Republican states join Trump FTC in lawsuit against world’s leading transgender health care group

The Trump administration opened a new legal front against transgender healthcare on Wednesday, suing the world’s leading transgender health organization and accusing it of misleading families, doctors, and insurers about gender-affirming care for minors.

The Federal Trade Commission, joined by the attorneys general of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, filed the lawsuit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in federal court in Texas. The complaint alleges that WPATH made deceptive or unsubstantiated claims about the safety, effectiveness, medical necessity, and evidence base for puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries for young people.

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The 123-page complaint names WPATH’s Texas and Illinois corporations and the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH’s U.S. affiliate. Rather than targeting a hospital, state policy, or an individual provider, the lawsuit targets the organization whose Standards of Care have helped shape the medical, legal, and insurance landscape surrounding transgender health care for decades.

WPATH forcefully rejected the allegations on Wednesday, accusing the administration of abusing federal power to attack transgender patients and the medical professionals who care for them.

“This is the second time this year the Trump Administration has abused the authority of its agencies to interfere with Americans’ rights to seek and obtain the healthcare that should be decided between a patient and their physician,” the organization said in a statement to The Advocate.

WPATH said the FTC’s earlier attempt to obtain protected information from the organization had been “struck down by a federal judge” and called the new lawsuit “a similarly baseless actual complaint.” The organization also said the FTC “is not a medical provider and has no place interfering with the process of individualized medical decision-making.”

Adrian Shanker, a former deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Biden administration, called the lawsuit part of “the mountain of unscientific actions from the Trump administration targeting transgender health.”

“But despite the Federal Trade Commission’s fiction that transgender medicine is a deceptive practice, the underlying science hasn’t changed,” Shanker said. “So let’s be clear: gender affirming care saves lives.”

Amber Perez, executive director of the Borderland Rainbow Center in El Paso, said Texas’s role in the lawsuit was “unsurprising” but still alarming for LGBTQ+ people in the state. Perez said Texas has become “a testing ground” for anti-LGBTQ+ policy that later spreads to other Republican-led states.

“To see them doing this again is really not a surprise, but it is continuing to be disheartening for queer Texans, for trans Texans, for gender diverse Texans,” Perez told The Advocate in an interview. “This is such a small marginalized group that the continued attack on it is pretty much just, to name it what it is, it’s like genocide.”

Perez said transgender Texans are exhausted by the repeated political attacks, but she also said the community has become more visible and defiant during Pride this year.

“They’re going to continue attacking us, but we are still here,” Perez said. “We’re seeing people being a lot louder, a lot bolder, a lot prouder, specifically to kind of combat what is going on.”

Perez said most Texans she encounters are not focused on attacking transgender people.

“What we hear people talking about are the prices of gas, the prices of food, the fact that they’re economically disadvantaged at this time,” Perez said. “That’s really where people are concerned.”

The lawsuit centers on WPATH’s Standards of Care, the widely cited clinical guidelines used by providers, insurers, and courts in transgender health care matters. The FTC alleges that WPATH’s guidance gave clinicians a framework to describe pediatric gender-affirming care as medically necessary and lifesaving while allegedly minimizing or omitting risks and limits in the research.

Related: Federal judge says Oregon must house trans inmates by gender identity, not Trump’s policy

FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson called the case a consumer protection matter, saying parents need “complete and truthful information” when making medical decisions for their children.

“For decades, the FTC has taken action against entities that make deceptive and unsubstantiated health-related claims,” Ferguson said in a statement. “The complaint filed today reflects that same long-standing mandate: when an entity makes a claim about a medical treatment, the claim must be truthful, evidence-based, and not misleading.”

Related: How Donald Trump transformed the federal government’s treatment of LGBTQ+ Americans

WPATH defended its work, saying that for more than 50 years it has developed guidelines “informed by established scientific standards, expert consensus, and patient-centered values.”

“WPATH supports individualized patient care, not a ‘one size fits all’ approach,” the organization said. “Transgender and gender-diverse patients deserve the highest level of care from their medical professionals, and the Standards of Care are designed to promote this through open dialogue and clear communication.”