A reporter who writes “sex assigned at birth” is promoting a belief system. Sex is not “assigned” at birth. It is established at conception and correctly observed and recorded in utero or at birth in 99% of cases. Ideologues use this phrase to convey the idea that doctors and midwives can only guess a baby’s sex, while the important marker of personhood is the individual’s “gender identity,” an entirely subjective sense of self, which the child or adult will declare later. Ideologues invented the term “cisgender” to describe the vast majority of humans who do not reject their sex. The term suggests that there are different kinds of women and men—cisgender and transgender. The term thus implies falsely that “trans women,” i.e. men who call themselves women, are a subset of women, or conversely that “a trans man” is a kind of man. The term “trans athlete” obscures the fact that a male is competing in female sport, which most of the public recognizes as unfair. An accurate description for these competitors is “trans-identified male athletes” or “male athletes who assert/claim a female identity.”The term “transgender prisoners” obfuscates what most readers would see as a dangerous situation: male felons (who almost certainly still have their birth genitalia) sharing cells and shower facilities with women inmates. News reports should clearly state that these individuals are “male prisoners who assert/claim a female identity” or “trans-identified males.”Misleading wrong-sex pronouns. When journalists use female pronouns to describe trans-identified male felons they skew crime statistics. This has led to the absurdity of male rapists being labeled as women. Across time and cultures, males have been responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes.“Gender-affirming care” is a euphemism for a medical scandal—hormonal interventions that disrupt healthy endocrine function and surgeries that remove healthy body parts. Calling these interventions “care” is a misnomer. Systematic evidence reviews have turned up no credible evidence that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries improve the psychological functioning of gender-distressed patients. A robust 2026 study out of Finland showed marked worsening of mental health with medical interventions. There are physical harms, as well. Exogenous estrogen use by men raises the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer. Testosterone use by females likewise raises cardiovascular risk and promotes vaginal atrophy and incontinence. “Top surgery” is a euphemism for elective, double mastectomy, the amputation of healthy breasts to make the chest look more masculine. “Bottom surgery” is a euphemism for disfiguring, complication-plagued procedures to remove healthy genitalia and fashion simulacra of opposite sex anatomy. Pseudo-phalluses and neo-vaginas do not function as natural male and female reproductive organs. Removal of testes or ovaries makes patients dependent on exogenous sex hormones for life.

“Gender identity” is nothing more than a set of feelings—an entirely subjective sense of self. Science has not located the seat of gender identity, nor is there a medical test to determine it. Definitions of gender identity are invariably circular. According to the ACLU, gender identity is “a person’s basic internal sense of being a man, woman, and/or another gender, such as gender queer or gender fluid.” GLAAD defines gender identity as “a person’s innate understanding of their own gender,” adding that it “is not visible to others.” The closest ideologues come to a definition of gender identity is a set of personal preferences and interests, almost always based on sex stereotypes. A little boy who likes dolls might be said to have a female gender identity. An adolescent girl who feels discomfort with her blossoming female body might assert a male or “non-binary” gender identity. The Trans Journalists Association acknowledges that “gender identity” is solely a matter of self-identification. This is why “gender identity” cannot serve as a basis to classify individuals for purposes of law and policy. A 50-year old may feel old, but cannot qualify for Medicare if he “identifies” as a septuagenarian. The American Boxing Association would not allow a 215-pound pugilist to “identify” into the welterweight division.

Biologists define sex as a strict binary, based on whether an organism developed to produce one of two gamete types: small gametes (sperm) or large gametes (ova). Sex does not exist on a spectrum. Gender ideologues argue that the existence of an extremely small number of individuals (less than 0.02% of the population) with ambiguous genitalia disproves the binary. These rare conditions are known as disorders or differences of sexual development (DSDs), sometimes called “intersex conditions.” None of these conditions results in the production of a third gamete, hence no third sex. Surgeries and opposite-sex hormones may feminize or masculinize some secondary sex traits, but every somatic cell (non-gamete) in the body will retain its pair of sex chromosomes, either XX or XY. Chromosomal anomalies like Klinefelter Syndrome, where boys are born with an extra X chromosome (XXY), do not constitute a third sex.

All Americans, including those who claim a transgender identity, are entitled to the same constitutional rights. However, activists and journalists use the phrase “trans rights” expansively to describe what are in fact demands for special privileges—all stemming from a supposed “right” to identify out of the reality of one’s biological sex and have the rest of society participate in the fiction. These special privileges impinge on the established rights of others. Males who claim a female “gender identity” demand the “right” to compete against females in sport, depriving women and girls of their right to fair competition , as protected by Title IX, other legislation, and court decisions. Males who say they feel like women demand the “right” to use female restrooms and locker rooms, infringing on women and girls’ rights to privacy and safety. Male felons who “identify” as women demand the “right” to serve their time in women’s prisons, in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Unsurprisingly, housing men in women’s facilities has led to harassment and rape of female inmates. To avoid this entirely predictable outcome, the UN’s Nelson Mandela rules bar males from female prisons. A trans-identified person’s demand to be called by pronouns that do not reflect biological reality undermines other citizens’ right to free speech. Judges that require rape victims to refer to their assailants with female pronouns not only compel speech (in abeyance of the First Amendment) but revictimize the most vulnerable women. By promoting gender identity ideology as a civil rights cause, activists tar dissenters as bigots and silence debate.

For years, advocates and journalists invoked a supposed “consensus of all major U.S. medical associations” in support of pediatric gender medicine. Then in February 2026, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons advised members to delay gender-related surgeries until age 19. Importantly, in its position statement, the ASPS, raised clinical and ethical concerns about the entire pediatric gender medicine pathway—from social transition to hormones and surgeries. The next day, the American Medical Association announced it agreed that feminizing or masculinizing surgeries should “generally be deferred to adulthood,” although the AMA has since tried to walk that back. European medical authorities have been questioning the wisdom of pediatric gender medicine for years. After systematic evidence reviews, the UK and Nordic nations severely restricted puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors. As for the U.S., the consensus of medical opinion was never robust. Rather than carefully examine the results of clinical studies, American medical societies simply cited each other’s guidelines, which are based on very low quality evidence. Dr. Hilary Cass, who led the UK’s comprehensive evidence review, highlighted the “circularity” of the consensus and noted the suppression of dissent within the medical profession. “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour,” she wrote. Dr. Julia Mason has documented the silencing of anyone questioning gender medicine by activists within the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) presents itself as the leading medical authority on gender medicine, issuing standards of care for treatment of patients suffering distress over their biological sex. WPATH claims its mission is to “promote evidence based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health.” However, leaked documents and videotapes made public in 2024 in a release known as the “WPATH Files” exposed it as an activist organization whose recommendations violate medical ethics. WPATH-affiliated clinicians appear on video acknowledging that minors cannot understand or consent to procedures that will lead to loss of fertility. WPATH’s latest “standards of care” (SOC-8, 2022) lists “eunuch” as a “gender identity” that children supposedly can recognize in themselves at an early age. For such patients, WPATH recommends castration as a harm-reduction strategy. Court documents, released in the discovery process for an Alabama youth gender medicine case, revealed that WPATH suppressed a systematic evidence review it had commissioned from John Hopkins University, apparently because the review failed to find evidence for the benefits of pediatric sex trait modification. The documents from the Alabama case also revealed that former US Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services Rachel Levine successfully pressured WPATH to drop all age minimums for gender interventions from SOC-8. SOC-8 also deleted the section dedicated to ethics.

Journalists should not repeat the claim that “gender-affirming care” prevents suicide. Proponents of gender medicine portray hormonal and surgical interventions as suicide prevention and thus life-saving care. Parents of trans-identifying children report doctors pressuring them into consenting to medicalization with the terrifying threat, “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” A leading gender doctor has admitted using this line on parents. However, the suicide risk for trans-identified individuals is no greater than it is for other patients with the same co-morbidities such as anxiety, depression and borderline personality disorder. This is the conclusion of the Cass Review, the U.K.’s comprehensive, systematic evidence review released in 2024 as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services umbrella review released in 2025. Nor is there any evidence the withholding medical interventions increases suicide risk, or that providing hormones and surgeries reduces suicide. In fact, in a 2023 study, two of 315 older adolescents who identified as transgender or “non-binary” and did take hormones committed suicide, a much higher rate than for the general population. (Still, clinicians shamelessly use this study to justify the practice of “gender-affirming care.”) Even ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, arguing for trans-identified minors’ right to have their puberty blocked, had to admit before the Supreme Court that completed suicides among trans-identified youth are “thankfully and admittedly rare.” Raising the specter of youth suicide is irresponsible. Suicide is socially contagious (the Werther effect) and the American Society for Suicide Prevention has extensive guidelines for journalists to limit such contagion. When reporters repeat false suicide statistics they encourage suicidal ideation by suggesting to young people that they are likely to kill themselves if they are not immediately affirmed in their newly declared gender identity.

You will often read that the regret for sex-rejecting interventions, hormones and surgeries, is “rare.” A leading source for this claim is a flawed 2021 paper claiming a 1% regret rate after gender surgery. As biologist Colin Wright has argued, the paper is riddled with methodological problems and misrepresentations. The paper was a review of various studies, which themselves were plagued with short-term follow-up and high drop-out rates. Additionally, nearly all the studies included in the review were conducted among patients who transitioned as adults, and so are not applicable to the exploding cohort of trans-identified youth. There are no solid long-term studies on regret, so the rate of regret and detransition is not known. What we know from the growing ranks of detransitioners is that regret often sets in five years or more after embarking on irreversible, life-altering procedures. The  r/detrans | Detransition Subreddit, a members-only forum for detransitioners, desisters, and self-questioners with some medical or legal professionals allowed, has approximately 62,350 members  as of July 2026. Even if only half are people who have experienced transition regret, that is a significant number. Given the rapid increase in the number of people seeking these procedures over the last 10-15 years and the fact that no one is systematically tracking these patients and their outcomes, we may never know how many people come to regret their decisions.

The female category in sport exists because males enjoy overwhelming athletic advantage over females. The statistics are stark: Males run 10% faster, jump 20% longer, throw balls 50% further and lift 65% heavier. They can punch more than 2.5 times harder than females. The differences emerge long before puberty. Male fetuses are exposed to higher levels of testosterone in utero and again in the early months of life, when babies go through a “mini-puberty.” Decades of records from the Presidential Fitness Challenge show boys from the age of six outperformed girls in every category except flexibility. When adolescent males go through puberty, the testosterone surge they experience produces taller, stronger bodies with broader shoulders and greater heart and lung capacity and muscle mass than females have. Male advantage in running translates into approximately 10,000 males—including schoolboys—with a personal best 100m sprint time faster than the current female Olympic champion, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Testosterone suppression in trans-identified athletes does not undo the height, limb/digit length and shoulder/pelvic width differences that give post-pubertal males overwhelming athletic advantage. The modest loss in muscle strength resulting from testosterone suppression does not bring male strength down to female levels. The proof of these statistics lies in the thousands of medals, awards and opportunities females have lost to males who claim a female “identity” across sport at all levels. Not only is including males in female sport unfair. It is dangerous.

In the late 1990s, clinicians in The Netherlands became the first to put gender distressed children on puberty blockers, followed by opposite-sex hormones and surgeries. The goal was to stop their sexual development and help them “pass” as adults of the opposite sex. Of the 70 patients in the study that came to be known as the “Dutch Protocol,” 62 were same sex attracted. So too were most of the patients who got referrals for hormones and surgeries at the U.K.’s now-closed Tavistock clinic. Tavistock practitioners joked that at the rate they were “transitioning” kids, “soon there would be no more gay people.” As many gays and lesbians attest from their own life experience, children who defy gender stereotypes and yearn to be the opposite sex often grow up to be homosexual. In most cases, gender dysphoria resolves after puberty and this was well known to therapists in the decades prior to the Dutch Protocol. Organizations like LGB Courage Coalition and LGB Alliance USA are dedicated to stopping the medicalization of young people who defy sex stereotypes. In the words of the LGB Alliance USA, “We oppose the harmful, unnecessary, and unscientific medicalization of children in the name of ‘gender transition.’ We oppose ideologies promoting the belief that gender-nonconformity or dysphoria requires physical alteration through medical intervention.” The belief in a transcendent “gender identity” has ironically led clinicians to put proto-gay children on a pathway to sterilization and sexual dysfunction.

Reporters often quote Trump administration officials, other Republican politicians, Christian conservatives, or “right-wing” commentators as the voices of opposition to gender medicine or males in female sport. This framing conveys the idea that opponents of so-called “trans rights” and the “gender-affirming” medical model are political reactionaries and bigots. Often journalists frame trans issues as left-right disputes, instead of examining the nature of the trans social contagion, the quality of the evidence for gender medicine, or the statistics on male athletic advantage. Such framing exaggerates the actual partisan divide over trans issues. Polling shows majorities of rank and file Democrats oppose sex-rejecting medical interventions for minors and males competing in female sport. There are plenty of gender critical experts in the medical, sports and legal issues who are classic liberals. If you are a reporter, interview them. If you are a reader dissatisfied with coverage, urge journalists to give them a platform.On the leftist feminist objections to “gender identity” and to “trans” generallyKara Dansky, The Democratic Women’s Declaration, The TERF Report, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, DIAG Board member, contact at http://karadansky.com,, @kdanskyElizabeth Chesak, Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA), president@womensdeclarationusa.com, @WDI_USAElspeth Cypher, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), contact@womensliberationfront.org, @WomensLibFront, SbclawsonOn leftist LGB objections to “gender identity” and “trans” generallyJamie Reed, LGB Courage Coalition, Jamie.reed@lgbcouragecoalition.org, LGB Courage CoalitionLauren Leggieri, LGB Courage Coalition, Lauren.leggieri@lgbcouragecoalition.org, LGB Courage CoalitionOn liberal objections to “pediatric gender medicine”Jamie Reed, LGB Courage Coalition, Jamie.reed@lgbcouragecoalition.org, @LGBCourageLauren Leggieri, LGB Courage Coalition, Lauren.leggieri@lgbcouragecoalition.org, @LGBCourageMartha Wexler, DIAG, media@di-ag.org, @DIAGdemocratsOn female-only sportsMariah Burton Nelson, Women's Sports Policy Working Group, DanCruz8@me.com Kim Jones, ICONS, kimjones@iconswomen.com, @icons_womenMarshi Smith, ICONS, kimjones@iconswomen.com, @icons_womenJennifer Sey, XX-XY Athletics, sey@xx-xyathletics.com, @xx_xyathleticsSarah Barker, The Female Category, @thefemalecategory On dissent within the Democratic PartyMartha Wexler, DIAG, media@di-ag.org, @DIAGdemocratsKara Dansky, The Democratic Women’s Declaration, The TERF Report, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, DIAG Board member, contact at http://karadansky.com, @kdanskyOn single-sex spaces (prisons, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc.)Jean Chadbourne, Women Are Real, info@femalesmatter.org, @WomenAreRealsOn detransitionElizabeth Chesak, Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA), president@womensdeclarationusa.com, @WDI_USAOn female safeguarding issues and child safeguarding issuesAmy Sousa, knownheretic.com, theknownheretic@gmail.com, @KnownHereticOn sex and gender in law and the courtsKara Dansky, The Democratic Women’s Declaration, The TERF Report, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, DIAG Board member, contact at http://karadansky.com, @kdanskyElspeth Cypher, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), contact@womensliberationfront.org, @WomensLibFront, @SBCLaw