Shh… It Is Secret!

For a long time the American College of Pediatricians kept there size and membership secret and it was like pulling teeth to find out the size of the organization. They are anti-LGBTQ+ but that was all we knew and then…

A Massive Leak Spotlights the Extremism of an Anti-Trans Medical Group

How the tiny American College of Pediatricians helped turn fringe beliefs into government policy.

Mother Jones

By Madison Pauly and Emma Rindlisbacher

May 17, 2023

Michelle Cretella had a problem. In 2018, Cretella, then-president of the American College of Pediatricians, was speaking to the group’s board of directors about a reputation crisis she’d been trying to shake for years, ever since the Southern Poverty Law Center had put ACPeds on its hate group list.

The organization had been small since its beginnings in 2002, when 15 doctors met in Boston to discuss splintering away from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the mainstream professional association, in protest of the academy’s support for same-sex couples adopting children. In the years since, ACPeds had found a lane on the religious right using its aura of medical authority to pump out position statements and amicus briefs on a range of social issues—taking stances against abortion and same-sex marriage, and in support of conversion therapy for queer youth and disciplinary spanking for children. Its work provided fuel for Christian right power centers like the Heritage Foundation, a major think tank that often cites ACPeds’ statements to back up its conservative political agenda, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization behind many major anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws and lawsuits.

But in 2018, with the hate-group label dogging it, ACPeds still faced the same old problems: Only a few hundred doctors had joined its cause, compared to the 67,000-strong AAP. And ACPeds was little-known outside its circle of policy and legal allies, aside from its reputation for anti-LGBTQ extremism. In one slide of Cretella’s presentation, labeled “What Our Friends Think of Us,” she showed directors a picture of Justice League superheroes. But in another, titled “Perception,” she showed them a picture of the KKK.

This is a medical association that still believes that being LGBTQ+ is a choice! They still believe in conversion therapy that you can “cure the gay” and that is one of the reason why the Southern Poverty Law Center labels it a “hate-group.”

According to an agenda for the spring 2018 board meeting, an ADF attorney had recently told ACPeds that “it was best that the College was not religiously affiliated in order to provide maximum benefit for our message.” Yet the gathering, at a Hilton Garden Inn in Atlanta, began and ended with a prayer. Cretella delivered her report, outlining a need to recruit more doctors and acquire funding. With an annual budget of around $140,000, only a couple of support staff, and the hate-group label clinging to them, ACPeds had a hard enough time getting members to pay their dues, much less recruit new colleagues. According to meeting minutes, ACPeds relied on in-kind donations from higher-profile right-wing groups—media training from Alliance Defending Freedom, messaging advice from Heritage, and free video production through its close relationship with Family Watch International, a Christian fundamentalist group known for its founder’s opposition to decriminalizing homosexuality.

As you can see they are tied into far right-wing groups! The Alliance Defending Freedom is the legal group that is pushing all the anti-LGBTQ lawsuits and legislation. While the Heritage Foundation is an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. that is primarily geared toward public policy and they are the ones that was picking judges for the Trump administration. They chose Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett for Trump.

The New York Times wrote,

The lifetime appointees — who make up more than a quarter of the entire appellate bench — were more openly engaged in causes important to Republicans, such as opposition to gay marriage and to government funding for abortion.

[…]

John Malcolm, a conservative legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, said he was looking for “people who have the strength of their convictions.” He drew up a list in 2016 of recommended Supreme Court nominees that was embraced by Mr. Trump.

Those were the judges that Trump wanted! Narrow-minded judges that put religion first and the Constitution second.

As Mother Jones reported in a March investigation revealing the previously undisclosed emails of a secretive anti-trans working group, ACPeds leaders including Cretella and Van Mol helped shape language and messaging for the first wave of bills to ban transition-related care for youth in 2020. In Alabama, one of the first states to pass a ban, at least four ACPeds members—Den Trumbull, Scott and Susan Field, and Bill Whitaker—testified in support of the legislation, according to an ACPeds committee’s report to the board. And last year in Florida, when the DeSantis administration wanted to end Medicaid coverage for transgender health care, the state paid Van Mol at least $15,104.55 and Van Meter at least $12,417.28 to provide “expert” reports and reviews on the topic, as Health News Florida reported. Van Mol sent a Florida agency a lengthy compilation of citations and talking points making a case against gender-affirming care—a version of a document labeled “Opus” in the exposed Google Drive. When the state agency was sued for discrimination, it brought in ACPeds founder Joseph Zanga as an expert witness.

It was the American College of Pediatricians that consulted Florida on their trans healthcare policy that killed healthcare for us in Florida. They also were limited to testimony that they could give in trials,

Meanwhile, some ACPeds members have had their testimony on transgender issues limited in court. One of them, Paul Hruz, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has acted as an expert witness in cases related to gender-affirming care in Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina. Yet in the North Carolina case, a judge barred vast swaths of Hruz’s statements, finding that he was “not qualified to offer expert opinions” on the diagnosis and causes of gender dysphoria or the effectiveness of mental health treatments for it. The judge permitted Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist, to speak only on the risks of prescribing hormone treatments to teens and adults. “His conspiratorial intimations and outright accusations sound in political hyperbole and pose a clear risk of inflaming the jury,” the judge wrote, explaining he was blocking Hruz’ statements about “Cancel Culture”; “transgender and allied political activists”; and the “Transgender Treatment Industry.” Hruz did not respond to a request for comment.

These are the quacks that help Florida with their trans policies. Like a bad penny they keep popping up in legislative testimony and in court cases.

In another Mother Jones article they wrote,

On a Saturday afternoon in August 2019, South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doctors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to introduce that would make it a felony for doctors to give transgender children under 16 gender-affirming medical care. “I have no doubt this will be an uphill battle when we get to session,” Deutsch warned the group. “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better.”

The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped Deutsch’s repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.

I just want to point out one thing. Many organizations help write legislation. Businesses that want favorable legislation will many times write a bill and give it to a friendly legislator. Many times lobbyist will "advise" legislators on technical points. And we have done it also. Pro-LGBTQ+ organizations have helped write state non-discrimination laws and birth certificate laws. It boils down to our lobbyist are good theirs are bad.

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While we are talking medical things, I am right now at my PCP for a follow-up appointment.