The World Health Organization (WHO) established an expert advisory group on transgender health, seeking guidance from a transgender former prostitute who called the line of work “empowering” and an academic attempting to popularize “genderf**king” as a critical legal theory.
The WHO’s Guidelines Development Group on the Health of Trans and Gender Diverse People was established to facilitate the creation of guidelines aimed at “increasing access and utilization of quality and respectful health services by trans and gender diverse people,” and establishing “health policies that support gender-inclusive care, and legal recognition of self-determined gender identity.”
Among the experts named by the WHO is Erika Castellanos, who the WHO says is “a trans woman living with HIV from Belize who resides in the Netherlands.” Castellanos, a former prostitute, is a member of the International AIDS Society, where he focuses on “youth engagement in HIV activism.” It also includes Florence Ashley, an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta and former clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, who the WHO describes as a “transfeminine jurist and bioethicist whose work focuses on trans issues in the legal and healthcare systems.” His most recent work is on how to use “genderf**king” as a strategy to resist “gender governance.”
The WHO’s decision to staff the board with radical transgender activists calls into question the organization’s ability to objectively assess the medical consequences of interventions that attempt to modify one’s sex.
It told The Daily Wire that its recommendations “are always based on balancing of available evidence, human rights principles, consideration of harms and benefits, and inputs of end users and beneficiaries.”
The experts, however, are clearly out of the mainstream community, and have no health expertise. Castellanos said that he became an expert in the field by being a prostitute.
“Surviving migration, sex work and homelessness, all while being HIV positive and transgender, have made me strong and resilient in the work I do,” Castellanos noted in a biography. “I have had the opportunity to share my insights with young trans and HIV activists.”
Rather than just “surviving” prostitution, however, Castellanos says “sex work was the most empowering thing that ever happened to me,” explaining that he “started working in the streets, offering my sexual services” in Mexico after fleeing home, eventually using drugs and ending up in prison.
Castellanos is now engaged in various fields of activism, previously serving as a delegate to the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS on behalf of Trans United Europe, a “sex worker umbrella NGO for Trans Black People of Color (BPOC) and migrants from the global south.”
He’s also listed as the Executive Director of Global Action for Trans Equality, an organization that calls itself “an international advocacy and expert organization focused on gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics.” The organization’s site explains that “Erika’s background is in sex work issues and HIV activism.”
Florence Ashley, another transgender activist who was appointed to the WHO’s Guidelines Development Group, describes himself as “metaphorically a biorg witch with flowers in their hair” and is the author of an article set to be published in the McGill University Law Journal titled “Genderf**king as a Critical Legal Methodology,” where he discusses ways to resist “gender governance.”
“Genderf**king is defined by its focus on the needs and experiences of those who ‘f**k’ with gender, resisting attempts at gender governance through laws, policies, and practices,” an abstract from the article reads before going on to claim that the approach “offers a rich and fertile approach for analyzing a social, political, and legal world indelibly marked by regimes of gender and, in so doing, steps on the path towards gender liberation.”
The 34-page article expounds on the approach through “stylistic” means, namely, sexually charged humor. “The present article as well as several of the past writings I mention include puns and jokes, many of them sexual. More than incidental, I would suggest that these stylistic elements are an extension of genderf**king’s substance into the realm of form and style,” the paper reads before explaining that the theory can also be used to challenge academic standards. “For just as genderfucking rejects the politician’s idea that gender must be policed, so does it reject the academician’s idea that writing must be policed. The name ‘genderfucking’ itself offers a challenge to dominant mores around sex and profanity.”
Ashley goes on to ask “Are sex jokes not a celebration of scholarly fucking? Is there not something peculiarly trans about sex jokes?”
The article also addresses transgender identification among youth, claiming “Regardless of whether youth know their gender well, nobody is better placed to navigate the world of gender in their name. Only they can catch glimpses or gaze upon the shape of their gender mosaic.” Ashley goes on to apply his specific approach, writing, “Under a genderf**king lens, gender self-determination seems the only way to properly account for the needs of all trans youth, including those who defy attempts at disciplining gender.”
He also explains that the concept of “genderf**king” is intended for those “whose gender is an eldritch horror adorning a seven-dimensional tentacle c*ck. People whose gender oscillates so fast that it undergoes spontaneous fission.”
“You can’t handle the truth of their gender,” Ashley wrote.
Ashley produced an extensive list of largely nonsensical terms that he’s used to refer to his gender, which includes the words and phrases “alien,” “alienby,” “trashgender,” “gender malcontent,” “deception,” and “unfathomable swirling void.”
Ashley, whose placement on the WHO advisory board sparked criticism online, has informed the WHO that he is “unable to attend due to a conflict in schedules.”
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the Director of , a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting the politicization of medicine, warned that the WHO’s guide development group will likely ignore the increasing body of literature that challenges the basis of support for medical interventions intended to modify a person’s sex.
“At a time when the European community is in the midst of a great re-examination of the entire edifice of so-called ‘gender affirming care,’ it is indeed unfortunate that the world health organization has decided to enlist a number of gender activists to create new guidance,” Goldfarb remarked. “Guideline formation should be first based on a careful and comprehensive review of the medical literature. If this is done, these activists must come to the conclusion that ‘gender affirming care’ should be dramatically curtailed as has occurred in five European nations.”
“Unfortunately, the World Health Organization’s choice of individuals suggest that their present commitment to this activity will prevent them from approaching this problem in an evenhanded and rigorously scientific approach,” Goldfarb continued.
The WHO defended its decision to establish the guidelines and development group, telling The Daily Wire its recommendations “are always based on balancing of available evidence, human rights principles, consideration of harms and benefits, and inputs of end users and beneficiaries. ”
But Castellanos and Ashley are just two of the leftwing trans activists that the WHO placed on the Guidelines Development Group. There are also four individuals associated with the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that removed minimum age requirements for medical interventions, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone therapy, and sex change operations from its medical guidelines.
Two former presidents of WPATH, Walter Bouman and Gail Knudson, are included in the WHO’s guidelines development group.
Critics of gender ideology have blasted the WHO over its Guidelines Development Group, launching a petition called “WHO Decides?” that objects to the “biased panel tasked with creating new transgender health guidelines.”
“Of the 21 panel members, over three-fourths are transgender activists. The few physicians either specialize in HIV or are ‘gender doctors,’” the petition reads before adding “There is currently a worldwide explosion of teenagers wishing to undergo a sex change; WHO’s stated plan to promote hormones and “legal recognition of self-identified gender” will harm innumerable gender-dysphoric youth, gays, lesbians and other women.”
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