An analyst on gender-affirming care alleged the practice harms vulnerable youth and is rooted in institutional corruption and scientific fraud.Mia Hughes is the director of Genspect Canada, the author of The WPATH Files, and a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. During a 23-minute speech at the Reclaiming Canada Conference in Calgary on Saturday, she condemned medical interventions regarding gender."Surgeons amputate the healthy breasts of teenage girls; invert the penises of young men, sometimes even before their first sexual encounter; remove functioning reproductive organs... It sounds like a horror film, but they call it medicine,” Hughes said.Hughes said these procedures were based on a "vague psychiatric label, gender dysphoria" with symptoms that "overlap with depression, anxiety, autism, or even just puberty."Hughes meticulously deconstructs the institutional support for these treatments, with particular focus on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)."In 2018, when WPATH commissioned systematic evidence reviews from Johns Hopkins, they quickly realized there was no evidence. So they blocked Johns Hopkins from publishing the negative reviews and went ahead and published their standards of care as if the reviews had shown evidence," Hughes said..The speaker said there was a "social contagion" of trans identities, particularly among adolescent girls. She argued that activist messaging has created an environment where normal adolescent body dissatisfaction is immediately medicalized."In the early 2010s, trans influencers on YouTube, even unforgivably our schools, started bombarding young people with the messaging that if you hate your body, that could be a sign that you're trans," Hughes said.The lecturer also decried the use of puberty blockers in this context. "In gender medicine, the drugs are started when normal puberty has already begun, and then almost 100% of the time, they're followed by cross-sex hormones, so the kids never go through puberty."Hughes said this practice was justified by flawed Dutch studies published in 2011 and 2014."Those studies were so riddled with flaws that their results should have been completely invalidated," she said.Most damning is Hughes’ critique of the suicide prevention narrative. "In December 2024, before the Supreme Court of the United States, the ACLU had to admit the truth — there is no suicide epidemic, which means there is no truth to transitional suicide."Hughes alleged in this regard that the American Academy of Pediatrics "misrepresented an entire body of research on adult homosexuality and applied it to gender identity in children with no relevance whatsoever.".Her analysis of the broader context is uncompromising. "There are only two fields of Pediatrics where treatment carries the potential to sterilize a child, oncology and gender medicine," she notes. "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."Hughes describes the victims of this approach as "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.""There has never been a medical scandal that involves so much institutional fraud and corruption leading to so much damage to healthy young people." Multiple systematic reviews from countries including the UK, Sweden, Finland, and the US all reach the same conclusion: "There is no good quality evidence to support these drastic interventions, none."Hughes said a “spiral of silence” has allowed this practice to continue, and people need to overcome their fear of ridicule and speak against it."Gender affirming care is not medicine. Healthy young people being subjected to irreversible, life-altering interventions that lack scientific justification cannot be called medicine,” Hughes insisted."Never be afraid to speak the truth about this medical crime. Never allow activists or institutions to silence you, because silence belongs to this scandal, but courage has the power to end it,” she concluded.
