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I want to devote a mini-series of my ongoing analyses of World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference videos to examining the pivotal role that Dr. Madeline Deutsch has played in shepherding WPATH through the most recent era of political turmoil. Dr. Deutsch, who is a transgender woman herself and goes by Maddie, was the president of WPATH’s U.S. arm, USPATH, during the crucial period when Republican state lawmakers were blanketing the nation with bans of gender-transition interventions for minors.
As I explored in my investigation for Compact magazine of the WPATH videos I obtained, Dr. Deutsch’s response to these threats was to double down on the organization’s mission of expanding access to gender-transition treatment. Given she served her term in the immediate wake of the 2020 so-called racial reckoning, she also spent a lot of her energy on what appeared to be a futile effort to get WPATH to diversify its overwhelmingly white ranks. Rather than examining whether, say, the field of pediatric gender medicine might moderate in the face of extreme sociopolitical scrutiny, she zeroed in on racial-equity concerns.
Dr. Deutsch, who is the medical director of the University of California San Francisco’s gender clinic and whom sources have told me can be extraordinarily abrasive in private, is best known for the crucial role she played in alienating her predecessor as USPATH president, psychologist Erica Anderson. In October 2021, journalist published an article in ’s Substack (which ultimately became ) in which she quoted Dr. Anderson, who is herself a trans woman, deriding what she characterized as “sloppy” practices in the field of pediatric gender medicine. This article triggered a paroxysm among USPATH’s leadership, who confronted Dr. Anderson.
Dr. Deutsch led the charge to censure Dr. Anderson and pushed for the organization to put a moratorium on USPATH leadership talking to the press. Dr. Anderson warned them that such a move would only cause a backlash that would harm the field. Dr. Deutsch won the argument and Dr. Anderson left WPATH in dismay, becoming one of a tiny coterie of pediatric gender medicine dissidents.
As I reported for Compact:
At the 2022 conference, Dr. Maddie Deutsch, then USPATH’s president, discouraged colleagues from referencing too many potential harms of treatment in public-facing materials, for fear they will be leveraged against the field.
Maddie Deutsch by 2023 flipped about speaking to the media. But by then WPATH was no longer merely defending the science. It had advanced to an active training mode, politically and rhetorically, and was coaching members to observe its rigidly prescribed terms. “The work that we do is important. It’s life-saving,” Deutsch said at the 2023 conference. “And because this charge does bring great responsibility, we have to be evidence-based. We have to be measured—measured in our approach, measured in dealing with the press, measured in dealing with conflict.”
Deutsch announced that WPATH had brought in experts from the prominent communications firm BerlinRosen to advise attendees on messaging. Other panels at that conference would counsel attendees on interweaving the transgender and abortion rights fights and would provide a crash course on “practical resistance” to “criminalization of gender-expansive communities.
USPATH 2023 Opening Remarks
The video featured in this Substack documents Dr. Deutsch’s opening presidential remarks from the 2023 USPATH conference, when she was the outgoing president. The speech betrayed her ambivalence over scaling the roles of an advocate of science and a political actor fighting what amounted to a losing battle in a raging culture war.
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