Inside a Secret Transgender Health Conference: Clinicians Admit They’re All Just ‘Winging It’

At a 2021 conference closed to both the public and the press, several gender clinicians made a startling admission. Behind closed doors, they acknowledged that there is no rigorous body of research or universally accepted standard of care guiding many of the medical procedures offered to patients who are seeking transgender operations. Even more revealing, some clinicians described their role not as helping patients work through the underlying sources of their distress, but as affirming a patient’s internal sense of gender, even when that sense conflicts with biological reality.

At the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), spoke about her role in videos obtained by The Free Press.

As an example, she spoke about a patient named Sky, who was an 18-year-old who was living on his own for the first time. He informed Penkins that Sky reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future,” as well as “not want[ing] to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible.”

Sky said more directly that he wanted to look like “a Barbie down there.”

Penkin said that with a patient like Sky, existing “research” and “standards of care” are “not enough to meet the needs of our patients, and we need to take it to the next level to really think about how we evolve and match the needs of our patients as their needs are being expressed to us.”

In other words, she said that the goal of a so-called transgender health clinician is to meet the needs of the patient, as opposed to diagnosing the patient and informing them of the correct way to proceed.

A colleague of Penkin’s, psychologist Mair Marsiglio, told the conference in another video that it’s “important to reframe the role of the mental health person or the psychologist as a collaborator rather than a gatekeeper.” She argued this meant ensuring that even patients with severe mental health issues, including “multiple personalities” and “psychosis,” should not be excluded from gender surgery simply because a medical team feels “uncomfortable” operating on them.

One of the most insane admissions from the videos obtained was medical professionals saying that their goal is to fulfill the “embodiment” desires of their patients, and that doing so may require “deviat[ing] from guidelines.” 

British endocrinology consultant Leighton Seal also said that it is better if the entire medical community around ‘transgender healthcare’ should remain in agreement, despite lacking research and guidelines, as it would protect their practices. In answering an attendee’s question, he said:

“If you have a network around you where a clinical team, in concert with the individual, has made a decision, you then have a framework to say, ‘Well, the ethics of this were explored…’ ” Seal said. “[W]e are doing procedures here where we don’t have outcome data. So, unless you want to go to individual ethics boards in each hospital to get ethics permission to do those surgeries because they’re on the edge of the field of medicine, you need to have a mechanism around you to support you. Otherwise, you could be vulnerable. That’s our feeling.”

The attendee responded, saying she felt as though everyone was making things up as they went on. “Because I feel like we’re all just winging it, you know? And which is okay, you’re winging it too. But maybe we can just, like, wing it together.”

In other words, there are no guidelines to a medical practice that have been pushed on confused teens for nearly a decade.

Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it.  

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At a 2021 conference closed to both the public and the press, several gender clinicians made a startling admission. Behind closed doors, they acknowledged that there is no rigorous body of research or universally accepted standard of care guiding many of the medical procedures offered to patients who are seeking transgender operations. Even more revealing, some clinicians described their role not as helping patients work through the underlying sources of their distress, but as affirming a patient’s internal sense of gender, even when that sense conflicts with biological reality.

At the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), spoke about her role in videos obtained by The Free Press.

As an example, she spoke about a patient named Sky, who was an 18-year-old who was living on his own for the first time. He informed Penkins that Sky reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future,” as well as “not want[ing] to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible.”

Sky said more directly that he wanted to look like “a Barbie down there.”

Penkin said that with a patient like Sky, existing “research” and “standards of care” are “not enough to meet the needs of our patients, and we need to take it to the next level to really think about how we evolve and match the needs of our patients as their needs are being expressed to us.”

In other words, she said that the goal of a so-called transgender health clinician is to meet the needs of the patient, as opposed to diagnosing the patient and informing them of the correct way to proceed.

A colleague of Penkin’s, psychologist Mair Marsiglio, told the conference in another video that it’s “important to reframe the role of the mental health person or the psychologist as a collaborator rather than a gatekeeper.” She argued this meant ensuring that even patients with severe mental health issues, including “multiple personalities” and “psychosis,” should not be excluded from gender surgery simply because a medical team feels “uncomfortable” operating on them.

One of the most insane admissions from the videos obtained was medical professionals saying that their goal is to fulfill the “embodiment” desires of their patients, and that doing so may require “deviat[ing] from guidelines.” 

British endocrinology consultant Leighton Seal also said that it is better if the entire medical community around ‘transgender healthcare’ should remain in agreement, despite lacking research and guidelines, as it would protect their practices. In answering an attendee’s question, he said:

“If you have a network around you where a clinical team, in concert with the individual, has made a decision, you then have a framework to say, ‘Well, the ethics of this were explored…’ ” Seal said. “[W]e are doing procedures here where we don’t have outcome data. So, unless you want to go to individual ethics boards in each hospital to get ethics permission to do those surgeries because they’re on the edge of the field of medicine, you need to have a mechanism around you to support you. Otherwise, you could be vulnerable. That’s our feeling.”

The attendee responded, saying she felt as though everyone was making things up as they went on. “Because I feel like we’re all just winging it, you know? And which is okay, you’re winging it too. But maybe we can just, like, wing it together.”

In other words, there are no guidelines to a medical practice that have been pushed on confused teens for nearly a decade.

Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it.  

Help us continue to report on President Trump’s successes. Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.