Radical trans activist quietly removed from WHO’s new transgender health panel – after calling for children to be given puberty blockers urgently
The World Health Organization has quietly suspended a transgender activist with extreme views on the treatment of children from its transgender health policy panel.
DailyMail.com reported last week that Florence Ashley was part of the 21-member WHO committee tasked with drawing up international treatment guidelines for treating gender dysphoria.
After the selection, it emerged that the Canadian – who has no medical background – had published several articles calling for trans children to be given puberty blockers without a mental health evaluation.
The committee members were announced on January 3, but a revision to the list published on Monday no longer listed Ashley as a panelist.
Florence Ashley, a law professor in Canada, believes puberty blockers “should be treated as the default option” for children with gender dysphoria.
The WHO’s official position is that Ashley planned for conflict that prevented them from participating. It came just a few days after DailyMail.com reported on their views on allowing menopausal medicine for children
The WHO said the exclusion was due to “a conflict in the schedules.” Despite announcing just a few weeks ago that Ashely would be included on the panel, the latest version of the biographies list stated that Ashely had “notified WHO in 2023 that they would not be able to participate.”
Ashley – whose pronouns are they/them/that b***h – is a Canadian law professor TRUE? WHICH UNI? who specializes in transgender rights.
They co-authored a study on this said Puberty blockers and hormone therapies “should be treated as the default option” for children with gender dysphoria.
They have also said that social transition, such as calling a child by the pronouns he prefers, and puberty blockers “should be made easily available to anyone who wants them.” Together we must recognize that research can best be advanced not by delaying transition, but through transition.’
They have a significant TikTok following, where they express tough stances on trans issues, calling for the scrapping of mental health checks for trans children before they are given puberty blockers and hormone medications.
Ashley recently said on TikTok while discussing an academic paper they co-authored on this topic: “Is there a reason to ask people to undergo a lengthy and complex gender assessment to access gender-affirming care, or is that pointless and should that happen? the time best spent supporting decision-making.
“And what our paper concludes is that there’s really no evidence that gender assessments work… it’s just a longer process for no real reason.”
They added: “Gender assessments are actually an unnecessary form of gatekeeping that trans communities have been resisting for some time.”
Nearly two-thirds of the panelists are human rights lawyers, activists and policy advisors, while just over a third of them are trained doctors
Insurance claims for puberty blockers in the US have doubled since 2017
Ashley did not publicly acknowledge the updated list of WHO panelists or their reason for dropping out, but said on X, “Tough time to be a troll.”
The move was celebrated with some celebration online.
Leor Sapir, a political researcher at the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute, said: “This is a good first step; The WHO probably wanted to omit a figure that could cause embarrassment.
“You get the sense that this was a symbolic sacrifice at best.”
But the composition of twenty other panel members has drawn ire even at the United Nations.
Reem Alsalem, a Jordanian human rights lawyer at the UN, criticized the WHO for including more activists than medical experts.
She said: “Stakeholders whose views differ from those of transgender activist organizations do not appear to have been invited.
‘These stakeholders include experts from European public health authorities who have led the way in developing an evidence-based and therefore cautious approach to gender transitions in young people (e.g. England, Sweden and Finland)’
Eleven members have no medical background, but are a mix of activists, social justice advocates, human rights lawyers, STD researchers and policy advisors.
Seven are trans themselves, ten have a medical background and eight of them are doctors.
The panel also includes members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting medical treatments for gender dysphoria, which has been accused of being too pro-medication.
WHO’s goal with this group is to establish global guidelines for the ways in which health professionals around the world can increase access and use of quality and respectful health care services by trans and gender diverse people.
The WHO also said the guidelines will focus on five policy areas: the provision of transition care, including hormone therapies, health policies that support gender-inclusive care, and laws that respect an individual’s right to express their own gender in the manner appropriate feels. to them.
These laws often include new updates to official documents, such as IDs, to reflect the individual’s self-identified gender, rather than the gender he or she was born with.