustn’t have had actual dysphoria and I’m either stupid or a grifter. One person even said I must be incapable of making my own decisions and should have had a conservatorship to make them for me.

Slave to the Algorithm

I was 30 years old when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. By age 32, I was traumatized, isolated, and constantly watching TikTok videos of autistic trans people recommended by the algorithm. Trans people said this was a sign that I was trans. They said that wondering if I was trans meant I was trans. They said that anybody who felt they were trans was trans. The more TikTok videos I consumed, the more things progressed. First, I told my long-term boyfriend I was nonbinary—then trans—then thinking about getting top surgery. I should have been getting back out into the world and building my future, but I had become obsessed with finding the “real” me.

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For someone who they say was never trans, I did all the things you see transmascs on TikTok doing: cutting my hair into a mullet, talking about whether I wanted to use “they” or “him” pronouns, getting my new name on a Starbucks cup, dancing to music in my binder, crying about how I broke up with my boyfriend, and soaking in all the likes, follows, and comments saying I was “so handsome.”

By age 33, I had 50,000 followers on TikTok, but I was completely alone in real life. My dysphoria had worsened to the point that I experienced suicidal ideation from being in my female body. What began as exploring my “gender expression” had escalated into something that felt like life or death. I could no longer psychologically handle the reality of not matching the person I felt I was. Being called “ma’am” made me viscerally angry.

I booked therapy through the government and was assigned a male therapist who told me he identified as nonbinary. I genuinely wanted to explore resolving my issues without medical intervention, but after only a couple of appointments, I sobbed about how I didn’t want to be a woman who wore dresses, and my therapist encouraged me to come out to my parents.

The Creepy Doctor

I found a gender-affirming care doctor through a trans nonprofit organization. During my first appointment, he tried to persuade me multiple times to show him my genitals. While smiling enthusiastically, he claimed he could determine if I was intersex by examining them. I insisted that I knew what my genitals looked like and left feeling uneasy.

In an effort to avoid returning to the doctor, I scoured the internet for someone who no longer experienced gender dysphoria. I found Reddit threads claiming that dysphoria always returns and that the only treatment is medical transition. Meanwhile, trans people on X posted, “Just try hormones—you won’t regret it.” When I responded that it was irresponsible to encourage people to try something irreversible, they smeared me as transphobic.

Eventually, I didn’t know what else to do, so I returned to the gender-affirming care doctor, where I spent multiple appointments being asked questions like what kinds of activities I did as a child and how I felt about my body in the shower. I told the doctor I was bisexual, had been diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and OCD, and had experienced a traumatic childhood, was sexually assaulted and had previously worked as an escort. After each appointment, I was so exhausted that I slept for the rest of the day. I was worried about giving the wrong answers and being denied what I had been told was life-saving medication—but the doctor said I was at high risk and, “no matter what,” he would prescribe me testosterone.

My last appointment was a health exam, where I was instructed to remove my shoes and socks and lie down. The doctor checked my pulse in my feet, then my heartbeat in my chest, then palpated my stomach, and then began to pull my shorts and underwear down. When I flinched, he said he needed to examine my “hair pattern.” He insisted it was necessary, and because I felt I needed testosterone to continue living—because society had told me it was the only way to treat my dysphoria—I said, “Okay.”

I left the appointment feeling hazy. It was only a quick glance, but I knew it was entirely unnecessary. I felt like the doctor had tricked me into examining my genitals, especially because he had been so persistent about it during my first appointment. When I asked him why it was necessary, he shrugged and said something about there being studies. I wish I had had someone there advocating for me, and if the trans community hadn’t encouraged me to push everyone else away, I might have.

My uneasiness continued to grow. I delayed filling my testosterone prescription because I didn’t want to return to see the doctor. I contacted the nonprofit that referred me to report what happened. I was told he was the only gender-affirming care doctor accepting new patients in my city. The director said in an email, “You deserve to feel safe and to have choice in your medical decisions, but the system isn’t providing that for you and other trans folks right now.”

Recovery and Reflection

As months passed, I threw myself into writing my first book, Finding Autistic Joy, but people launched a smear campaign, accusing me of racism for using a stock photo of a raised fist on the cover. They claimed I was appropriating Black Lives Matter and comparing Black people to autistic people, posting my words out of context to perpetuate the narrative that I’m racist. This destruction of my reputation continued for six months straight and was so intense that I left social media, went on long hikes, and worked out for hours at the gym. While exercising, I listened to podcasts like Fucking Cancelled and Beyond the Self by disaffected leftists. After a year, I had lost 40 pounds, my gender dysphoria had disappeared, and I could see everything more clearly. I wrote a book called How to Survive Cancel Culture, where I detailed the impact of psychological warfare.

That time in my life feels like a fever dream. I’m 35 now, and looking back, I was completely consumed by a social contagion fueled by the TikTok algorithm. I didn’t “explore my gender expression”—I was brainwashed, and it ruined my life. For a while, I felt embarrassed and wanted to pretend it never happened as I worked to rebuild my life. But I have deep concern for young people who will inevitably discover one day that they’ve made a horrible mistake, only to be told by the trans community, “That’s on you.”

Despite what people say, I experienced what is currently described as gender dysphoria. I felt distraught in my body and believed I needed to remove my breasts and go on testosterone. I was exactly like the trans people on TikTok—so if I didn’t have dysphoria, then none of them do either.

For those who dismiss my experience by claiming I was never trans because I managed my dysphoria without medically transitioning, I have one question: Who’s at fault for prescribing testosterone to me, a person who isn’t trans? Is it me or the doctor?

If I was so confused by a social contagion in my 30s, how can children, who are also on TikTok and lack fully developed brains, consent to puberty blockers, HRT, and surgeries? How can they make informed decisions about their bodies when adults aren’t even taught how to protect themselves from psychological warfare? We’re seeing more detransitioners sharing their stories, and soon there will be so many traumatized victims that it will be impossible to call it “rare.”

Forest Van Slyke is a writer from Canada. She enjoys going on long hikes and trying new gelato flavors. Find her on X @forestvanslyke.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

On May 1, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a landmark 409-page report titled Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices. This report represents one of the most comprehensive evaluations to date of the scientific literature and ethical considerations related to paediatric gender medicine.

While the report was commissioned under a politically controversial executive order, its findings are anything but partisan. Instead, the report is built upon a solid foundation of systematic evidence reviews—the highest standard of evidence in clinical science. These reviews assess the entirety of available data across numerous studies and have been conducted independently in countries such as Sweden, Finland, England, and Canada.

Key Findings:

• Weak Evidence Base: The report underscores that the current evidence supporting medical interventions—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries—for minors is of very low quality. There are no high-quality randomized controlled trials demonstrating long-term benefit.

• Documented Risks: These interventions carry known risks, including infertility, loss of bone density, disrupted psychosocial development, and impaired sexual function. These are not hypothetical concerns—they are well-documented outcomes.

• Ethical Violations: The report cites the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report, cornerstones of medical ethics, which state that no research should proceed without a favourable risk/benefit profile. Paediatric gender medicine fails to meet this ethical standard.

• Support for Psychotherapy: Instead of irreversible medicalization, the report strongly advocates for non-invasive therapeutic approaches, urging clinicians to address underlying mental health and developmental factors.

Far from being ideologically motivated, the HHS report reflects a growing international consensus that the medical treatment of gender-distressed youth has outpaced the evidence. In recognizing the urgent need to protect vulnerable patients from unproven and potentially harmful interventions, the report aligns with reforms already underway in much of Europe.

Genspect Canada supports the findings of this report and calls on the Canadian government—at both the federal and provincial levels—to commission a similarly rigorous, independent review of our approach to paediatric gender medicine. A transparent and evidence-based evaluation is urgently needed to ensure that policies and practices in Canada uphold the highest standards of scientific integrity, medical ethics, and child safeguarding. The health and future of so many vulnerable young people depend upon it.

For more on Genspect Canada, visit: https://genspect.org/international/genspect-canada/
Media inquiries: Contact Mia Hughes, Director of Genspect Canada, at mia@genspect.org