As public knowledge of this scandal grows, lawyers will try to go further and further upstream in the referral pipeline to hold providers accountable. In the U.S. legal system, courts play a leading role in crafting standards of medical liability; given their independence, American judges are known to offer novel and creative interpretations of the law. It is only a matter of time before judges become skeptical of pediatricians who referred vulnerable teenagers to facilities that they knew or should have known were unsafe.

It is not news that the AAP has endorsed novel theories about sex and gender in defiance of empirical evidence. What is increasingly clear, and what was confirmed at the conference last weekend, is that the AAP is too shortsighted to protect even the interests of its own members. By deceiving them about the science of gender medicine and infantilizing them with unicorn-themed propaganda, the AAP is not only undermining the public’s trust in its authority as a scientific organization. It is also creating legal risk for pediatricians who, perhaps in good faith, rely on its guidance.

[That’s why one detransitioner has named the AAP in her lawsuit over her pediatric sex-change therapies. This is the only way to hold these quacks accountable for the damage they’re doing in order to score some cheap virtue-signaling points in the progressive media. When insurers start writing big malpractice checks over this unfounded “therapy,” they’ll cut the AAP and its members loose — and then the plaintiffs will start coming after the providers directly. In the process, they’ll expose this as a scam that only benefits the providers, especially in the pediatric community. — Ed]