Networks owned by the largest local TV station owners in the U.S., and mainstream outlets including The Washington Post and Newsweek, recently amplified a deeply flawed report by anti-trans activists. The outlets also failed to fact-check its misinformation or provide context for the extremists behind it.

The report was covered widely by anti-trans figures and outlets, and some Republican state legislators are already using the report to call for expanding restrictions on gender-affirming care. 

On March 4, anti-woke blogger and former California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger announced the release of “The WPATH Files,” a collection of leaked forum posts from an internal message board for members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The group is the leading body providing clinical guidance for medical professionals on gender-affirming care, and a frequent target of anti-trans activists. 

The report included a loose collection of out-of-context clinical observations paired with inaccurate and editorialized commentary. An independent review from medical news outlet STAT described claims made in the report as false and oversimplified. 

Specifically, as discussed by journalist and researcher Erin Reed, the report cites research that comes either from biased sources or is well over a decade old, with newer research refuting the claims. The report makes verifiably false claims about gender-affirming care and the commonality of detransition. Leaked material is inaccurately characterized throughout the report, and at other times, the content was presented without context, allowing readers to misinterpret what was said in the chat logs. 

The report was the product of behind-the-scenes collaboration between Shellenberger and Genspect, an anti-trans activist group that promotes conversion therapy and bans on transition care for adults. The report’s analysis was written by Mia Hughes, who has an extensive history as an anti-trans writer and acted as a spokesperson for an organization that supports conversion therapy for trans youth. 

“The WPATH Files” are a part of a larger strategy by anti-trans extremists to push for broad gender-affirming care bans in blue states

Genspect has shadowed WPATH’s annual conference for the past few years, running its own conference in conjunction and promoting its anti-trans rhetoric to WPATH membership. 

Last year, Genspect’s conference featured talks from far-right extremists including James Lindsay — who helped popularize on social media the practice of falsely accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” — alongside mainstay anti-trans activists like Colin Wright and Chloe Cole. 

The conference also featured figures more closely associated with other fringe movements targeting established science, such as anti-vaccine activist Heather Heying and Shellenberger, best known for his skepticism and misinformation around climate science. 

Shellenberger, whose most recent book San Fransicko targets progressive policy on homelessness with a similar reliance on misleading and inaccurate information, laid out his plan in a speech at that conference (which Genspect has since made private on YouTube). 

“The name of my talk is ‘How WPATH ends,’” Shellenberger began, “and the idea here is that the obstacle is the opportunity, so when we think about the things that are getting in the way of us providing the care that people need rather than the care that they’re getting, let's think of that obstacle as the thing that's going to help us to achieve our goal.” 

Shellenberger framed trans identity as one of a series of “foundational woke ideologies” alongside efforts to combat climate change and oppose racism. He also asserted repeatedly that trans identity is a mental illness, that gender-affirming care is comparable to lobotomies (a common right-wing trope), and that gender dysphoria is something that is being created and not “a natural thing.”

Shellenberger stated that he wants to end access to all gender-affirming surgeries and that he wants to use the report to target those “who are running for president, who are governors of major liberal states, because the conservatives, the Republican states, are just sort of — it’s happening,” seemingly referring to the sort of gender-affirming care bans in place in many conservative states.

At the conference, Shellenberger also introduced the tool with which he hoped to accomplish these goals: the WPATH Files. He described the “obstacle” to which he alluded at the start of his talk, namely that WPATH’s credibility as a professional association replete with a peer-reviewed journal and scientific literature gave it enough authority for major medical organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to follow its guidelines on supporting gender-affirming care. 

“When WPATH ends,” Shellenberger said, “the basis for these medical mistreatments must come to an end as well.”

 Shellenberger said he wants to use his report to earn coverage in news outlets “that think that everybody in this room [at the Genspect conference] is a transphobe,” which he said he hopes will help bring about the end of WPATH and access to gender-affirming care broadly, including by convincing Democrats that gender-affirming care is unscientific — an assertion that goes against a wealth of actual research. 

The nation’s largest TV station owner gave the activists behind the report an uncritical platform to push misinformation

Shellenberger’s strategy of targeting outlets outside the far-right appeared to gain some traction, first with NewsNation, which ran an “exclusive” on the report. 

NewsNation is the cable network for Nexstar, the largest owner of TV stations in the U.S., covering 68% of households. Launched in 2021, NewsNation billed itself as a supposedly centrist alternative to other cable networks, with Nexstar describing it as “the destination for fact-based, unbiased news.”

Prior to publishing the report on X, Shellenberger gave an interview to NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports.

During his interview, Shellenberger shifted from calling for an end to all gender-affirming care for trans youth to asserting that “the people that are getting these treatments must understand what’s happening to them,” claiming that “the files show very clearly that that’s not what’s happening.”

The show also interviewed Mia Hughes, describing her simply as the “author of the report” but failing to disclose her long track record as an anti-trans writer and activist. Hughes characterized gender-affirming care as causing sterility, a piece of misinformation often repeated by anti-trans campaigners. 

The outlet also interviewed Julia Mason, a pediatrician who belongs to the fringe Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Mason’s group is working to pass anti-trans legislation and its flawed research has been used to justify Texas’ order declaring gender-affirming care child abuse, but the network’s correspondent identified her simply as a “pediatrician in Oregon who has been sounding the alarm on medical transition of minors for years.”

Along with failing to disclose its guests’ background, NewsNation provided no pushback to the claims made in the report or by its authors. The only voice of dissent was a short quote from WPATH President Marci Bowers read by the correspondent at the end of the segment. 

This is not the first time Elizabeth Vargas Reports has jumped on shaky claims from biased sources to target trans rights. The show aired similarly uncritical coverage of contested claims about gender-affirming care that were made against a St. Louis hospital last year. 

As the report gained traction in other outlets outside the right, coverage failed to provide context or pushback to the Shellenberger’s report

Sinclair, the nation’s fourth largest TV network conglomerate, published an article uncritically quoting the report (with one quote from WPATH) and interviewing Shellenberger through its own program, The National Desk. Sinclair also used its immense roster of local news outlets to distribute the article to websites for local news stations, including affiliates of ABC, CBS, and NBC.  

The article ends by focusing on changes WPATH made to its standards of care two years ago, which were widely mischaracterized by right-wing media to attack the organization. 

Newsweek also reported on the report, publishing an article titled “Transgender Hormone Drugs Linked to Cancer” — a headline so misleading it prompted condemnation from the National LGBT Cancer Network.

Additionally, Megan McArdle, a columnist for The Washington Post who previously used a biased anti-trans source to call for compromise between the rights of trans youth and the extremists targeting them, dedicated her March 8 column to Shellenberger’s report. 

Following coverage of the report, WPATH’s website was the victim of a ransomware attack, and Shellenberger took the opportunity to announce “victory” and claim the organization had removed the latest standards of care from its website, suggesting his report was responsible. He removed his triumphant posts after his claims were shown to be false.