EXCLUSIVE: Republicans Demand WHO Chief ‘Disband’ Activist Panel On Transgenderism

A coalition of congressional Republicans urged the World Health Organization on Monday to “disband” the group it put in charge of developing guidelines on transgenderism, according to a letter first shared with The Daily Wire.

Led by doctors Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), the lawmakers sent a letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus demanding that he dissolve the organization’s Guideline Development Group (GDG) on transgenderism because of its ties to leftist activist groups. The lawmakers say that the group has bypassed and ignored scientific evidence showing the harms of transgender procedures in favor of ideology.

“Any guidelines that affect the health and well-being of individuals must be rooted in rigorous scientific evidence and must be free from conflicts of interest,” McCormick told The Daily Wire. “We cannot allow the voices of powerful activists to dictate medical practices that should prioritize patient safety and health outcomes.”

The guidelines group was announced in December 2023 with the purpose of developing a framework “on the health of trans and gender diverse people” and promoting “health policies that support gender-inclusive care, and legal recognition of self-determined gender identity.”

In addition to Marshall and McCormick, the letter was signed by 27 House Republicans. Marshall told The Daily Wire that the group was another example of why the United States should cut ties with WHO. 

“The World Health Organization has abandoned its mission to cater to radical globalist activists; it is past time to stop its funding and cut our losses,”the Republican senator said. “The WHO’s ‘gender identity’ cult and its embrace of irreversible mutilation surgeries and psychologically harmful chemical therapies are just one of the many reasons the U.S. needs to walk away from this globalist organization.”

The letter says that the process surrounding the guidelines has “been shrouded in secrecy, irregularities, and profound conflicts of interest.”

“Incomprehensibly, the Group bypasses evidence reviews on the safety, effectiveness, risks and costs of treating gender dysphoria with medical interventions, including cross-sex drugs,” the letter says. “Instead, it moves directly to consider how countries should provide such interventions and impose the highly controversial, sex-denying framework of ‘gender identity,’ including through legal ‘self-identification.’”

Specifically, the lawmakers take issue with the fact that multiple of the members of the guidance group are members of the far-Left World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare (WPATH), an organization that removed age limit restrictions for its guidelines for transgender procedures at the behest of the Biden administration.

The letter noted that Walter Bouman and Gail Knudson, members of the WHO guidance group and WPATH, signed onto a letter to pressure researchers not to publish results that would “negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense.”

The letter said that other members of the GDG have been part of a group called Global Action for Trans Equality, a group that promotes transgender procedures.

“GATE exists to promote, not assess gender transition interventions. It cannot possibly serve as an unbiased participant,” the Republicans wrote.

The lawmakers said that the GDG’s group so far looked more like “a global marketing campaign rather than an honest assessment of the medical evidence.”

“The proposed GDG guidelines mirror the fraudulent WPATH process: like WPATH, the GDG has opted not to review the evidence to determine whether hormones should be widely available. Instead, it will only focus on how to best promote their wide availability,” the lawmakers wrote.

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The Republicans said that WHO policies that allow sex to be determined by “self-identification” pose a risk to women and children.

“Policies that treat sex as a matter of ‘self-identification’ endanger women and children,” the letter says. “Most Americans recognize this fact, and strongly oppose ‘self-identified’ biological males accessing private spaces and competitions reserved for females.”

The letter says that the whole group should be scrapped, and any future guidelines grounded in a careful review of scientific evidence.

“This vulnerable population deserves evidence-based care, not a shameless promotion of medical experiments tainted by ideology and industry interests,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge you to disband this Guideline Development Group, investigate the disreputable process that led to its formation, and discard its proposed guidelines.”

WHO has long come under fire and been accused of politically motivated action from its handling of COVID and close ties to China.