(LifeSiteNews) – American Medical Association (AMA) president Bobby Mukkamala defended the use of gender-reassignment drugs on minors by citing his dependence on “experts” while repeating several false claims in undercover video obtained by the Daily Wire.
Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro played the recording, taken from a video call earlier in 2025, on his radio show. In the call, Mukkamala is confronted about youth gender practices by Michigan Republican state Rep. Brad Paquette and Texas Children’s Hospital whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim.
When challenged on flaws in the studies most commonly cited to support transitioning minors, the AMA chief admitted to not actually reviewing them firsthand but rather placing trust in “the experts” to tell him what conclusions to adopt.
“I don’t look at them. I rely on a specialty society to look at them and then give us their opinion of them,” Mukkamala said. “I’m not an expert at all. And honestly, I don’t think you are either. I’m not an expert at all. I’m not an expert at all in the science that you’re talking to me about. I defer to the experts.”
“Neither one of us spent an hour working on transgender care, neither one of us,” Mukkamala continued. “So we have no business discussing the science that’s brought to the American Medical Association from people that spent years in training for this, and years taking care of patients for this.”
During the exchange, Mukkamala claimed puberty blocker are “reversible,” contradicting a U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) review that found the “assumption that … Puberty Blockers are reversible remains largely untested”; that only 2% of transitioners regret it, citing a review that did not follow up with most patients beyond two years and only reviewed one subset of transition treatments (genital surgery); and that more than half of “trans-identifying people” commit suicide, a number contrasting sharply with a study in the AMA’s own journal putting the real rate vastly lower at 75 per 100,000.
“And sure, he’s not an expert in endocrinology or plastic surgery,” Shapiro said. “But as the President of the AMA, he’s meant to be an expert in the AMA’s code of ethics, and at the bare minimum, the Hippocratic Oath.”
“The hourlong conversation with Dr. Bobby displays a level of institutional ideological capture that is so outrageous we have an obligation to release the full length call,” Shapiro added.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
In the meantime, the Chicago Tribune noted that far-left Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker has launched a free hotline to “support LGBTQIA+ people, through which they can learn about their legal rights and be connected to health and social services.”
Despite being the most prominent medical association in the country, the AMA is notorious for left-wing bias on most issues, from promoting COVID-19 vaccines and opposing therapeutics like ivermectin to defending abortion-on-demand. During the Biden presidency, the AMA advocated censoring, investigating, and prosecuting what it called “an intentional campaign of disinformation” about youth gender transitions, “where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals.”
Despite its position that gender is mutable, the AMA is so adamant that sexual orientation isn’t that it advocates banning so-called “conversion therapy” to resolve unwanted same-sex attraction.
One of the only exceptions to the AMA’s left-wing agenda is physician-assisted suicide, to which it remains opposed.
