THE WPATH TAPES: Behind-The-Scenes Recordings Reveal What Top Gender Doctors Really Think About Sex Change Procedures

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is the leading authority in the field of gender medicine. Its guidance is routinely used by top medical associations in the U.S. and abroad, while its standards of care inform insurance companies’ approach to coverage policies.

But behind closed doors, top WPATH doctors discussed, and at times seemed to challenge, the organization’s own published guidelines for sex change procedures and acknowledged pushing experimental medical interventions that can have devastating and irreversible complications, according to exclusive footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

WPATH published highly influential clinical guidance called “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8” (SOC 8), which recommends the use of invasive medical interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex change surgeries, calling them “safe and effective.”

The DCNF filed a series of public records requests to WPATH SOC 8 co-authors who are employed at taxpayer-funded institutions, making their emails subject to open records laws. Buried in more than 100 pages of responsive records from the University of Nevada was a series of emails between prominent WPATH members and leaders, including WPATH Global Education Institute (GEI) Co-Chair Gail Knudson, that were sent in 2022. In one email, Knudson sent a colleague the link to a folder containing nearly 30 hours of recordings from WPATH’s GEI summit in September 2022 in Montreal, Canada, which included sessions on mental health, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex change surgery.

These sessions provided WPATH members with in-depth education on the clinical application of topics addressed in the SOC 8 treatment guidelines. However, the footage reveals WPATH-affiliated doctors advocating for children to undergo risky sex change procedures and even pushing for these treatments for patients struggling with severe mental health issues. Several sessions were dedicated exclusively to treating children and included recommendations for minors to receive puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.

For instance, WPATH guidance recommends addressing a patient’s mental health issues before giving them sex change medical interventions. However, in one recorded session, a WPATH faculty member and gender doctor claimed that mental health issues don’t necessarily affect a patient’s ability to receive cross-sex hormones.

In another video, a doctor told attendees children should be informed that cross-sex hormones will likely make them infertile but admitted that he will prescribe them anyway if a child says they want the treatment, regardless of the future consequences.

A surgeon euphemistically referred to a phalloplasty procedure, a surgical series that includes obliterating the vaginal cavity and creating a fake penis with harvested tissue, as an “adventure” for young people. He did this despite later admitting that those same procedures will “definitely” have “complications,” such as permanent issues with bladder function and tissue death.

One physician called the entire field of cross-sex hormones “off-label,” referring to the concept of drugs being used for alternative purposes than what they were approved for. The doctor went on to say that female patients might actually appreciate drug side effects that cause them to lose hair, because they’d look “more like men.”

The Food and Drug Administration says that when it approves a drug, healthcare providers generally may prescribe that drug for an unapproved use, or off-label, when “they judge that it is medically appropriate for their patient.”

In several other videos, doctors argued in favor of transitioning patients who experience psychotic episodes. One admitted that some of his patients with schizophrenia have to be careful how much cross-sex hormones they take or they can’t “keep the voices down.”

The DCNF consulted medical professionals from respected organizations, such as Do No Harm, who all argued that the comments from WPATH-affiliated doctors show that the transgender medical industry does not have patients’ best interests at heart.

While the average person, nationally and internationally, likely has never heard of WPATH, the modern medical industry is deeply tied to the organization and relies on it to dictate the standards of care for transgender medicine. WPATH’s guidelines are cited as criteria for obtaining insurance coverage by both private insurance companies and tax-funded insurance plans, positioning them as a lynchpin of the sex reassignment industry.

Additionally, their guidelines help inform policy statements from major medical and professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Psychological Association and the Endocrine Society. The AAP is currently being sued by Isabelle Ayala, a former patient who was medically transitioned as a child, for allegedly rushing her through sex change medical procedures.

There’s been an explosion in the number of young people, including children, being put on hormones and puberty blockers and getting sex change surgeries, according to a study published in August 2023 by the JAMA Network. This surge has been fueled, in part, by groups like Planned Parenthood, which distributes cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 16. Planned Parenthood saw a roughly 125% jump in the number of transgender services it provided between 2020 and 2022.

Twenty-three states, however, have enacted legislation preventing doctors from performing sex change surgeries on minors amid backlash from concerned parents and doctors who don’t subscribe to the WPATH-endorsed “gender-affirming care” model. Gender-affirming care is another euphemism used by medical professionals to describe the idea that doctors should affirm a patient’s wish to live as the opposite biological sex through social transitioning, hormone therapy and even surgery.

The SOC 8 was released just days ahead of the 2022 symposium and contained several significant changes to how doctors and medical institutions implemented transgender medical treatment. For instance, WPATH removed minimum age requirements criteria that established when a child can or should receive transgender medical services such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries.

WPATH’s previous guidelines recommended that hormone therapy be given once a patient was over the age of 16, but the updated version removed this barrier and suggests hormone therapy begin at the first signs of sexual maturity.

The videos obtained by the DCNF give the first glimpse at how doctors and mental health professionals discussed implementing the new guidelines. To highlight the most significant portions of the content obtained in the records requests, the DCNF has decided to publish a series of articles collectively called “The WPATH Tapes.”

Following this release, the DCNF intends to publish all of the videos in their entirety in order to provide the public with necessary information about WPATH’s approach to medical care and shine a light on an influential organization that has largely remained anonymous until now.

The WPATH Tapes Table of Contents:

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Addictions

Activists Claim Dealers Can Fix Canada’s Drug Problem

Published on November 18, 2025

Todayville

By Adam Zivo

We should learn from misguided experiments with activist-driven drug ideologies.

Some Canadian public-health researchers have argued that the nation’s drug dealers, far from being a public scourge, are central to the cause of “harm reduction,” and that drug criminalization makes it harder for them to provide this much-needed “mutual aid.” Incredibly, these ideas have gained traction among Canada’s policymakers, and some have even been put into practice.

Gillian Kolla, an influential harm-reduction activist and researcher, spearheaded the push to whitewash drug trafficking in Canada. Over the past decade, she has advocated for many of the country’s failed laissez-faire drug policies. In her 2020 doctoral dissertation, she described her hands-on research into Toronto’s “harm reduction satellite sites”—government-funded programs that paid drug users to provide services out of their homes.

The sites Kolla studied were operated by the nonprofit South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) in Toronto. Addicts participating in the programs received $250 per month in exchange for distributing naloxone and clean paraphernalia (needles and crack pipes, for example), as well as for reversing overdoses and educating acquaintances on safer consumption practices. At the time of Kolla’s research (2016–2017), the SRCHC was operating nine satellite sites, which reportedly distributed about 1,500 needles and syringes per month.

Canada permits supervised consumption sites—facilities where people can use drugs under staff oversight—to operate so long as they receive an official exemption via the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. As the sites Kolla observed did not receive exemptions, they were certainly illegal. Kolla herself acknowledged this in her dissertation, writing that she, with the approval of the University of Toronto, never recorded real names or locations in her field notes, in case law enforcement subpoenaed her research data.

Even so, the program seems to have enjoyed the blessing of Toronto’s public health officials and police. The satellite sites received local funding from 2010 onward, after a decade of operating on a volunteer basis, apparently with special protection from law enforcement. In her dissertation, Kolla described how SRCHC staff trained police officers to leave their sites alone, and how satellite-site workers received special ID badges and plaques to ward off arrest.

Kolla made it clear that many of these workers were not just addicts but dealers, too, and that tolerance of drug trafficking was a “key feature” of the satellite sites. She even described, in detail, how she observed one of the site workers packaging and selling heroin alongside crackpipes and needles.

In her dissertation, Kolla advocated expanding this permissive approach. She claimed that traffickers practice harm reduction by procuring high-quality drugs for their customers and avoiding selling doses that are too strong.

“Negative framings of drug selling as predatory and inherently lacking in care make it difficult to perceive the wide variety of acts of mutual aid and care that surround drug buying and selling as practices of care,” she wrote.

In truth, dealers routinely sell customers tainted or overly potent drugs. Anyone who works in the addiction field can testify that this is a major reason that overdose deaths are so common.

Ultimately, Kolla argued that “real harm reduction” should involve drug traffickers, and that criminalization creates “tremendous barriers” to this goal.

The same year she published her dissertation, Kolla cowrote a paper in the Harm Reduction Journal with her Ph.D. supervisor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. The article affirmed the view that drug traffickers are essential to the harm-reduction movement. Around this time, the SRCHC collaborated with the Toronto-based Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre— the only other organization running such sites—to produce guidelines on how to replicate and scale up the experiment.

Thankfully, despite its local adoption, this idea did not catch on at the national level. It was among the few areas in the early 2020s where Canada did not fully descend into addiction-enabling madness. Yet, like-minded researchers still echo Kolla’s work.

In 2024, for example, a group of American harm-reduction advocates published a paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports that concluded, based on just six interviews with drug traffickers in Indianapolis, that dealers are “uniquely positioned” to provide harm-reduction services, partly because they are motivated by “the moral imperative to provide mutual aid.” Among other things, the authors argued that drug criminalization is harmful because it removes dealers from their social networks and prevents them from enacting “community-based practices of ethics and care.”

It’s instructive to review what ultimately happened with the originators of this movement—Kolla and the SRCHC. Having failed to whitewash drug trafficking, Kolla moved on to advocating for “safer supply”—an experimental strategy that provides addicts with free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. The Canadian government funded and expanded safer supply, thanks in large part to Kolla’s academic work. It abandoned the experiment after news broke that addicts resell their safer supply on the black market to buy illicit fentanyl, flooding communities with diverted opioids and fueling addiction.

The SRCHC was similarly discredited after a young mother, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was shot and killed near the organization’s supervised consumption site in 2023. Subsequent media reports revealed that the organization had effectively ignored community complaints about public safety, and that staff had welcomed, and even supported, drug traffickers. One of the SRCHC’s harm-reduction workers was eventually convicted of helping Huebner-Makurat’s shooter evade capture by hiding him from the police in an Airbnb apartment and lying to the police.

There is no need for policymakers to repeat these mistakes, or to embrace its dysfunctional, activist-driven drug ideologies. Let this be another case study of why harm-reduction policies should be treated with extreme skepticism.

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Health

NEW STUDY: Infant Vaccine “Intensity” Strongly Predicts Autism Rates Worldwide

Published on November 18, 2025

Todayville

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Across countries on three continents, a 1% increase in vaccine types before age one corresponded to a 0.47% increase in autism prevalence.

A new cross-national study from Italy’s National Research Council, spanning multiple developed countries across three continents, has identified a remarkably strong association between early-life vaccine intensity and autism prevalence. The number of vaccine types and doses administered before 12 months showed exceptionally high correlations with national autism rates.

A 1% increase in vaccine types before age one corresponded to a 0.47% increase in autism prevalence.

The correlation is enormous — r = 0.87 for vaccine types and r = 0.79 for vaccine doses. In regression models, vaccine intensity alone explained 81% of the variance in autism prevalence across nations.

This is not an isolated signal. It directly corroborates earlier U.S. state-level data from DeLong (2011) — and aligns with the 107 positive-association studies catalogued in the McCullough Foundation’s Landmark Autism Report.

Key Findings

Coccia used cross-national 2021 autism incidence data paired with WHO-reported infant vaccine schedules. Countries were grouped into relatively comparable healthcare and surveillance systems (North America, Europe, and advanced Asian nations) to reduce detection and reporting bias. The primary exposures were:

number of vaccine types given ≤12 months, and
total number of doses delivered ≤12 months.

Autism prevalence per 100,000 children served as the outcome, and general vaccination coverage rates were statistically controlled so only vaccine intensity and timing were isolated.

The results were striking but unfortunately expected:

Countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore give ~15 vaccine types and 20 doses before age one — and have the highest autism prevalence (~1,273 per 100k).
Countries like Norway, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and the UK give ~8 vaccine types and 9 doses — and have significantly lower autism rates (~834 per 100k).
A 1% increase in vaccine types before age one corresponded to a 0.47% increase in autism prevalence.
The regression model (log–log) explained 81% of the variance.

Coccia then used quadrant mapping to classify nations:

Critical Risk Zone: high vaccine intensity + high autism (U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore)
Protection Zone: low vaccine intensity + low autism (Nordic countries)
Transitional Zone: countries on track to move upward as vaccine intensity rises (Italy, UK)

The conclusion is clear: Early-timed and compound vaccination strongly tracks with rising autism rates.

How DeLong (2011) Fits In

DeLong’s analysis of CDC data found that each 1% rise in U.S. childhood vaccination coverage was associated with ~680 additional cases of autism and speech/language impairment nationwide.

Where DeLong examined state-level associations between how many children were fully vaccinated and subsequent autism/SLI prevalence, Coccia provides the first true cross-national dose–response analysis — showing that the number of vaccine types and doses given before age one powerfully predicts national autism prevalence.

Both studies point in the same direction:
more vaccination in early life → higher autism prevalence.

How This Strengthens the McCullough Foundation’s Landmark Autism Report

Our Autism Report reviewed 136 vaccine-related studies:

107 studies inferred positive associations between vaccination or vaccine components and ASD/NDDs.
All 12 vaccinated vs unvaccinated studies found better neurodevelopmental outcomes in completely unvaccinated children, including far lower rates of autism.
Found strong, consistent increases in cumulative vaccine exposure during early childhood and the reported prevalence of autism across successive birth cohorts.

We concluded:

Combination and early-timed routine childhood vaccination constitutes the most significant modifiable risk factor for ASD, supported by convergent mechanistic, clinical, and epidemiologic findings, and characterized by intensified use, the clustering of multiple doses during critical neurodevelopmental windows, and the lack of research on the cumulative safety of the full pediatric schedule.

Coccia independently arrived at a highly similar conclusion:

This study offers a critical contribution to the ongoing discourse on vaccine safety and neurodevelopment by identifying a statistically significant association between early-life vaccine intensity and national autism rates.

All evidence points to the same conclusion:

Early, clustered vaccination is the strongest modifiable driver of rising autism rates.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

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