Well, if this turns out to be real it will be an earthquake in the cultural and medical landscape in the United States. 

WPATH's Board of Directors apparently met last night--no results of that meeting have yet to be released--and their website was taken down and replaced with one from 2019

The latest "Standards of Care," which promoted child gender transitions, has been taken down and replaced with the previous version, and references to the current president of the organization Marci Bowers have disappeared.

This appears to be in response to the dramatic revelations in what has been dubbed "The WPATH Files" released by Michael Shellenberger, in which the hollowness of the claims made by "gender-affirming care" professionals was definitively proven. 

I wrote about the WPATH Files when they were released, and the most striking thing about them was not the admissions that WPATH promotes quack medicine, but rather that doctors freely admitted that their patients had no idea what they were getting into. This is a grotesque violation of both law and medical ethics, and it is likely that WPATH is in a legal pickle. 

It is possible that Shellenberger is jumping the gun a bit since this could be a website glitch and not a desperate attempt to respond to a brewing scandal. Only time will tell, but it would hardly be surprising to see WPATH backtrack under legal pressure that surely is mounting. Lawsuits are already being filed, and the open admissions of malpractice can't be something WPATH can afford to embrace. 

2/ You shouldn't just casually toss out the theory that Bowers has been removed when the screenshots clearly show a reversion to an earlier version of the site, from before she took over. I don't understand the downside of finding out before tweeting speculation. pic.twitter.com/KUclr09hvu

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 19, 2024

4/ Different person, not a member but very well-connected: “WPATH has had huge internal controversies over the years, but now seems to be embroiled in unprecedented disruption.”

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) March 19, 2024

It's not clear that WPATH can afford to backtrack. Its recommendations form the "scientific" foundation for gender care in the US and Canada and in much of the world until, over the past year, European countries, including The Netherlands, which invented gender care, turned their back on the practice as dangerous quackery. 

There are now more than a hundred gender clinics in the United States, and it is a multi-billion dollar business. Schools and the MSM have embraced WPATH's recommendations as the gold standard of care, spent enormous efforts landing its critics, and doing a 180 will be devastating to these advocates. 

This, as much as anything else, fuels my skepticism about this news. Until WPATH itself releases a statement we should withhold judgment. 

Chances are that it will take years to reverse the current trends, and the resistance to doing so will be intense. It will take a total collapse of WPATH, not just a backtrack, for us to make enough progress to satisfy me. 

Until we know more, this is all speculation. Shellenberger may be taking a victory lap too early, but we can hope.