Why Genspect doesn’t want to replace WPATH (we want to close it!)

In our recent discussion, Kellie Jay Keen expressed her desire for Genspect to replace WPATH, stating, “I want you to replace WPATH.” Prior to this, she had said, “Because if anyone’s going to take out WPATH, you’ve got the best chance.” It was a flattering and positive wish and I took it in the spirit it was given. But I have recently learnt how important it is to be very careful about any inadvertent mixed messages, and so I want to clarify our position: Genspect does not want to replace WPATH; Genspect wants to help close WPATH.

First established in the late 1970s, WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) has promoted transgender healthcare for some years now. This is very far from Genspect’s stated mission to offer a healthy approach to sex and gender and to carry this out by providing a non-medicalised approach to gender dysphoria. This is why we have no intention of replacing WPATH; we want something that is more helpful and healthier.

We are, however, aware of other organisations that appear to be seeking more cautious medical treatment pathways for gender dysphoria than what is currently offered by WPATH. We have noticed how, in recent years, clinicians such as Erica Anderson and Laura Edwards Leeper have withdrawn from the aggressively affirmative stance. We expect they will one day soon form an organisation – or an alliance with existing organisations – that offers a more clinically careful approach to medical transition. These organisations may look back to documents such as Standards of Care 5, published by WPATH in 1999, as an appropriate approach to medical transition. Presumably in the coming years, some organisations will create their own version of a Standards of Care and this will offer a range of safeguards and protections for people who seek medical transition.

Genspect, however, has no interest in this particular strategy; we want to offer an alternative vision to gender nonconformity and gender dysphoria. While WPATH are like a chemist who promotes the use of anti-depressants, Genspect is in a different arena, espousing the merits of quality relationships, satisfying careers and the importance of exercise.

Since our first inception, we have deliberated long and hard about gender dysphoria, medical transition and the many associated risks. We have brought into consideration the range of issues that have arisen in relation to gender dysphoria, such as ROGD, autogynephilia, detransition and desistance and we eventually came to the conclusion that the most helpful protocol to offer is a non-medicalised approach to gender dysphoria that respects the need to prioritise sex before gender identity. Our think tank, the Killarney Group, has already put in countless hours working on the creation of the first draft version of the Gender Framework and we launched this at our conference in Denver. We are currently creating a legal brief that will support future legal cases for detransitioners.

Genspect has expanded quickly since we first started as “a voice for parents” in June 2021. At the time the parents had been cruelly silenced. Clinicians whom they had sought help from in the hour of their child’s greatest need had dismissed the cautious concern of these loving and engaged parents. Ideologically driven clinicians, puffed up by a sense of self-importance and a dangerous god complex, destroyed their children’s future fertility, good health and sexual functioning in a bid to create a new body. Many parents also suffered as a consequence of virtue-signalling teachers and schools who were reckless when their vulnerable children sought guidance. The result was devastating chaos. Families were simultaneously ripped apart by a culture war that positioned parents as oppressors and their children as victims.

Genspect has expanded rapidly since its first inception in June 2021. Initially, in March 2020, we established the Gender Dysphoria Support Network (GDSN), an Al-Anon-type organisation that continues to offer support meetings for parents whose children have been impacted by gender dysphoria. I felt overwhelmed when I first became aware of the thousands of parents who belonged to a vast network of secret organisations who, in the wreckage of their lives, were trying to retrieve some sanity and maybe even some understanding about what had happened. The parents in these secret groups could not speak out – their families were typically right in the middle of the biggest trauma of their lives – and so, just over a year after launching the GDSN, we established Genspect to allow others to speak about this unfolding medical scandal and bring some attention to the plight of the parents.

Genspect first launched with a public awareness campaign in the media. We followed this with webinars, a range of guidance documents and policies for professionals and laypeople who wanted to help support people with gender dysphoria. We launched Genspect Unheard, a range of recordings of parents speaking about their experiences and perspectives and we also launched Stats for Gender, a website that offers reliable research about sex and gender so that the public could check their facts about subjects related to sex and gender. We support PITT, Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans, a Substack that offers hundreds of parent stories and we were delighted to see their book recently published by Pitchstone.

Genspect was less than a month old when we were contacted by the first person seeking help to navigate the chaotic, unknowable road of detransition. Of course, we could not say no. If we were to create a chart of who has suffered the most, few among us would disagree that it is the detransitioners who deserve the most sympathy. At first, we helped detransitioners on an ad hoc basis and then we formalised this arrangement. In June 2022, a year after Genspect first launched, we launched Beyond Trans, a project that offers funding for therapy for detransitioners and people who have been harmed by medical transition. We were also delighted to support the launch of Themis at the Genspect conference as this is an organisation that offers to fund legal cases for detransitioners.

By then we had expanded our organisation considerably, and so we decided to re-brand. No longer simply a voice for parents, we expanded our mission last year to be “a healthy approach to sex and gender”. With that, we chose to focus on WPATH, the root, stem and branch of gender ideology, and we started to plan our counter-conference campaign.

The number of people who are concerned about gender ideology is growing every day – so much so that our graphic (above) is straining and many more groups and issues should probably be part of it. Most people agree that childhood medical transition is diabolical; beyond that, there is very little consensus. Some organisations are focused on women’s sports; others are more concerned with safe spaces for women and children; many are worried about the level of censorship that is ongoing in relation to trans issues. Many are also deeply bothered about how we should handle autogynephilia in public.

Feminists, philosophers, lawyers, teachers, parents, psychologists, sports people, prisoners, targets of sexual assault, detransitioners, desisters, people who have medically transitioned, religious, conservatives, evolutionary biologists, advocates for free speech, comedians, cultural commentators; the list goes on and on of stakeholders who are impacted by medical transition. There are hundreds of organisations and we need hundreds more. In the meantime, the more we can pull together, the further we will go, despite our many differences.

Genspect wants to help close WPATH. We offer a completely alternative vision to WPATH so we do not want to replace it. We are looking forward to the release of Michael Shellenberger’s WPATH files as we believe this will be a game-changer. We also plan to continue to hold WPATH to account by holding conferences wherever they hold theirs – next stop: Lisbon, Portugal in September 2024!

Illustration by Christina Buttons.