It’s Time to Crush the American Medical Association – HotAir

As the “gender-affirming care” consensus has been cracking before our eyes, I worry that we will see a pattern that gets repeated endlessly when people in power do enormous damage before they are forced to reverse course. 

We saw it with COVID, of course, but it is a consistent pattern: the people who did all the damage walk away with even more power and prestige among their peers than they had before. It is as if getting away with harming people is a badge of honor, not a stain on the people and institutions. 

A step in the right direction, but we need to call it what it is: medicalized sexual abuse of children.

“Hormones can leave a child sterilized just as surely as surgery can…

We thus find it concerning that the AMA continues to support the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex… https://t.co/1fFI8gsTYr pic.twitter.com/7GjSkBI2TR

— Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) February 24, 2026

Suddenly—very suddenly—medical associations are backing away from some “gender-affirming” care for children, although they are trying to slow-walk their reversals in order to minimize the damage. 

The suddenness is easily explicable: a detransitioner won a lawsuit, and the gravy train suddenly looked like a gravy drain, and it was time to move on to some other Mengele-like experiment. 

A coalition of 20 attorneys general are putting pressure on the American Medical Association to explain its support for puberty blockers for children, calling the group’s position inconsistent with the evidence after it recently came out against gender-related surgeries for children.

In a letter penned by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall on behalf of the coalition and sent to AMA CEO Dr. John J. Whyte on Tuesday, the group praised the AMA for agreeing with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons that gender-related surgeries should be deferred to adulthood due to a lack of “clear evidence” to support the interventions.

But the group argued the evidence is similarly weak for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones used to treat gender dysphoria in children.

“We thus find it concerning that the AMA continues to support the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors,” the letter states. “The quality of evidence is the same as it is for surgeries: low and very-low quality.”

The group cited systematic reviews by the Department of Health and Human Services and Dr. Hilary Cass, both of which found a lack of high-quality evidence supporting these treatments’ safety and efficacy.

“So if you agree that there is insufficient evidence to support using surgical interventions to treat gender dysphoria in minors — as your recent statement indicates — we do not understand how you can find that there is sufficient evidence to support using hormonal interventions to treat gender dysphoria in minors,” the letter continued. “These interventions have not been shown to be any safer for children that surgeries are, and in fact may be all the more dangerous precisely because they are viewed as not as serious.”

It may appear that conservatives are going to win this battle, but I fear that unless the establishment that pushed these ghoulish practices of sterilizing and mutilating children is destroyed, we will only get a tactical, not strategic victory. As we have seen with the COVID fiasco, the very people who destroyed lives, killed people, and transferred trillions of dollars in wealth from ordinary people into the pockets of the elite have been allowed to go along their merry way. 

https://t.co/vJoOeEXarh https://t.co/hlUWFtg92n

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) February 24, 2026

The New York Times, after spending years slandering people for not buying into alphabet ideology, has finally made some space on its Op/Ed pages for skeptics, and again, many people see this as a victory, and in a sense it is. But it is a minor victory, because the Times has been part of the very propaganda effort that enabled these atrocities, and it will retain its influence. 

WHOA. They are melting down on the sky that is Blue today over Jesse Singal’s NYT op-ed!!

It argues major medical assocs prioritized ideological belief over rigorous science for so called “trans” care.

They do not like the NYT!

(The archived version is in the next post.) pic.twitter.com/qKibJSQ6CB

— Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙‍♀️🦉🐈‍⬛ 🦖 (@babybeginner) February 24, 2026

Jesse Singel’s Opinion piece was a breath of fresh air, but it also shows why institutions that enabled and promoted the medicalization of gender confusion must be destroyed. These institutions weren’t just mistaken: they were the instruments of the horrors. 

The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: “The science” was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, “Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving.”

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption. The organization published a nine-page “position statement” advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that “there are currently no validated methods” for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment. (The document also acknowledged a similar level of uncertainty surrounding blockers and hormones, though that’s less directly relevant to the practice of plastic surgeons.)

The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

You see the problem, right? After losing a lawsuit—the first of many—the institutions that enabled the growth of an entire industry, and who helped create the entire educational structure that distorted millions of kids’ lives by invading the public schools, the AMA and the APA are trying to cover their own butts. They CREATED this mess, and are trying to distance themselves from it now. 

The most striking finding of the Cass review, a 2024 British inquiry that found “remarkably weak” evidence to back up the practice of youth gender medicine, was the shoddy quality of the professional guidelines for this treatment.

Researchers at the University of York, who provided underlying work for the Cass review, found that rather than being linked to careful, independent evaluations of the evidence, these guidelines relied heavily on other organizations’ guidelines. The authors wrote that this “may explain why there has until recently been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice for which evidence remains lacking.”

A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population. (A single study is cited.) The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true. It’s understandable why the Cass reviewers scored this policy statement so abysmally, giving it 12 out of 100 possible points on “rigor of development” and six out of 100 on “applicability.”

States have changed their laws to take children away from parents if they object to transitioning their children, and have been funding gender transitions based on recommendations from institutions that had no scientific basis for their claims. They instead generated a “consensus” by referring to each other as experts. 

97% of gender scientists agree…

Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

Dr. Julia Mason, a 30-year member of the organization, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, with the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, that the A.A.P. deferred to activist-clinicians and stonewalled the critics’ demands for a more rigorous approach. Dr. Sarah Palmer, an Indiana-based pediatrician, told me she recently left the A.A.P. after nearly 30 years because of this issue. “I’ve tried to engage and be a member and pay that huge fee every year,” she said. “They just stopped answering any questions.” This is unfortunate given that, as critics have noted, in many cases the A.A.P. document’s footnotes don’t even support the claims being made in the text.

The shakiness of the guidelines didn’t matter, though — they were cited numerous times in news accounts and court documents as evidence that the most important pediatric association in the country supported youth medical transition.

Groups like the AMA, the APA, Endocrinology societies, and other “expert” organizations do not base their recommendations on science. Perhaps they once did, but surely not now. 

Yet they retain their prestige, and hence the power to destroy lives should they so choose. 

Like the universities and public schools, these institutions are fundamentally compromised, and because they are, they are worse than useless. They are an active danger to society. 

And the thing is, we need “experts” on complex topics like medicine. We shouldn’t always defer to them, and we definitely should be wary of any “consensus,” but we need people who understand complicated topics to give us advice. 

But these days, you are a fool to trust any of them because they are liars. 

So we need to crush the AMA, and any other institution that promoted the COVID and gender lies. They have proven themselves to be dangerous. 

Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.