Trump’s FTC Lays the Groundwork to Charge GAC Providers with “Fraud”

Instead of working to protect Americans' privacy, the FTC is hosting what amounts to an anti-trans rally.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted a July 9 “workshop” on what it called “unfair or deceptive trade practices in ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors.” However, others might call this descriptor false advertising. The 6-hour long event, held in Washington, DC, was arguably more like another avenue for stoking stochastic terrorism, as well as threatening and intimidating providers of trans-affirming health care—this time under the guise of accusing them of “fraud.”

The conference featured dozens of anti-trans zealots—including anti-trans parent activists, disgraced doctors, people from notorious right-wing extremist groups and “detransitioners”—to purportedly “help the FTC to understand whether consumers are being or have been exposed to false or unsupported claims about ‘gender-affirming care.’”

In other words, the FTC under President Donald Trump is asserting that trans kids and their parents have been robbed of informed consent. They argue that trans-affirming health care, which is supported by most every major medical organization in the country, lacks evidence rigorous enough for an Administration whose medical politics are, at best, completely arbitrary, unscientific, ideologically-charged, and internally inconsistent.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, condemned the panel on Bluesky in response to Erin in the Morning’s live-reporting. “Instead of working to protect Americans' privacy, the FTC is hosting what amounts to an anti-trans rally,” he wrote. “Nobody is more obsessed with controlling the private decisions of the American people than Republicans.”

The event’s framing was, of course, dripping with pretext (to borrow the words of federal Judge Ana Reyes). It had McCarthy hearing energy—it reeked of conspiracy theories gone wild about “the gender industry,” which the feds painted as a surreptitious and far-reaching ploy “built on lies and deception,” as per Chad Mizelle, the Trump-appointed Chief of Staff of the Department of Justice.

This kind of spectacle is not usually in the purview of the FTC, staffers say. Almost 150 FTC employees sent joint letters to Congress pushing for the workshop’s cancellation. Signatories remained anonymous, citing “credible fears” of retaliation from the White House. They wrote that this kind of encroachment “would chart new territory for the Commission by prying into confidential doctor-patient consultations” and that “regulation of the practice of medicine falls under the jurisdiction of state licensing boards, not the FTC.”

“The FTC's mandate is to address unfair or deceptive practices in interstate commerce—not to second-guess established medical standards widely accepted by experts in the field, based on their professional judgment, or to overrule clinical and familial decision-making,” the letter continues.

But these pleas fell on deaf ears. The meeting transpired with no counterweight to the lies, vitriol, and disinformation of panelists.

For example, there was Ethan Haim, a disgraced physician who allegedly lied to a hospital to obtain and leak the confidential patient records of trans minors to the right-wing press. (The Department of Justice functionally charged him with a form of health care fraud, but dropped the case upon Trump’s return to office). There was Brandon Showalter, a far-right reporter from The Christian Post who likened gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation in concentration camps. And then there was Erin Friday, a California attorney and anti-trans advocate who has bragged about forcing her child to abandon an expressed transgender identity.

It was perhaps Friday’s speech that was the most telling about the real purpose of the event, which again, was marketed as a symposium on “‘gender-affirming care’ for minors.”

“My goal is this: to see the decimation of the deceitful gender industry for both minors and adults and to see that the individuals who set society on this course are held accountable civilly and criminally,” she said, vowing to take on the “transgender mafia,” and presenting a list of doctors, hospitals, and medical associations she declared were at the center of “the crime board.” The room burst into applause.

It remains unclear just how far the Trump Administration can and will go with the FTC. On the one hand, they may not need to successfully prosecute someone or win a lawsuit to achieve their desired effect. Their application of anti-fraud laws remains deeply controversial. And even before rumors swirled of FBI probes into this or that hospital, many gender-affirming care clinics around the country preemptively closed their doors, hoping to thwart a potential legal situation. Communities rallied and some clinics reopened as a result, while others remained closed or have since closed, including in supposedly liberal states like California and New York. Panelists also identified medical associations as well as state legislatures, courts and medical boards as pressure points—institutions that anti-trans activists see as safeguards for trans-affirming care, and barriers in banning it.

However, this means the trans community and our allies can organize around protecting them, too.