Former GLAAD President: We Were Wrong to Medicalize Trans-Identified Children
A new podcast series on tensions within the so-called LGBTQ movement delivers major revelations
On Friday, Longview’s Reflector podcast debuted Strange Bedfellows: When LGB met T, a three-part series about how the gay rights movement became the LGBTQ movement. Ben Kawaller, a cohost of the series and its lead reporter, interviewed me for it a number of months ago. The portion of our conversation included in the final product focuses largely on my time working as a News & Rapid Response intern at GLAAD in 2017—particularly how uneasy I felt about the organization’s quickness to condemn public figures who voiced reasonable objections to trans rights initiatives or who perhaps misspoke about trans-related issues.
According to the series, GLAAD adopted this punishing ethos not long after its current president and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, joined the organization in 2014. Prior to that, former GLAAD president Herndon Graddick told Kawaller on the podcast, the strategy when a public figure erred was to “try to figure out a way to heal—not throw people off your side permanently, but kind of figure out a path forward that you wind up being friends.”
Graddick’s words felt vindicating, as did the message I received from a former GLAAD employee the day the podcast premiered. This individual, whom I’d never met, wrote to thank me for “verbalizing everything I felt then about the switch under SKE [Sarah Kate Ellis].” They continued: “All of a sudden, I was being asked to make the case for someone being a bigot rather than documenting their actual bigotry.”
What felt even more vindicating, though, was hearing what Graddick told Kawaller in Episode 3: “I think we need to correct what’s wrong first. And so that’s a big thing. I mean, particularly the medicalization of children.”
Kawaller narrated: “He thinks that the time has come to admit it was wrong to medicalize so many of these kids.”
Graddick continued: “Teenagers and kids should not be given the power to make these life-altering decisions that medicalization causes.”
Kawaller’s cohost, Andy Mills—who produced the 2023 podcast series The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling—was as shocked as I was to hear Graddick say this out loud. “Wait, so you’re saying that the former head of GLAAD told you it was a mistake to unquestionably support the medical treatment of these minors?” he asked Kawaller.
“Yeah,” Kawaller said, before rolling another Graddick clip.
“I just think that we should completely stop doing anything that might harm children, even if it [means we admit] that we got something really wrong, and my understanding is that we have,” Graddick said. “I think that there’s been a lot of fear about discussing things openly for fear of being called transphobic, and I think that we’re at a place that we can really have those conversations without that fear. And certainly transphobia has nothing to do with my motivation to say this, but more like, you know, let’s just get our side of the street totally clean.”
This is a big deal. Graddick joined GLAAD in 2010 and served as its president from 2012 to 2013. It was under his leadership that the organization began to shift its focus to transgender issues, even going so far as to change its name from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to simply GLAAD. In May 2013, after Graddick announced his resignation, Chad Griffin, then president of the Human Rights Campaign, issued a statement thanking Graddick for leading GLAAD in its “new and groundbreaking work” to “lift up transgender voices across the country.” That same day, The Advocate reported:
Graddick was also instrumental in GLAAD’s awareness and media competency campaigns around issues impacting the transgender community. GLAAD worked closely with the Colorado family of a transgender 6-year-old whose school refused to allow her to use the girl’s bathroom, filing a complaint with the state civil rights commission and elevating awareness about the situation.
Graddick also led GLAAD’s efforts to educate the mainstream media on how to report on transgender people, including, most recently, the murder of Cemia Acoff, reports of whose death was bungled by local media in Cleveland. In November, the organization published a comprehensive report about transphobic violence and irresponsible media reporting called Doubly Victimized, that offered guidelines for mainstream media reports on transgender issues.
On YouTube, there’s a clip from 2013 of Graddick introducing trans-identified boys Jazz Jennings and Coy Mathis—ages twelve and six at the time—on stage at GLAAD’s annual awards gala. “Earlier tonight I was asked by Ketel One who was my inspiration, and I wrote the both of you,” he told them.
No word on where Coy Mathis is today, but we know how things turned out for Jazz. He had his puberty blocked at 11 and started cross-sex hormones at 14. At 17, he underwent bottom surgery, which was unsuccessful and required at least two surgical revisions. He now battles severe mental health issues and obesity.
One of Jazz’s surgeons was Dr. Jess Ting, who was the surgical director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery. Last month, news outlets reported that the Epstein files revealed that Ting performed personal favors for Jeffrey Epstein, including giving 35 stitches to one of his girlfriends, a Russian undergraduate, while she was “laid out” on Epstein’s dining room table. Ting visited Epstein’s island with his own girlfriend and her children. According to Ting’s Mount Sinai profile, “Dr. Ting performs research in transgender health and his clinical practice is limited to the surgical care of the transgender/gender non-conforming community, as well as victims of female genital mutilation.”
Jazz’s other surgeon was Marci Bowers, a transwoman and the former president of WPATH. Here’s an excerpt from my book, Cis White Gay, about Bowers:
During a 2022 Duke University symposium, Bowers stated that every male whose puberty is blocked at Tanner Stage 2—the stage when the body begins to sexually mature—has never and possibly will never experience a proper orgasm. (This, of course, is on top of the fact that medical transition sterilizes them.) Bowers revealed the experimental nature of gender-affirming care by wondering aloud to the audience what the solution to this could be. Options range from removing the blockers and letting “a little bit of puberty come back” to encouraging the child to masturbate so that they know what an orgasm feels like.
As Bowers made this latter suggestion, he acknowledged that some males might experience dysphoria around their penis, but went on to say, “All a penis is is just a large clitoris—it’s all the same material—so, you know, use it for the pleasurable purposes that partially it was intended!”
To this, any thinking person might respond, “If a child getting over his dysphoria about his body is such a reasonable possibility, then why are we cutting off his penis?”
Unfortunately, none of the other panelists made a peep.
Bowers said that his work with female genital mutilation survivors, whose physical trauma has affected their ability to be intimate with their partners, is what “raised the red flag” for him about this particular issue in gender care.
To this I would say, “When the ‘care’ you provide to adolescents can be compared to female genital mutilation—that is, the excision of women’s clitorises, performed in the name of Islam, to deny them sexual pleasure—you might want to rethink what you’re doing.” And leaving aside for a moment the total impropriety of an adult encouraging a pre-pubertal child to masturbate, I find it tragic that clinicians are taking away his possibility of having his own organic sexual awakening. Rather, he is a lab rat. His sexual life begins in a sterile clinic.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’ve been speaking out against the medicalization of gender-nonconforming youth since at least April 2022, when Newsweek published my op-ed, “The New Homophobia.” Since then, I’ve been—and there’s really no other way to say this—afraid of GLAAD, which wields considerable financial, political, and cultural power. A 2024 New York Times investigation revealed the organization’s “lavish spending,” especially when it comes to Ellis, whose contract allows her to earn up to $1.3 million per year, including bonuses. The Times article begins with Ellis being chauffeured in a Mercedes to “the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week,” where she and her colleagues stayed during the World Economic Forum in Davos. (In 2017, when I interned at GLAAD, the organization did not pay its interns.) Graddick’s remarks on the podcast, as well as the messages of support I’ve now received from two former GLAAD employees, come as a huge relief.
In the podcast,1 Ellis stands behind the medicalization of minors: “This is finished business. It’s politicians and junk science, who’s creating some kind of debate or argument about this.”
She went on: “It is not a debate. We are actually looking at the single source of truth and they are creating a conversation that doesn’t exist. It’s deeply rooted transphobia. That’s what it is, at the end of the day.”
I reached out to GLAAD for comment on Graddick’s remarks. If I hear back, I will update this post.
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The audio of Ellis is archival and not original to the podcast.
My son is gender nonconforming and is a sensitive child. I thank you for all the work you do to help make space and advocate for people like him. And I am grateful to those who are brave enough to admit they made a massive mistake in order to protect future children from unnecessary medicalization. I feel confident that my son will be ok but I can’t stop worrying about all the other little boys out there like him who might get sucked into this dangerous and regressive movement because their anxious parents have been fed a lie.
For males "bottom surgery" (aka vaginoplasty) includes total castration, amputating the testicles, cutting away the interior of the penis, and turning the remaining penis skin inside-out and tucking it into a deep wound cut into the perineum to imitate a vagina. Some of the scrotal skin is repurposed to imitate female labia.
A young man (aka transwoman) I know, operated on as a 17-year-old, described waking up from surgery (vaginoplasty) with the feeling of "having been hit between the legs with an axe".
For females "bottom surgery" (aka phalloplasty) can involve a series of surgeries, flaying an arm, leg and/or part of the torso, to construct a very poor facsimile of a penis. Infection and tissue necrosis is likely. If the grafted tissue survives the resultant "phallus" can only be used for penetrative sex with implantation of a device. Complications are common at every stage of this surgery.
Now that young children are being primed for "transition" it's time to stop using the euphemistic term "bottom surgery" and speak very frankly of what these vulnerable children are facing. Rather than "affirming" the delusion of "changing sex" in children, let's affirm reality for gender questioning and dysphoric children, and love and accept them just as they are.