By Joshua Arnold

A breakout session at a recent medical conference suggests that professional associations remain captured by the transgender ideology, even as the rest of the country reverses course. During the annual conference of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), October 5-8, a session titled “Gender Affirming Puberty Suppression: Initiation and Management” instructed attendees to gratify a 12-year-old’s desires over and against the counsel of both his parents and the mass of emerging medical evidence.

The AAFP likely expected the materials from their conference to remain private, as they charge a hefty $1,195 to view the sessions online (AAFP members pay a discounted rate of $995). But “truth will out,” and one conference attendee shared the sordid details with National Review, which broke the story.

The session, led by two LGBT-identifying doctors based in Minnesota, endorsed what its adherents call a “gender-affirming care” model, as opposed to a watchful waiting, which prefers talk therapy to excessive medical intervention. What proponents call “gender affirmation” is really a tolerance for gender confusion, choosing to affirm feelings that contradict a person’s biological sex instead of affirming the person in his or her unalterable sex. “There’s no one right story or one right way to have a gender,” their presentation argued.

The presentation sought to personalize this abstract nonsense with a story about a 12-year-old boy who questioned his gender and wanted “hips and boobs.” The presentation urged a “patient-first” philosophy, which in practice meant that doctors should listen to a budding adolescent over the wishes and insight of his or her parents.

The discussion simply brushed aside the matter of the minor’s tender age, arguing that minors as young as nine can “participate meaningfully in personal health care decision-making.” If by that they mean that nine-year-olds should be compelled to eat their broccoli, then it’s hard to disagree.

The presentation also brushed aside the mounting body of evidence showing the medical dangers of puberty blockers. It made no mention of the side effects: weight gain, metabolic issues, cardiovascular issues, brain tumors, decreased bone density, and loss of fertility, just to name a few. The only mention of the fertility concerns came in the context of recommending that doctors not discuss fertility concerns with parents, according to National Review.

Nor did it mention the ongoing global retreat from puberty blockers. Last year, comprehensive reviews led the British health system to conclude there was “not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria or incongruence, which is why the NHS decided that they would no longer be routinely offered to children and young people,” said NHS Medical Director for Specialised Services James Palmer.

Additionally, the presentation brushed aside the fact that youth with gender dysphoria often have other serious mental health issues, which often go unaddressed when minors are placed on a regimen of hormone treatments. The presentation told attendees that “active mental health symptoms, disordered eating/body dysmorphia, and differences of development are NOT contraindications to puberty suppression.”

The presentation received sharp criticism from Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director for Do No Harm. “Not only did the AAFPs ‘Gender Affirming Puberty Suppression’ lecture wrongfully encourage physicians to push aggressive sex change interventions like puberty blockers on confused children, but it cited studies riddled with methodological limitations, rejecting good, sound science,” he declared. “Children struggling with gender dysphoria deserve high-quality, evidence-based care, not to be victims of a political ideology enforced by radical activists. The annual meeting offered yet another sign that political agendas are being woven into medicine — a trend that must end.”

Sadly, the AAFP, which boasts approximately 128,300 members, is no stranger to injecting political agendas into its practice of medicine.

For a member price of $345, the association offers a Continuing Medical Education (CME) course in “LGBTQ+ Health: Pride in Care,” which counts toward the CME credits members must earn every three years. One of the 16 sessions in the course is titled, “Impacting LGBTQ+ Patients Through Legislative Advocacy,” which sounds more like training for political activism than family medicine.

The AAFP has also waded directly into gender transition policy debates with a policy statement (dated both 2020 and 2024) declaring that “the full spectrum of gender-affirming care should be legal and should remain a treatment decision between a physician and their patient.”

The justification for this stance was more philosophical than medical. “The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) recognizes that diversity in gender identity and expression is a normal part of the human existence and does not represent pathology,” the organization declared. “The AAFP supports gender-affirming care as an evidence-informed intervention that can promote health equity for gender-diverse individuals, although wider sociopolitical efforts are necessary to further mitigate these barriers and advance equity.”

After the Supreme Court this summer upheld Tennessee’s law protecting minors from the harmful effects of gender transition procedures, the AAFP felt compelled to express alarm at the “growing state and federal interference in the patient-physician relationship” and to condemn “policies that impede evidence-based care and criminalize physicians.”

In fact, the AAFP seems poised to maintain this defiant posture into the future. After its annual conference in October, the association announced Nashville as the location of its 2026 conference. This could be a coincidence, but it could also be the organization’s way of taking their transgender fight to the center of the state movement to protect kids. While American states and foreign nations move away from gender transition procedures for minors, the American Academy of Family Physicians seems determined to double down.

Their determination leaves only one question unanswered — perhaps the most important one — what does gender transitioning minors have to do with the practice of family medicine?

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.