Last week 2025 the US Department of Health and Human Services, responding to litigation that revealed the authors of its Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices (AKA the HHS Review), published a list of those authors along with a new supplement of peer reviews, both solicited and unsolicited. Unsurprisingly, given that the HHS Review is just a more extreme version of the Cass Review, every single one of its contributors has a documented history of anti-trans lobbying and/or activism. More surprisingly, the supplement includes some utterly damning takedowns, two of them unsolicited published peer-reviewed papers and one by the American Psychiatric Association. In contrast, of the eight physicians (all commissioned by the Review) who praise the Review, seven have proven credentials in anti-trans activism. So while anti-trans lobbyists are claiming that these peer reviews somehow legitimise the HHS Review, the supplement itself tells a different story.
Excerpts from the unsolicited peer reviews
“Our conclusions are that while the HHS Report purports to be a thorough, evidence-based assessment of gender-affirming care for transgender youth, its underlying methodology lacks sufficient transparency and clarity for its findings to be taken at face value. […] As a result, the Report’s claims fall short of the standard of methodological rigor that should be considered a prerequisite for policy guidance in clinical care.”
(American Psychiatric Association. Supplement to Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices: Peer Reviews and Replies. (2025) https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/gender-dysphoria-report-supplement.pdf)
“The HHS report, with its extensive violations of scientific norms, misrepresentations of science, and wanton disregard of the expert standard of care for TGD youth, is a dangerous incursion of politics into science and medicine. […] The role of government should be to support the highest quality and equitable implementation of the evidence-based standard of care for all children, and the HHS report does precisely the opposite.”
(Dowshen et al. A Critical Scientific Appraisal of the Health and Human Services Report on Pediatric Gender Dysphoria. Journal of Adolescent Health (2025) https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(25)00246-0/fulltext)
“It is the role of researchers and healthcare providers to provide transparent, accountable, and comprehensive information about the state of scientific evidence regarding healthcare and healthcare access, a standard which our commentary demonstrates is not met by the anonymously authored HHS review. Just as the intent is to end GAC for TGNB youth, there has also been a move at the federal level to limit or terminate the very research that will allow experts in the field to continue longitudinal evidence-based studies on the nature and outcomes of pediatric gender care. We condemn the political motivations leading to the publication of the HHS review without consulting pediatric gender care experts and organizations, as well as the review’s misrepresentation of the evidence surrounding the benefits of supporting and affirming TGNB youth. We call on the government and policymakers to consider the full body of peer-reviewed research supporting GAC and to end the politically motivated attacks on TGNB youth, their families, and the healthcare providers who support them. Pediatric GAMC decision-making should remain within the qualified healthcare team, parents, and adolescents without political interference and without restrictions or bans put in place by unqualified individuals with no expertise in the field of pediatric gender care.”
(Rider et al. Scientific Integrity and Pediatric Gender Healthcare: Disputing the HHS Review. Scientific Research and Social Policy. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01221-5)
Authors of the HSS Review
Evgenia Abbruzzese – Co-founder of SEGM (the so-called Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine), designated an anti-trans hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre and imo the most dangerous organisation in the western world for trans young people.
Leor Sapir – Works at the Manhattan Institute (a conservative thinktank active in anti-trans lobbying). Often appears in conservative media attacking GAMT for trans young people. Claims the New England Journal of Medicine has “capitulated” to trans activists.
Alex Byrne – Has publicly promoted anti-trans theories since 2018. Frequent speaker at events hosted by prominent anti-trans organisation Genspect, which shares members with SEGM.
Farr Curlin – Wrote the article “Transgender Treatments Distort the Purpose of Medicine: Physicians are supposed to promote patients’ health, not cater to their desires”. So-called expert witness supporting Missouri’s ban on GAMT.
Moti Gorin – Speaker at inaugural SEGM conference in 2023. Contributor to Lawrence Krauss’s laughable “anti-woke” book The War on Science. Wrote “The Cure for Politicised Pediatric Gender Care”.
Kristopher Kaliebe – So-called expert witness supporting Florida’s ban on GAMT. Speaker at 2023 SEGM conference.
Michael Laidlaw – Former member of the Pediatric and Adolescent Gender Dysphoria Working Group, which spawned SEGM and multiple other anti-trans organisations that share members and exist in name only on the internet. Formed in 2018, this group, which was created to promote Lisa Littman’s junk-science “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” theory, brought together discredited old-school so-called experts such as Kenneth Zucker and Ray Blanchard with younger anti-trans activists such as future president of SEGM Roberto D’Angelo. Laidlaw has testified in support of GAMT bans across the US and created the website Resilience Health Network, which promotes the “ex-transgender” movement.
Kathleen McDeavitt – Another so-called expert witness supporting US bans on GAMT. Has collaborated on papers with Kaliebe and Stephen Levine, one of the most infamous and frequently cited of the so-called expert witnesses.
Yuan Zhang – Worked with so-called godfather of evidence-based medicine Gordon Guyatt on the McMasters University systematic reviews into GAMT sponsored by SEGM. Spoke at the 2024 SEGM conference.
Authors of the commissioned peer reviews
Phew, it’s late and this is getting long, so I won’t go too deeply into the independent physicians who did the remaining peer reviews, but here’s a quick rundown: John Bester publicly claimed “minors lack autonomy” and therefore should not receive GAMT; Karleen Gribble (currently working at the University of Sydney) campaigned in 2020 against gender-neutral language for pregnant people and believes terms like “sex assigned at birth” and “gender identity” should be abolished; Richard Santen criticised WPATH for “stacking” its guideline development team by prioritising physicians who had practiced GAMT yet praises the HHS Review, which included only physicians who had not practiced GAMT; Jilles Smids spoke at 2025 SEGM conference; Patrik Vankrunkelsven spoke at 2023 SEGM conference; Trudy Bekkering is a frequent collaborator of Vankrunkelsven; only Lane Strathearn has a clean record.
TL;DR
The HHS Review was authored entirely by well-known anti-trans campaigners shortly after Trump issued Executive Order 14187: “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” in early 2025. Attempting to copy the Cass Review, the Department of Health and Human Services kept the Review’s authors secret, until litigation (I forget by whom and I accidentally shut the tab that told me) forced the department to reveal them. At that point, in an attempt to prove the Review’s credibility, the department commissioned some lesser-known anti-trans campaigners to write peer reviews, publishing these, along with two peer-reviewed papers that had since emerged and some unsolicited negative comments by the American Psychiatric Association, in a supplementary booklet that also included rejoinders, by the Review’s anti-trans authors, to the negative peer reviews.
In a nutshell, if anyone acts as if this Review is credible we know what to tell them. Not a single one of its authors has any experience in the field of trans healthcare and every single one of its authors (and all but one of its commissioned peer reviewers) is either a well-known anti-trans activist or has publicly espoused anti-trans views. The fact that the bulk of the authors have directly collaborated with SEGM proves, yet again, that the current attack on trans young people is the result of a decade-long disinformation campaign by fringe physicians with no expertise in the field.