Trust the experts! Trust the Science! Because they've all been blackmailed into pushing the left wing agenda.
As left wingers proclaim, "How sad it must be believing that doctors, scientists, scholars, historians, economists & journalists are all lying to you, but a criminal conman, business cheat, reality TV game show host with a lifelong history of blatant, unapologetic, nonstop lying, is telling you the truth."
Time to denounce right wingers for undermining trust in medicine by spreading "misinformation"!
My Medical Association Silenced My Views on Gender Treatment
Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility.
I’m a board-certified obstetrician, a lesbian, a mother, a lifelong Democrat, and up until recently, someone who placed immense faith and trust in the institutions that guided my profession.
I served as the chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Iowa section for a year and a half, where I dedicated my time to expanding women’s health access to rural areas in my state.
But in March, one of ACOG’s vice presidents called me into a meeting and told me I had a choice: resign from my position as chair, or stop publicly criticizing ACOG’s endorsement of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender medical care.
I had come to realize that our profession was not doing the right thing by encouraging medicalization and surgery for transgender patients, when robust evidence that these treatments provided long-term health benefits did not exist.
The choice was easy.
I told the vice president, Rachel Pittman, that I would resign because I did not intend to silence myself on an issue about which I care so much, and one that impacts so many vulnerable patients deserving of the best, evidence-based medical care.
To understand how I came to this position, I have to take you back to my first day working as a general obstetrician at the UnityPoint LGBTQ+ clinic in Waterloo, Iowa, in 2019.
After enrolling at the University of California, I attended the University of Iowa for my medical residency, where I met my former wife; we had three kids together. I’ve poured myself into my work, at times spending over 120 hours a week in the hospital.
When the opportunity presented itself to work at the LGBTQ+ clinic a few times a month, I jumped at it. I knew how lesbians had historically felt ostracized by their doctors, and I wanted to help rebuild trust.
I was surprised to find that my first patient at the clinic was a biological woman who identified as a man. Even more surprising was that my second patient was too, as was my third, and nearly every patient on my schedule. Those who didn’t identify as transgender identified as nonbinary. The clinic, I learned quickly, didn’t predominantly serve the needs of lesbian or gay patients. It was, by and large, a gender clinic, there to provide medical pathways toward transition for those with gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy and surgery.
I didn’t mind this at the time. In fact, I enjoyed feeling like I was providing much-needed care for an underserved community. I left the clinic after a year due to scheduling conflicts, but it continued to refer patients to me. I performed over a dozen “gender-affirming” hysterectomies—surgery to remove a uterus—on patients who, in some cases, had traveled hundreds of miles to see me. It’s a major medical procedure, which comes with risks as serious as death. By this point, all of the gender-affirming hysterectomies I performed were on biological women who were seeking to transition to men and who had plans to be on lifelong testosterone treatment. I thought the medical basis for these procedures was plausible: lifelong testosterone treatment could cause uterine complications, and in addition, it made sense to me that seeing menstrual blood, or even knowing they had a uterus in their bodies, could cause these patients profound anguish. I presumed that the benefits of a hysterectomy in these cases outweighed the risks.
But in 2023, a patient came to my office seeking a hysterectomy and made me rethink everything. She was in her early 20s and perfectly healthy, but she did not intend to undergo a full medical transition. Instead, she identified as nonbinary, but presented very much like a conventional woman—in the way she looked, but also in the way she acted and dressed. She indicated she did not plan to pursue any other medicalization, such as testosterone. I felt a deep sense of anxiety over performing the procedure. I couldn’t understand how her request was any different than asking for an elective hysterectomy—a surgery that has no medical justification, and against which ACOG strictly recommends. I began to reflect on this patient, and all the other patients who had come through my door asking for me to remove their uteri. Why was it that for a healthy young person it would be nearly impossible to get their uterus removed without an underlying medical issue, but if one were simply to identify as a man with no other plans to transition—or even just say they are nonbinary—the surgery is freely available?
When I reached out to a community of ob-gyns on Facebook and explained my reservations, almost everyone was in favor of the procedure. One group of respondents was highly credentialed doctors at some of the best academic institutions in the country telling me the procedure was “medically necessary,” that ACOG, guided by WPATH’s guidelines, explicitly recommended it. And the second was a group of doctors who called me names like “ignorant” and “transphobe” for even questioning whether to perform the procedure in the first place.
But nobody could provide a strong, evidence-based argument as to why this procedure would help my patient get better, so I declined to perform it. I was nervous to tell the patient. I was scared she would go into the community and tell her friends, and that I’d be labeled a “transphobic doctor” and my practice would be at risk. I had seen that happen to plenty of highly regarded physicians before me.
Shortly after, a detransitioner, a woman who had sought testosterone treatment to transition to male but later stopped taking it and resumed identifying as a woman, came into my office. I had been told for years that detransitioning was so rare, so unlikely, that I was shocked to find someone in my small community going through it.
Around this time, in the fall of 2023, I decided to run to become chair of the Iowa section of ACOG. My focus at the time had been on increasing reproductive healthcare access in rural areas like mine, where we struggled to recruit and retain good doctors. When I assumed the position, I acted as ACOG’s loyal soldier, consistently relying on their standards of care and defending the organization when doctors expressed their frustrations. My superiors in the association told us that by sticking together in our guidance, we could more effectively help our patients and fight for improvements in our field.
But in the background, I began to dig more deeply into the literature on transgender medical science. I assumed there would be a great body of research supporting these invasive measures, even if they didn’t always make sense to me.
But I couldn’t find a single good long-term, longitudinal study on the health outcomes of transgender patients who underwent treatments including hormone replacement therapy and surgery. Then I started reading books like Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think, an investigation into what went wrong at the UK’s Tavistock Gender Service for Children, which shut down in 2022 after independent inspectors found it provided “inadequate” care. In July 2025, I tuned in to a United States Federal Trade Commission hearing that laid out a strong case that leaders within WPATH unethically manipulated their data or put pressure on researchers to produce outcomes that supported their preexisting guidelines.
I was floored to discover the research basis into gender medicine both for adolescents and adults was not just poor; it was fraudulent. I couldn’t understand how my medical association, let alone others in my field, could endorse it.
In December 2025, I authored an essay on my blog titled “Physicians Must Demand Answers from WPATH.” In it, I argued that it was time for members of my profession to hold ourselves to the highest, most rigorous and data-driven standards of care when treating patients with gender dysphoria, even if it means having to admit we had previously been misguided.
I didn’t expect ACOG to completely disregard all of the concerns I had raised. On February 4 of this year, two months after publishing my article, the newly appointed vice president Rachel Pittman sent me an email stating my article “raises concerns” because of my “public expression of dissatisfaction with ACOG’s inclusion of WPATH in its clinical guidance.” She requested I join a meeting with her and the association’s legal staff. On March 10, ahead of our meeting, she followed up to emphasize that I could voice my concerns during the meeting “relating to care for transgender people,” but added that “we aren’t planning on having a full discussion on the issue.” The meeting lasted only 20 minutes, and in the end, I was forced to resign if I wanted to continue expressing my concerns publicly.
What made my dismissal all the more ironic was that the very day I was ousted, ACOG awarded the Iowa section the State Legislative Advocacy Award for my work to recruit and retain ob-gyns in the state. A week earlier, ACOG recognized me with a service award and asked me to give a presentation in Washington, D.C., about my work in Iowa to a national audience of ob-gyns.
Rather than hear my concerns and take them seriously, my national medical association chose to silence me. They chose to be complicit in a campaign to promote ideology in medicine over evidence-backed science.
Whenever WPATH’s proponents are asked to defend their guidelines, they don’t cite the weak scientific evidence. Their strongest argument is always that all major medical associations in the United States have adopted them. That’s hard to argue with. And it was true until this past February, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to no longer endorse medicalization of minors dealing with gender dysphoria.
I always thought once the leaders of our medical associations learned the truth, they would seek to change our guidance. But I continue to be disappointed. The reality is that these medical associations have now become overrun by a small, loud group of activists. The leaders who we expect to guide us and hold us to the highest standards have succumbed to them out of cowardice, or even ignorance, to what is best for our patients. They’re now more interested in silencing critics than they are in standing up for what is best for our patients. I know this because it’s exactly what I witnessed at ACOG.
Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest medical authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility and makes people less likely to trust us for their care.
It’s not hateful to tell the truth and to want to keep young people from experiencing these grave harms. In fact, it is our duty as doctors to do so. I hope my medical organization one day finds the courage to admit this.
A week after resigning from ACOG, I signed on as the lead medical adviser of the LGB Courage Coalition, a lesbian, gay, and bisexual advocacy group seeking to restore evidence-based care in gender medicine. My hope is that by reaching out to physicians one by one, I can help them understand how our position isn’t hateful like the mainstream leads them to believe; it’s based on the truth.