EXCLUSIVE: Federal Trade Commission Sets Sights On Transgender Procedures On Kids

WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission is setting its sights on the industry pushing transgender medical procedures on minors, documents obtained by The Daily Wire show, a potential major step in the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on radical gender ideology.

The FTC, an tasked with protecting American consumers, will hold a day-long workshop in July on transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, according to an internal memo obtained by The Daily Wire. That’s a likely indicator of the agency’s intentions: the FTC often holds such events before initiating legal action against an industry to gain information, gather evidence, and solicit the input of affected Americans.

“Under the Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC is provided broad authority to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade acts and practices,” the memo reads. “There is now considerable reason to believe that the doctors and medical providers pushing [gender-affirming care] on minors are knowingly deceiving parents by exaggerating [gender-affirming care’s] ‘benefits’ and downplaying its harmful side effects.”

The Trump-appointed chairman of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, reportedly pitched the president on using the agency to fight “against the trans agenda” before he was selected for the post, according to a document obtained by Punchbowl News in December.

Ferguson believed the FTC could “investigate the doctors, therapists, hospitals, and others who deceptively pushed gender confusion, puberty blockers, hormone replacement, and sex-change surgeries on children and adults while failing to disclose strong evidence that such interventions are not helpful and carry enormous risks,” Punchbowl reported.

The FTC declined to comment for this story. But the leadership, contents, and guests of the proposed workshop — “The Big Lie: The Dangers of Gender-Affirming Care for Minors” — strongly indicate that the commission plans to make good on those promises.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The memo obtained by The Daily Wire was authored by FTC senior policy advisor Jon Schweppe, the former policy director for the American Principles Project, which has aggressively fought against transgender ideology. The group has had a strong influence on MAGA culture war messaging. In one instance, APP’s leader, Terry Schilling, hand-delivered polling to Trump showing how strongly Americans would back a candidate who took a stand against gender ideology.

The purpose of the workshop, according to the memo, is to build on President Trump’s executive order ending the federal government’s support for so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors. The memo notes that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals recently called transgender procedures “in truth still experimental.”

While transgender advocates claim that performing transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blocker procedures on children will cause them to be less suicidal, the FTC memo notes that “a growing chorus of experts now publicly contradict these claims.”

“There are no longitudinal studies on the effectiveness of [gender-affirming care] on minors,” the memo states. “While several politicized medical organizations that promote [gender-affirming care] for minors as the best standard of medical care might claim a ‘consensus,’ there is in truth no widespread medical consensus as to whether [gender-affirming care] is the correct course of action for gender dysphoric youth.”

Significantly, the memo notes that “while there remains a debate over the ‘benefits’ of [gender-affirming care] for minors, the science is settled when it comes to the harms.” The document cites the “debilitating” side effects that come with giving minors puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, including infertility, developmental harm, sexual dysfunction, inability to achieve orgasm, blood clots, osteoporosis, and more.

These risks are typically downplayed by activists, but are also “widely acknowledged as medical fact,” the FTC memo states.

The proposed guest list for the conference includes a number of higher profile doctors and experts in the gender field, such as Dr. Miriam Grossman, who has written a number of books on the topic, and Dr. Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation. Another proposed guest is Erin Friday, an attorney who co-leads “Our Duty USA” and has filed multiple lawsuits and amicus briefs on the issue following her own experience helping her daughter navigate gender dysphoria.

Chloe Cole (Katie Bernard/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Other proposed guests include individuals have spoken out about their experience undergoing devastating transgender procedures, like Chloe Cole, and a number of whistleblowers who sought to expose child gender transition practices in Missouri and Texas — and were subsequently targeted by the Biden justice department for their efforts.