WPATH experts have skin in the game so lack authority
Andrew Neil said:
“WPATH is basically people who have skin in the game. They are people who are active in this.”
The idea that practitioners who treat a condition have a financial or ideological stake in its continued treatment is a recognisable conflict-of-interest argument. It sounds like a reasonable check on expert authority.
The argument that clinical experience creates disqualifying bias would empty every specialist guideline in medicine: oncologists set cancer protocols, cardiologists set heart disease protocols, and the people treating a condition are precisely the ones who have seen what helps and what does not. WPATH's standards are developed by clinicians who have spent careers in consultation rooms with trans people, which is not a conflict of interest, it is the source of the expertise. A guideline written by people with no experience of the condition it covers is not more objective, it is simply less informed. Dismissing the most qualified voices in a field as too close to the work is a way of making good evidence sound like a vested interest, and trans people seeking care are the ones left without the standard-setting those experts exist to provide.
What I said at the time:
“I think that the fact that they have skin in the game is absolutely essential. They are treating patients every single day in their clinics, in their everyday work.”
Trans people seeking care are harmed when the expertise of the clinicians most qualified to treat them is systematically dismissed as bias.