Published August 28, 2024
On August 28 and 29, 2024, EPPC scholars Eric Kniffin and Mary Hasson filed amicus briefs in Crouch v. Anderson and Folwell v. Kadel, urging the Supreme Court to reverse the Fourth Circuit’s en banc holding that West Virginia and North Carolina’s insurance exclusion of “gender transition” procedures violated the Equal Protection Clause and that West Virginia’s exclusion also violated the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) anti-discrimination provision. Its ruling relied, in part, on the belief that a medical consensus exists regarding treatment for gender dysphoria—and that this consensus is reflected in World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines.
The brief, based on the work of EPPC’s Mary R. Hasson, Director of the Person & Identity Project, argues that no medical consensus exists regarding the medical or surgical interventions for gender dysphoria. Compelling evidence exposes the WPATH guidelines as neither evidence-based nor reliable, reflecting instead a politicized agenda.
As summarized in the brief:
[T]here is not, and has never been, a national or international medical consensus regarding treatment for gender dysphoria. The 2024 Cass Review, a groundbreaking, four-year study commissioned by the U.K.’s National Health Service, exposes the “remarkably weak” evidence base underlying gender transition procedures and highlights “serious questions about the reliability of current guidelines.”
Respondents’ claims of medical consensus also cannot be reconciled with marked swings in medical practice over the past decade in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, England, and Scotland, or with the growing debate over gender dysphoria treatments among medical authorities in Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The tumultuous state of gender medicine internationally reflects mounting evidence and well-grounded concerns that gender transition interventions cause significant harm and do not constitute evidence-based medicine.
Finally … recent developments … expose WPATH as an ideological organization with no claim to represent medical consensus. The WPATH Files disclose admissions by WPATH leaders of scientific and ethical breaches, poor outcomes, deficiencies in informed consent, and inadequate treatment of pre-existing psychological conditions before gender transition. Damning expert reports from a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on gender transition procedures expose WPATH’s ideological, unscientific agenda.
For these reasons, Amicus urges this Court to grant the petition[s] and reverse the court below.
Full versions of the briefs can be found at the following links: Crouch v. Anderson and Folwell v. Kadel.
Eric Kniffin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he works on a range of initiatives to protect and strengthen religious liberty as part of EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project.
