FTC hosts day-long workshop on harms of ‘gender-affirming care’

Warning: This article contains graphic details of chemical and surgical procedures performed on individuals who were once identified as transgender. Descriptions also include bodily functions of adult subject matter.

WASHINGTON — Panelists were reduced to tears during the Federal Trade Commission’s day-long workshop this week, featuring multiple panels of experts and detransitioners who shared their stories as the agency assesses whether consumers have been subjected to misleading or unsubstantiated claims about “gender-affirming care.”

During the workshop on Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department’s Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle announced that the agency has issued more than 20 subpoenas against clinics that are engaged in transgender medical procedures on children.

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‘I was lied to by the medical professionals’

The first panel, titled “A Conversation with Parents and Survivors,” was moderated by FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson.

Simon Amaya Price said he suffered intense bullying growing up and tried to socially transition as a teenager amid his confusion, and that medical professionals encouraged him to embrace a transgender identity and attend a transgender support group behind his father’s back.

“I told him that my dad was refusing to take me to the gender clinic. The pediatrician then asked my dad in front of me, ‘Would you like a dead son or a living daughter?’ This isn’t just a line used by activists. This is a line used in healthcare settings by the doctors that your kids are seeing.”

Price said he is thankful he did not go so far as to permanently modify his body.

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” he said. “I only socially transitioned. I only lost a couple years of my life. I didn’t lose any body parts. I thank God every day, whether or not He exists, that I am whole and I’m here today. I was lied to by the medical professionals.”

Price’s father, Gareth Amaya Price, spoke next and choked up as he recounted his son’s suffering from his perspective. He accused medical professionals of engaging in emotional blackmail against him and other parents who are trying to do what is best for their children.

He feared the psychiatrist his son was seeing would recommend that his son be taken from him by Child Protective Services because of his reluctance to affirm transgender procedures for his son.

Price pinpointed the prevalent unhappiness and confusion of his son’s childhood to his autism and difficulty relating to his peers.

“He cried if a gas station closed. His own body changing upset him profoundly. He was a target of bullying, both by boys physically and by girls socially. The boys threatened him and called him homophobic slurs, and the girls shunned him, mostly for not acting like they thought a boy was supposed to,” he said.

When he recounted how his son’s pediatrician offered him the option of “a dead son or a living daughter,” Price grew emotional, adding, “That was emotional blackmail and, in my opinion, malpractice.”

Elvira Syed, who was on the same panel, sobbed as she told the story of how her daughter, who struggled with autism but spoke multiple languages and played several musical instruments, took her own life at age 18 amid her gender confusion.

“They treated her ideology, not her illness,” she said of medical professionals.

‘Code of silence’

Multiple doctors spoke throughout the day about the dangers of transgender procedures on minors, including Dr. Patrick Lappert, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who participated in a panel titled “What Does the Science Actually Say About Gender-Affirming Care?”

Dr. Lappert at the @FTC speaks about the deception in @WPATH‘s so-called standards of care. Fraud in insurance claims. Debunks the suicide or trans mantra. pic.twitter.com/7WJ2zrmAJ6

— Erin Friday, Esq. (@ErinFriday75490) July 11, 2025

“I didn’t imagine 11 years ago, when I started down this road, that I’d ever be speaking to a federal agency about what’s going on in the world of medical care in the United States,” said Lappert, who went on to explain his belief that the prevailing consensus regarding “gender-affirming” procedures are grounded in deceit and fraud.

“The transgender treatment industry actually operates in the American medical system through the use of deceptive labeling and deceptive practices,” he continued, adding that it “mislabels gender affirmation surgery as reconstructive rather than cosmetic, using that deceptive labeling to defraud public and private insurance programs, as well as defrauding the finances of families while essentially medicalizing these young people for life.”

Dr. Eithan Haim, who blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital in 2023 for continuing to perform transgender procedures on minors despite claiming otherwise, said during a panel titled “The Politicization of Science” that many doctors have become complicit in perpetuating the industry by staying quiet out of fear.

“There is a code of silence that exists among physicians and professionals today,” said Haim, who claimed the left-wing institutional capture of the medical profession has been a “decades-long process.”

“As that creep has taken a hold in these institutions, people who spoke up were increasingly vilified,” Haim said.

“So people would suffer the traumatic experiences of speaking out and having their professional lives damaged; they will be fired, they’ll be held back from promotions. They would be sometimes targeted by governing medical authorities in their state, and in cases like mine, they would be targeted by the federal government.”

Haim, whom The Christian Post first exclusively interviewed in January 2024, potentially faced a decade in prison himself after leaking the documentary evidence he found regarding secretive procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital, where he completed his surgical residency.

Biden’s U.S. Department of Justice slapped him with four felony counts after claiming he “obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes and the attending physician from Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) electronic system without authorization.”

The charges against Haim were dropped days after President Donald Trump took office in January.

Despite his own victory, Haim suggested that those not beholden to radical, pro-transgender ideology are unlikely to obtain prominent positions in some of the most influential medical schools.

“You have real consequences to the doctors who speak out against this,” he said. “That is happening in conjunction with the professors at medical schools, the clinical doctors who are teaching medical students in residence.”

“All of the people who are promoted, who are hired, are not the ones who hold conservative values — or not even conservative values, just not radical values.”

“Being an average person essentially eliminates your ability from being hired in these prestigious academic centers,” he added.

‘Incredibly brutal’

A panel titled “How Can the FTC Protect Families from Harm?” featured Brandon Showalter, a Christian Post opinion writer and social commentator who hosts the “Generation Indoctrination” podcast.

Showalter, who has extensively reported for years on the harms transgenderism has inflicted upon children, asserted the ideology is incompatible with truth, has led to deceptive trade practices and must therefore be dismantled.

“Because it is based on an irretrievably flawed premise that it’s actually possible to be born in the wrong body, any medical treatment toward that end is going to do damage, guaranteed, full stop, because it starts with a lie,” he said.