The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) annual convention is an opportunity for pediatricians to network, exchange ideas and learn. Unfortunately, when it comes to youth gender medicine, misinformation was on the 2024 conference agenda. As a keynote speaker, the AAP chose U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender official in the Biden administration .
Levine’s invitation should cause concern to American families who want to know that the nation’s largest pediatrician group values evidence-based medicine. Levine has supported a misinformation campaign that has turned the U.S. into an international outlier in the use of the “gender-affirming” model of care, which recommends hormones and surgeries rather than psychotherapy as the first-line treatment for adolescent distress around puberty.
Emails recently unsealed in a lawsuit revealed that in 2022, Levine pressured the World Association for Transgender Health to remove age minimums for ...
