A sham medical group put out an anti-trans statement. Conservatives took the bait.

The American College of Pediatricians is an ideological hate group, not a science-based professional organization

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Late last week, dozens of members of the American College of Pediatricians issued a statement urging health care professionals to stop offering gender-affirming care to minors.

It came by way of a statement called the “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration,” complete with a hastily put together website and a “press conference” featuring A Lady Wearing a Lab Coat.

If the goal was to get attention, it worked. That video was shared by pretty much every anti-trans propagandist on the right, including Elon Musk. The Catholic News Agency hyped the statement as well.

It was also shared by reactionary/gullible “skeptics” like Michael Shermer.

There’s just one problem.

This isn’t a legitimate organization representing the field of pediatrics. It’s a group akin to the one mom who runs “One Million Moms.” They require prospective members to accept a certain set of ideologies. The group promotes abstinence-only sex education, opposes same-sex marriage, rejects vaccine mandates, links homosexuality with pedophilia, supports gay conversion “therapy,” and claims transgender identities are a mental illness. The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled them a hate group—and has the receipts to back up that claims.

According to leaked documents obtained by WIRED last year, the ACP had just over 700 members in 2022.

If you’re looking for the organization that represents what the top pediatricians in the country have to say, you’d want to check out the American Academy of Pediatrics. That’s the organization with 67,000 members that’s generally respected by scientists everywhere.

The ACP decided about two decades ago to mimic the name, website, and mission of the AAP in order to trick people into accepting their recommendations on everything from abortion policy to LGBTQ issues. Or, at the very least, they were hoping to piggyback on the credibility of the AAP by using the group’s influence to get themselves mentioned in media outlets every time there’s a child health controversy. All they need is some ignorant journalist who’s hoping to sound objective by getting “both sides” on the record… even when there aren’t two scientifically valid sides to the issue.

And because the ACP looks the part and has a logo and everything, idiots everywhere have fallen for the trick. (It’s telling that their annual report measures success by how many social media hits they get and not, say, how many children they help.)

Don’t let the doctor’s coat fool you into thinking this person’s beliefs are worth taking seriously.

All of that’s to say: No one should be paying any attention to what a conservative hate-group that cares only about ideology, not science, says about transgender people.

As for gender-affirming care, you should know it’s supported by people who actually know what they’re talking about because the science—and the outcomes—back them up. Here’s Scientific American in 2022:

The truth is that data from more than a dozen studies of more than 30,000 transgender and gender-diverse young people consistently show that access to gender-affirming care is associated with better mental health outcomes—and that lack of access to such care is associated with higher rates of suicidality, depression and self-harming behavior…

Major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, have published policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care. All of those medical societies find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.

There are differences of opinion when it comes to which care is appropriate at which age, but those decisions should ultimately be between doctors and patients, not conservatives who never accept trans identities or who think children can’t possibly know if they’re LGBTQ. Just as you’d never ask a Catholic priest for sex advice, you should never ask members of the American College of Pediatricians how they’d help LGBTQ people. Why waste your time when they’re ignorant about the subject?

Incidentally, Robby Starbuck, the person whose tweet about the ACP’s statement went viral, has a reason for spreading this misinformation. He’s an anti-trans activist who’s promoting his own anti-trans movie in which he lied to participants to secure their involvement, then edited their statements in deceptive ways.

You would think that’d raise some red flags with the founder of Skeptic magazine, but Shermer stopped caring about reason a long while ago.

(Portions of this article were publisher earlier)

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