Leaked WPATH files say children cannot comprehend lifelong consequences
Tom Swarbrick said:
“children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of gender affirming care.”
The concern about whether children can give meaningful informed consent to treatments with long-term effects is a genuine and widely shared one. Presenting it as an internal admission from within WPATH itself makes it seem like even proponents privately doubt the ethics of the practice.
What WPATH SOC8 actually contains is a detailed, carefully constructed informed consent framework, because the organisation takes the complexity of consent seriously rather than dismissing it. A line pulled from an internal discussion thread is not a clinical position: it is what professional debate looks like from the inside, the kind of working conversation that happens in every field of medicine before guidance is finalised and published. The genuine question about how young people, parents, and clinicians navigate decisions together is addressed directly in that guidance, not avoided. When this kind of selective quotation circulates as an admission of wrongdoing, the people who pay for it are trans young people and their families, who are left believing that the professionals caring for them think their own treatment is unethical.
What I said at the time:
“I'm not going to talk to you about leaked files. I'm only going to talk to you about reliable sources.”
Trans young people and their families, who are told that the professional body overseeing their care privately believes their treatment is unethical, when in fact the quote reflects ongoing internal discussion rather than a settled view.