ASPS Logo
Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.
When the board of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a “position statement” recommending that its members delay “gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery” until a patient is at least 19 years old, the anti-trans media circuit went wild.
As Erin in the Morning reported in our fact check of a recent New York Times opinion piece, some pundits want you to believe this statement, released earlier in the month, represents a sort of turning point. That the right’s “just asking questions,” free-speech charade has finally destroyed the institutional capture of those pesky transgender ideologues. The anti-trans brigades celebrated the ASPS position statement—which is not a clinical guideline, nor a universal rule—as the shattering of a supposed universal orthodoxy endorsing the “transing” of children.
However, out-of-context soundbites and headlines can be deceiving, especially when they come from Fox News or the White House. For starters, the document says up top that it “is not a clinical practice guideline.” It also asserts a broad “opposition to [the] criminalization of medical care” in favor of industry self-regulation. And the declarations about the appropriate age for gender-affirming surgery are recommendations, not rules.
Nonetheless, there is strong evidence to suggest the so-called “position statement” may in fact be a politically-motivated document—doused with anti-trans double standards promoted by the Trump regime, and released after meetings with nameless government officials, at least according to one account reported by the group’s Gender Surgery Task Force.
But its true origins remain opaque. They change depending on who you ask and when you ask it.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release the same day, where federal officials such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jim O’Neill, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and Mike Stuart praised the statement as “bravely standing with Secretary Kennedy.”
This could indicate the Trump Administration may have played a role in its production. And yet another high-ranking member, Task Force co-chair Dr. Scot Glasberg, who is reported to have been involved in drafting the statement, is quoted by the AP/CNN Health as saying: “This was an iterative process that took time, with no outside pressure.”
In other words, after the position statement came out, the Task Force was reportedly told that it was years in the making, but also that the Trump Administration brought it to fruition over a period of weeks, and that while ASPS officials met with the Administration—circumventing the Task Force at large—no external influences steered the report.
Now, physicians and patients are demanding answers. Who wrote this document, which arguably brands anti-trans and unscientific talking points with the ASPS logo? Why was most of the Task Force dedicated to this very issue kept in the dark about ASPS meetings with government officials? And did the Trump Administration play a hand in its crafting?
A spokesperson for the ASPS told Erin in the Morning that the impetus for the initial letter can be chalked up to “a series of misunderstandings, which ASPS is in the process of clarifying for its members.” But after weeks of continued silence, no public-facing clarifications have been made about the nature of these “misunderstandings.”
A Feb. 3 letter from members of the Gender Surgery Task Force—a group of plastic surgeons and other industry experts who had been discussing best practices for adolescent care for the better part of the year—says they were told after the statement’s release that its origins date back to 2024, well before the initial meeting of the Task Force. This is a likely reference to an August 2024 release where ASPS clarified it “has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”
ASPS’ February statement goes much farther—to the right. It legitimizes and bolsters Trumpian anti-trans propaganda, released after what an ASPS executive reportedly called “an urgent, time-limited process initiated by a federal agency seeking clarification of medical society positions on this topic,” produced over the last month or so.
In any case, the real experts appear to have been sidestepped completely. Instead, the statement heavily leans on the anti-science, anti-trans manifesto penned by the HHS last year, which Erin in the Morning and countless scholars discredited at the time.
The HHS report promotes lies about transgender people, such as that transness is a social contagion, that conversion therapy is a viable option over transition, and that gender dysphoria is actually just a symptom of neurodivergence and autism.
Psychiatrist and Task Force member Dr. Scott Leibowitz said on social media that the letter “addresses the Task Force’s concerns about the [process] by which the ASPS generated its all-or-nothing position statement that listed the arbitrary age of 19 (notably the same age listed in an Administration Jan 2025 Exec Order).”
ASPS Gender Surgery Task Force Letter
“It is worth noting that the signatories of this letter include Task Force members with diverging viewpoints on the subject at hand, yet who agree on the importance of protecting the integrity of a process,” he continued.
Meanwhile, Dr. Blair Peters, a board-certified plastic surgeon who specializes in gender-affirming care at Oregon Health and Science University, posted that “the broader membership was not involved in this statement in any way.”
“I do not believe it represents the views of the vast majority of plastic surgeons,” they said on Instagram. Peters, in addition to around 200 medical professionals, submitted a similar letter in support of greater transparency and accountability.
“A position statement of this magnitude should not come as a surprise to the membership or to leaders in this area of clinical care,” that subsequent letter said. Nonetheless, “this position statement was published, presented, and discussed in the media as though it represents the consensus of ASPS membership.”
The ASPS statement is primed to fuel even more legal and political animus going forward, having circumvented its own specialists and accountability processes meant to curtail political influence over science. But there are ways to safeguard the practice of medicine from getting caught in the crosshairs of politics—take, for example, the American Psychological Association, which updated its own policy statement on gender-affirming care in 2024, via a vote of over 160 representatives to represent its members. Not bureaucrats behind closed doors.
Good medicine depends on listening to the experts, and as per ASPS’ own Code of Ethics: “Members should practice a method of healing founded on a scientific basis, and should not voluntarily associate professionally with anyone who violates this principle.”
As is often the case, it appears anti-trans extremists are the exception to this rule.
Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.
From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.