Wait. . . *Did* The Endocrine Society Write That Letter Of Support?

A correction, an update, and a gripe

Last week I published an article originally titled “How WPATH And The Endocrine Society Thumbed The Scale Of Youth Gender Medicine Research.” I say originally because I’ve since nixed “The Endocrine Society” from the headline. I’ve also unlocked that article, which was paywalled when I published it. What follows will make a lot more sense if you read that one first.

In the article I claimed that both WPATH and the Endocrine Society (ES) authored letters endorsing an observational design for the “Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” study (those are links to PDFs of both letters), and that both letters exaggerated and oversimplified the state of quality evidence for youth gender medicine in 2014 (which, unfortunately, is not all that different from the state of quality evidence for youth gender medicine in 2026).

I made an error here: “The Endocrine Society letter was authored by the endocrinologist Wylie Hembree, who died in 2022 and who at the time was the Chair of the Society’s Task Force on Clinical Practice Guidelines for Transgender Care. He was also lead author of the 2009 guidelines. Writing on Endocrine Society letterhead. . . ”

I’m embarrassed I managed to screw this up given that I linked to the letter right in that paragraph, and it clearly isn’t on ES letterhead!

I’m honestly not sure what happened, but I apologize. I’ve corrected this in the text of the last article and, after this goes up, will include a link directing people here to explain what happened. (The WPATH letter clearly is on WPATH letterhead — believe me when I say I’ve now triple-checked.)

A couple people alerted me to this error. One was Dr. Michael Laidlaw, a California endocrinologist and youth gender medicine skeptic who has served as an expert witness for states seeking to ban youth gender medicine. He is also a co-author on the HHS umbrella review published last year, and the story of his attempts to get these documents is worth briefly telling.

In 2018 or so, Laidlaw developed concerns about the ethics of this research project. This led him to seek out information about it from the National Institutes of Health. He teamed up with the conservative legal activist Jane Robbins, a fellow skeptic, and she filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Olson-Kennedy team’s NIH application packet that year. When it arrived they found it was missing two appendices they were interested in: the consent form that would be used to enroll children and youth in the study and — more importantly for our purposes — the two “letters of support” from WPATH and the Endocrine Society. Multiple follow-up FOIAs did not yield these documents. Eventually Robbins’ sister, Patricia Daugherty, filed a lawsuit against the NIH to obtain the documents, with the conservative legal group Judicial Watch serving as her counsel. “We reluctantly agreed to a dismissal since they at least produced the consent forms,” explained Laidlaw, but the other documents were still missing.

Laidlaw said he made a separate effort to get the letters via a California Public Records Act request to UCSF, a public university whose youth gender clinic is one of the four sites of the study (UCSF is also the home base of Olson-Kenendy’s co-investigator, the endocrinologist Stephen Rosenthal). That effort stalled out as well, and these dead ends were “what led me to call and email the Endo Society directly to try to obtain the letter that I thought they endorsed,” explained Laidlaw, who had been a member of that group since 2006.

I don’t remember how I first found out about the existence of these letters — it may well have been through Laidlaw. But for those of us who are curious about this project, they have long been an object of fascination. There really wasn’t any ambiguity about the letters’ provenance in the language of the grant application: Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues reference “the Endocrine Society and WPATH letters of support regarding our cohort design” and “Letters of support regarding our cohort design from both the Endocrine Society and WPATH.” Anyone reading the application would interpret this as the ES and WPATH lending their institutional imprimatur to Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues’ preferred study design.

That’s why Laidlaw, curious for the same reasons I was, reached out directly to the Endocrine Society in 2020. In October of that year, an ES staffer named Rodneikka Scott told Laidlaw the group had had no luck tracking down any such letter. “We double-checked with our colleagues in our Government and Public Affairs and others in an attempt to find the letter referenced in your email,” she told Laidlaw in an email that he shared with me. “As it turns out, there is no record of an advocacy-related letter of this same title.”

A few days later Laidlaw responded, gently insisting that the letter likely did exist given the clear references made to it in Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues’ grant application. “It seems to me to be a big problem if researchers claim they have a letter from the Endocrine Society that does not exist,” he also noted.

Scott then responded again, closing out the conversation:

Many thanks for your follow-up. Intrigued, I continued to dig a bit more into your request earlier today. The Endocrine Society does not write letters in support of specific grants. With that being said, we were able to find the attached two documents. The author of the grant may have attached one of these letters. We don’t know, though. I hope this is helpful as it is all that we have. [emphasis mine]

Neither of the two letters attached had anything to do with this research project, so those weren’t the ones in question. I have no idea why I got lucky where Laidlaw and Robbins struck out — why, late last year, in a long-overdue response to my follow-up FOIA request, the NIH sent me the two letters.

After I heard from Laidlaw, I emailed the ES earlier this week, quoting some of the group’s correspondence with him and pointing out that this shouldn’t be a complicated thing to establish: Either Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues’ claim that their letter of support had been authored by the ES was true, or it was false. In either case, I argued, the ES should clarify things.

I haven’t heard back. Just like I didn’t hear back when, prior to my publication of last week’s article, I reached out to the Endocrine Society to ask if the group wanted to comment or provide context about what was going on.

What we’re left with is a confusing situation. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues repeatedly referenced a letter from the Endocrine Society in their NIH application. Such a letter would, of course, carry more weight than a letter from an individual endocrinologist — albeit an influential one — who merely had a role in the Society’s development of its gender dysphoria guidelines. The letter itself, however, looks much more like the latter: like the late Dr. Wylie Hembree was writing on his own behalf, noting his affiliation with the ES but not claiming to represent the opinion of that group on this particular matter.

I can imagine a critic accusing me of nitpicking, but shouldn’t researchers seeking millions in federal funding provide accurate information about which professional organizations have or haven’t written them letters of support? Shouldn’t the Endocrine Society, having been aware of this confusing situation since at least 2020 (via its correspondence with Michael Laidlaw), provide a public explanation? More broadly, should it have taken years worth of FOIA requests and a lawsuit just to obtain important documents that are part of a controversial, high-profile, and taxpayer-funded research project?

The most common theme in my reporting on youth gender medicine is a lack of transparency and accountability. It’s extremely rare for the researchers and activists whose work has come under scrutiny in recent years to be willing to answer even basic follow-up questions about their claims, their methodologies, or their theories. In some cases I can understand why — there have been lawsuits and harassment campaigns and all sorts of over-the-top ugliness. This is a very heated dispute. But when it comes to the top-tier researchers and research journals and professional organizations, I remain confused as to why they can’t answer simple questions about what they have done and why they have done it. These individuals and institutions often present themselves as the voices of scientific (and, frequently, moral) authority — they issue authoritative-sounding statements, they write op-eds, they get paid handsome sums to prepare expert declarations, and they consistently seek to influence ongoing public debates. It seems like they’re trying to have it both ways: They want attention and influence and prestige, but they don’t want to deal with the accountability that should come with those rewards.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook here for what was a very silly error. This shouldn’t have required two separate newsletters to explain, and I made the situation even more confusing than it needed to be. I should have noticed this apparent discrepancy and noted it in my first article. But fundamentally, the root cause of this confusion is a federal grant application that appears to contain false information. Someone directly involved should simply explain what’s going on here, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

---

Questions? Comments? More information about this? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.