Trump's Federal Trade Commission Sues The Nation's Leading Transgender Doctors For False Advertising, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Agency Built To Police Scam Ads Could Still Not Decide Which Patients Are Real

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Federal Trade Commission, the federal body chartered to protect American consumers from deceptive advertising and anticompetitive mergers, announced this week that it had identified a more urgent form of consumer harm: the existence of medical guidelines for transgender patients.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Texas and joined by the attorneys general of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, the agency accused the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the group that has written the international standards of care for gender medicine for four decades, of making deceptive claims about the benefits and risks of treatment for minors. The association, the commission alleged, had misled consumers into believing its guidelines were "based on strong evidence derived from scientific methods," the sort of representation the FTC has historically reserved for weight-loss teas and timeshare seminars.

Officials described the action as a natural extension of the commission's mandate. An agency built to police mattress labels and rigged sweepstakes, sources within the administration noted, is uniquely positioned to determine which courses of treatment a physician may recommend, and which patients are permitted to seek them.

The lawsuit is one piece of a broader administration campaign to end gender-affirming care for minors, an effort that has proceeded through executive order, funding threats, and now the novel theory that a standard of care is a form of false advertising. The association, for its part, declined to concede the point. "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is not a medical provider and has no place interfering with the process of individualized medical decision-making," the group said in a statement, apparently unaware that the place of the Federal Trade Commission is now wherever the President would like it to be.

Legal observers noted that the consumer-protection statute under which the suit was brought has typically been used to recover money for people who were tricked into buying something they did not want. In this case, the consumers the government has volunteered to protect are minors who, under the administration's preferred outcome, will be protected from receiving the treatment at all.

At press time, the commission had opened a follow-up inquiry into whether the nation's pediatricians were also engaged in deceptive practices by continuing to acknowledge that transgender patients exist.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who advances his pledge to end gender-affirming care for minors without waiting for a new statute or a court victory, and who converts an independent consumer-protection agency into an instrument of the culture war.
§The administration's anti-'gender ideology' branding, which recasts a federal lawsuit against doctors as the protection of children.
§FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and the commission's leadership, who expanded the agency's reach from the truthfulness of advertising into the content of medical practice itself.
§The attorneys general of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, who secured a federal partner and a friendly Texas venue for a long-sought attack on transgender medicine.
§The anti-trans legal movement and the activists who supplied the 'deceptive claims' theory, now carrying the endorsement of the United States government.
§Opponents of gender-affirming care nationwide, who gain a precedent that a profession's clinical guidelines can be relitigated as false advertising.
§Future administrations, inheriting the precedent that the FTC may be aimed at any medical body whose recommendations a president happens to dislike.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment