Eight days into his second go-round as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order fulfilled one of Trump’s most popular campaign promises; it states that the government will no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.” It specifically condemns the “junk science” promulgated by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
The order was not only a rebuke to WPATH and its fellow radical gender ideologists but to an American medical establishment that has embraced their recommendations—recommendations that have, as Abigail Shrier and others have shown, permanently damaged countless children. One of the most disgraceful players here is the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), an organization that boasts of its mission “to attain optimal physical, mental, and social health and well-being for all infants, children, adolescents and young adults”—and yet worked directly with Biden Health and Human Services assistant secretary Rachel Levine, a biological man who lives as a trans woman, to pressure WPATH to ignore research that recommended a minimum age for children seeking gender surgeries and hormone treatments.
In a scathing opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal published in 2022, pediatrician Julia Mason and Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir described in detail just how thorough the “capture of institutions such as the AAP” and its magazine Pediatrics has been with regard to gender ideology. The AAP “ignored the evidence that has led Sweden, Finland, and most recently the U.K. to place severe restrictions on medical transition for minors.” It also successfully silenced critics and “stifled debate on how best to treat youth in distress over their bodies, shut down efforts by critics to present better scientific approaches at conferences, used technicalities to suppress resolutions to bring it into line with better-informed European countries, and put its thumb on the scale at Pediatrics in favor of a shoddy but politically correct research agenda.”
Dr. Hilary Cass of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in the UK, whose review on abuses in gender transitioning of children prompted the closure of the UK’s largest transition center and an end to the use of puberty blockers, agreed. The AAP is “holding on to a position that is now demonstrated to be out of date by multiple systematic reviews,” she told the New York Times.
The AAP’s harmful approach to gender dysphoria in children is of a piece with the organization’s factually dubious campaigns over the past several decades. A nonprofit association with approximately 70,000 members, the AAP was founded in the U.S. in 1930, when pediatricians “were branching out to establish themselves as ‘family advisers,’” as Ann Hulbert described in her history of child-rearing advice, Raising America. “The doctor was no longer just the ‘healer of disease,’ but the ‘counselor of health.’”
Since then, the AAP has positioned itself as a kind of GPS device for parents: pointing anxious new mothers and fathers in the right direction when they have questions about children’s health and offering guidelines and best practices on a range of issues related to child well-being. The organization has drawn on the credentials of its membership to exert cultural power; in turn, parents and policymakers were reassured, assuming that an organization of pediatricians had done the hard work of studying the research and reaching consensus on what was best for America’s children.
That trust was misplaced. Since the 2000s, the AAP has repeatedly made significant mistakes in its health recommendations while also becoming more politicized and left-leaning in its approach to social issues. Overconfident recommendations about how to avoid peanut allergies and the dangers of screen time for very young children had to be retracted or significantly revised when it became clear the AAP had gotten ahead of the scientific consensus on such matters.
At the same time, the organization began uncritically embracing political positions popular on the left, calling for “the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use,” for example, and going all-in on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The AAP’s “sample language for office forms,” for example, lists nine possible gender identities, eight possible sexual orientations, and asks, “What sex were you assigned at birth?” The guidance insists that pediatricians announce their pronouns to patients and ask about children’s gender identity during every visit, while also “degenderizing” their own language by using phrases such as “as a person who has a uterus” rather than “as a woman.” The AAP also supports policies that allow biological males to play on female sports teams, and its recommendations have been cited in lawsuits brought by trans activists against states that have banned boys in girls’ sports.
The “counselor of health” pediatrician of days past has become a full-fledged activist. Benjamin D. Hoffman, the immediate past president of the AAP, told pediatricians at the organization’s annual conference last year that “advocacy is our superpower,” citing the Academy’s “Equity Agenda.” It is committed to “dismantling the structures that lead to inequity and oppression of marginalized and minoritized communities.” In praising the organization’s advocacy, however, Hoffman claimed to be above politics: “As an Academy, our policies begin and end with the resolute dependence on science, and that is our shield,” he said, adding, “We have been besieged by the deliberate undermining of that science by politics based in fear and intolerance and the impact of politicians trying to insert themselves between us and our patients.”
How utterly Orwellian. For it is the AAP that is guilty of allowing politics to supersede scientific fact; this was clear in its handling of school closures and masking during the Covid pandemic. The AAP initially strongly supported a return of students to in-person schooling for the fall of 2020, but when Trump voiced his own support for the same thing and cited the AAP’s recommendations, the organization reversed itself. Two weeks later, it issued a second statement, now co-signed by the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, that said reopening “safely” would require the government to spend more money, “Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics,” it declared. This was despite the fact that all evidence at the time pointed to the safety of children returning to in-person school.
Going against the recommendations of every other international health organization, the AAP declared (without evidence) that children as young as two should wear masks. An August 2021 tweet from the AAP’s Twitter account shows just how cavalier the organization was about this: “Real talk: Being around adults wearing masks doesn’t delay babies’ speech or language development.” Real Talk: It did and it does, and all elementary logic suggested it.
The organization is so committed to its partisan advocacy that it’s gone global: In early January 2025, the current president of the AAP, Dr. Susan Kressly, sent a letter to then–Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding to know “the whereabouts and wellbeing of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya,” a Gaza pediatrician who had been taken into custody by the Israeli army. Kressley noted that the AAP was joining other groups in calling for the “immediate release” of Safiya.
Kressley did not ask Blinken about the Israeli children still being held hostage by Hamas, such as Ariel and Kfir Bibas, or demand the release of the remaining hostages. And the Anti-Defamation League noted, “According to Israeli authorities and other sources, Dr. Abu Safiya is a member of Hamas, the terrorist group behind the October 7th massacre and who is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, reportedly holding the rank of colonel. The AAP’s failure to acknowledge this vital detail is a serious omission, and does a disservice to AAP’s mission and values, fundamentally compromising the integrity of the Academy.”
Having for so long indulged in partisan political posturing and having shown itself willing to ignore scientific fact in the service of ideology, the American Academy of Pediatrics has no integrity left to compromise.
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
