The Evidence of Harm: What the Data Really Show About Pediatric Transgender Procedures | Leor Sapir
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration last January was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce a systematic review of pediatric transgender procedures and their impact on children within 90 days.
In May 2025, HHS published a more than 400-page review, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” In November last year, an updated, peer-reviewed version was published with additional appendices and supplements.
Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the report’s main outside co-authors. In our in-depth interview, Sapir provides a detailed overview of the review’s findings and conclusions.
“We tried to be as factual and defensible as we possibly could,” he said.
The goal of the report, he says, is to “engage with people in the medical profession who may not be aligned with the administration, but who do care about questions of medical evidence and medical ethics.”
In this episode, he breaks down:
- The prevalence of sex-changing procedures in the United States, as well as the reversal in approaches in various Scandinavian countries and in the UK.
- How misleading and unscientific language was used by professionals across many fields to promote pediatric sex transitioning.
- The role of the organization, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), in establishing “gender-affirming care” as the accepted standard.
- How clinicians, in his view, distorted the principle of patient autonomy to increase pediatric sex change surgeries.
There is one chapter in the report that everyone should read, Sapir said. And that is the chapter about ethics.
“The question on everybody’s mind is: Should we do it? That’s an ethical question. And medical ethics is, you would hope, [what] governs the field of medicine,” he told me.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | She said, we're giving out puberty blockers like candy. |
| 0:03.0 | You're talking about powerful, irreversible drugs and surgeries on kids. |
| 0:08.0 | It's very difficult for them to say, oops, we got this one wrong, |
| 0:12.0 | even if they actually come to that realization. |
| 0:14.0 | What 12-year-old can possibly understand what it means to never be able to have children in the future? |
| 0:20.0 | In this episode, I'm sitting down with Lear Sapir, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and one |
| 0:25.7 | of the co-authors of the 400-page HHS review of pediatric gender medicine. |
| 0:31.5 | Sex is not assigned at birth, and to tell patients consistently in a medical setting where |
| 0:37.1 | figures of authority wearing white coats come into the room and tell parents, |
| 0:41.0 | the sex that you thought your daughter or son is, is not their true sex, is fundamentally unscientific and misleading. |
| 0:49.5 | This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. |
| 0:57.0 | Leah Sapir, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:00.0 | Thanks for having me back. |
| 1:02.0 | The term sex-rejecting procedures. It's one that I hadn't heard before but kind of makes a lot of sense to me. |
| 1:09.0 | Where did this come from? It's now largely used, |
| 1:13.2 | actually, in this lexicon, particularly by HHS. That's right. The administration adopted this term |
| 1:18.9 | in the last few months as an alternative to, certainly as an alternative to the standard term in the |
| 1:25.7 | field, which is gender affirming care. Gender affirming |
| 1:28.7 | care is a euphemism, and it is essentially a marketing term. And so it was clear to the administration, |
| 1:36.0 | in my view, that they didn't want to use this term. And there were a few other candidates, |
| 1:40.2 | sex trait modification being one. But sex rejecting procedures, the advantage of the term is that it conveys the intent |
| 1:46.2 | behind the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to treat a condition |
... |
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