Michigan State Medical Society Greenlights Anti-Trans Hate Group Genspect to Teach Trans Medicine
Anti-trans rhetoric—sponsored by Moms for Liberty, and brought to you by Genspect—could be coming to a clinician near you via CME.
Trans people are “anti-art,” according to Helen Joyce, a high-profile activist with the UK-based anti-trans group Sex Matters. She says this is why trans rights groups produce art that is “ugly”; the trans community seeks to normalize “unhealthy and unnatural body types.”
“If you insist on quality and beauty,” meanwhile, “then you’re doing something that’s inimical to trans bullshit,” Joyce said. “That’s something you can all do, without anyone even noticing that’s what you’re doing.”
Joyce is standing at the podium in Lisbon, Portugal, at a 2024 conference for Genspect, which is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group. Video of that speech is now being used in an official capacity to train medical providers here in the United States.
The courses are provided through CME programs—continuing medical education, which is a requirement for health care providers to maintain their licensure. The idea behind CME is that physicians will use it to stay up-to-date on emerging scientific protocols and topics.
Joyce is not a doctor; she’s a mathematician-turned-journalist and “gender critical” campaigner. And while it’s not unheard of for non-physicians to be featured in CME programming, there are still national guidelines to ensure that the content meets certain standards of scientific validity and balance. Erin in the Morning’s review of Genspect’s CME materials cast a light on what appears to have been an open secret: SPLC-designated hate groups are peddling CME courses and using them to spread dangerous rhetoric to care providers. It’s unclear how far the programs reach, but Joyce’s original YouTube video—available for anyone to watch for free, sans credits—has been viewed almost 40,000 times as of this writing.
Providers who want to receive credit for the CME courses must sign up for Genspect’s Substack to the tune of $180 per year.
The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the national oversight body for CME programming, says it accredits local partners—such as medical schools or state medical organizations—to certify CME-appropriate materials. The burden falls on these partner institutions to ensure the content is up to par, a spokesperson for ACCME told Erin in the Morning. (There is a confidential complaint form where anyone, regardless of their credentials, can raise concerns about CME content.)
If a CME activity does not adhere to ACCME’s standards, then the host institution could see their accreditation revoked. In Genspect’s case, the primary accredited party appears to be the Michigan State Medical Society (MSMS), which did not reply to requests for comment, nor did Genspect.
Joyce’s video on “gender ideology” (a term Human Rights Watch dubbed a far-right Christian “conspiracy myth”) spends a full three minutes, out of a 30 minute lecture, on Joyce’s disdain for trans aesthetics. She further calls on the audience to use “child gender medicine and sports” as “inroads” in order to eliminate trans rights at large.
“This is why the puberty blockers ban is so important,” she told the dimly-lit conference room in Lisbon, referencing the policy that has brought much of the gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom to a screeching halt—in part due to advocacy by groups like Sex Matters and Genspect.
“There’s not that many people in the UK who’ve ever got puberty blockers. It’s a small number,” Joyce said. “The point of them is they’re a rhetorical and argumentative device.”
Genspect markets Joyce’s lecture as a lesson on “how ideological beliefs have replaced objective standards,” and that viewers “will come away with a deeper understanding of how to defend evidence-based practice.”
On YouTube, Genspect issues a disclaimer on its videos that speakers do not necessarily reflect its views as a group. But its other materials strike a similar chord. In addition to Joyce’s “gender ideology” lecture, Genspect’s CME modules advertise topics like a series on “medical scandals” that compare gender-affirming care to mass lobotomies; a glowing feature on the American College of Pediatricians, yet another SPLC-designated hate group, founded when it split from the American Academy of Pediatrics to target same-sex couples’ rights; plus a panel for “ROGD Awareness Day,” a reference to the discredited effort to invent a diagnosis of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” which positions transness as a “social contagion.”
The ROGD panel was sponsored by at least four other SPLC-designated hate and/or extremist groups—including Moms for Liberty, known for inserting conservative extremism into public schools and stoking political violence.
“It’s essential that clinicians are informed about the full range of approaches their patients may be using, and that CME is a place where clinicians can learn about and debate controversies,” ACCME guidelines read. “Thus, CME providers need to develop activities that encourage free and rigorous scientific discourse—while ensuring that faculty do not advocate or promote unscientific treatments and that clinical care recommendations are based on established scientific consensus.”
In late October, Erin in the Morning published an article about how another Genspect-adjacent SPLC-branded hate group, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), had its own online CME courses certified through the medical school at Washington State University. After complaints were filed, ACCME launched an inquiry into the matter, and SEGM’s CME courses were suspended. The content was evidently removed from the WSU portal, but remains available elsewhere. (Genspect, like SEGM, denounced its “hate group” classification.)
Genspect’s CME offerings are more established. They’ve been selling the courses since at least 2024, but much of its contents are also free to view on Substack or YouTube.
The series is just one part of a years-long international campaign against human rights using weaponized pseudoscience. The Southern Poverty Law Center found this practice has become increasingly commonplace; that prejudice and hate has been dressed up in lab coats and given undue credulity through trusted institutions; and that the scientific method and industry best practices are, in some cases, being swapped with anti-trans propaganda.
“In recent years, anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience has become a prominent component of anti-LGBTQ+ policy networks who want to disguise their bigoted motivations with seemingly objective language,” an SPLC report said. “These networks help translate anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience into legislative and legal campaigns to limit bodily autonomy and LGBTQ+ people’s human rights.”
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Oof. Guess it’s time to file another complaint. Thank you for including the link to push for accountability.
"Moms for Liberty." A group that (unironically) cares for neither subject in their name.