Trump's HHS Report Co-Author Is Headlining a Trans Youth Care Panel At Preeminent Pediatric Academic Conference
The PAS Meeting’s premier event dedicated to gender-related care will be led by academics tied to SEGM and Genspect, groups known for anti-scientific, anti-trans practices.
Thousands of medical professionals will flock to Boston from April 24-27 for the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting. It will be one of the largest gatherings of its kind in the country. PAS is a collaboration of almost two dozen groups, including the Academic Pediatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)—shaping global pediatric care standards and providing certified continuing medical education (CME) credits that physicians need to maintain their licensure.
However, some clinicians have raised concerns about the conference’s sole panel dedicated to transgender health care, sources familiar with the situation told Erin in the Morning. The workshop will be stacked exclusively with academics who have been tied to a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group—the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, or SEGM.
The organization has been denounced for promoting conversion therapy practices and manufacturing the scientific facade for the Trump Administration’s state-sanctioned war on transgender children. Now, panel attendees can use this workshop to earn required CME credits.
“Pediatricians attend PAS to hear the latest in how to better care for the children and adolescents that they serve,” one attendee told Erin in the Morning, who requested anonymity due to the ongoing threat of professional retaliation or state persecution against medical professionals speaking out on trans issues.
“Platforming a one-sided perspective that is not based in medical society guidelines or in the preponderance of the scientific evidence misleads pediatricians, who are attending these talks in good faith that what they hear will be free from bias and rooted in science and good patient care,” they said.
Education-branded content from SEGM has already landed reputable institutions in hot water. Last year, SEGM and its very close affiliate, Genspect (another SPLC-designated hate group) were both approved to disseminate CME content through joint providerships with institutions such as Washington State University and the Michigan State Medical Society.
However, after investigations from Erin in the Morning revealed the unscientific practices promoted by these modules, the ACCME, or the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, placed the materials under review over concerns about scientific validity. The ordeal resulted in at least one joint provider organization losing its ACCME accreditation.
The courses promoted the “social contagion” myth of being transgender; some modules struck from course offerings featured the very same speakers attending the PAS, including Riittakerttu Kaltiala and PAS panel facilitator Dr. Moti Gorin.
The panel looks innocuous enough on the conference schedule. “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth” is advertised as “a scholarly review of the current evidence informing clinical approaches to care.”
In reality, the billed speakers have often been accused of pushing anti-trans ideology framed as “science” and misusing evidence to influence laws and public policies to harm transgender people.
SEGM rejects this classification, arguing it only seeks to establish nonpartisan and “evidence-informed discussions.” Notably, nearly a third of SEGM’s 2024 revenue—the latest year available on ProPublica’s searchable tax filing database—came from DonorsTrust, one of the largest conservative dark money groups in America. It is best known for bankrolling the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
SEGM’s most direct link to the panel is Dr. Anna Hutchinson, who is a psychologist based in the United Kingdom and a paid consultant for SEGM. Not only does she advocate for practices widely considered to be conversion therapy; she also suggested gender-affirming models of care are, themselves, a form of conversion therapy, a pipeline pushing “LGB” youth to become transgender.
The other speaker to self-disclose his SEGM ties in conference documents is Dr. Steven Montante of Richmond, Virginia, who works in private practice. He has also conducted research affiliated with the group through McMaster University, Montante has been compensated by SEGM with honoraria as part of the group’s “speakers bureau, symposia, and expert witness” activities. Montante represents a fringe faction of doctors and anti-trans activists who want to ban some, if not all, kinds of medical gender-transition care until age 25.
Then, there is Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish researcher who is well-known to those tracking threats to trans rights in the states and abroad. Former patients have accused her clinic of abusive behaviors—claims she rejects—including allegations that she prodded minors with invasive sexual interrogations and called child protective services on a family who sought to obtain their child’s treatment legally through a private clinic. In addition, she promotes social contagion myths about transness.
In 2023, Kaltiala partnered with SEGM to host an event in Finland. She also reportedly went out of her way to advocate for the Florida Medical Board’s decision to gut access to gender-affirming care for trans kids—a body packed with Governor Ron DeSantis’s handpicked political appointees.
Finally, the session was assembled and is chaired by Dr. Moti Gorin, a bioethicist based out of Colorado State University. Of the four workshop speakers, he was the only one to respond to a request to comment from Erin in the Morning.
Gorin was a co-author of the Department of Health and Human Services “Gender Dysphoria Report,” which Mother Jones reported was largely shaped by conservative, anti-trans activist Leor Sapir. It has been decried as an ideologically-driven document with a predetermined, Trump-approved outcome: to manufacture a (pseudo)scientific basis to justify Donald Trump’s goal of eradicating the “stain on our Nation” that is trans youth.
Among other red flags—the report deadnamed and misgendered Christine Jorgensen, an early trans celebrity, throughout the document. Its scientific findings were slammed by the American Psychiatric Association as well as groups like USPATH, WPATH, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics for its purported misuse and misrepresentation of evidence.
Report authors also included several current and former affiliates of SEGM including co-founder Evgenia Abbruzzese, as well as Alex Byrne, a proponent of the idea that trans women may just be acting out some sort of elaborate sexual fetish in transitioning. (Byrne and Gorin co-authored a 2025 paper together as well.)
In conversation with Erin in the Morning, Gorin defended the HHS report as a sound review of evidence surrounding pediatric gender care, and rejected the idea it might be political. He further called the SPLC’s hate group list a “slimy hitpiece based on errors and misconceptions.” (SEGM has similarly rejected its place on the SPLC’s hate group list.) Gorin said he is not “against” trans people or any group of people.
At the same time, Gorin’s own past with SEGM has raised eyebrows. He received an honorarium for speaking at the group’s 2023 New York conference, and he presented at their 2025 Berlin gathering, but told Erin in the Morning he received no honorarium for the latter.
Neither Kaltiala nor Gorin’s past collaborations with SEGM are disclosed as a conflict of interest in conference materials, although based on PAS’s narrow self-disclosure policies, it appears neither had to do so. He also co-wrote a 2025 paper with an SEGM researcher, J. Cohn, for which SEGM covered open access fees.
Gorin was also a founding board member for the LGB Courage Coalition—a small but glaringly loud anti-trans group spearheaded by activist Jamie Reed. LGBCC appears to largely fund excursions for activists to testify in favor of anti-trans policies around the country, and publishes hateful content on its modest Substack. Gorin has since stepped down from his role in the organization but declined to tell Erin in the Morning why.
These are the educators that doctors from around the country will be relying on to inform culturally competent care for trans youth.
Texas’s Baylor College of Medicine has been the accredited body for PAS meetings overseeing CMEs for years, which are hosted in different states and cities each time. PAS selects presentations, speakers, and topics, Baylor’s Vice President of Communications, Lori Williams, told Erin in the Morning.
“We have no role in that,” she said. “We only confirm compliance for [ACCME] accreditation, which we did.”
PAS, meanwhile, would not answer questions about how it evaluated submissions for programming. Instead, Glenda Minshew, its Chief Meeting Officer, sent Erin in the Morning “topic-related sessions within the PAS program,” which were subsequently added to the public schedule as an addendum to Gorin’s talk.
It is possible this may have been seen as a sort of carbon offset—to steer attendees to more diverse perspectives without cancelling it or censoring speakers—although it should be noted that most of the supplemental events are tangentially related at best.
The suggestions included an APA-sponsored gathering more generally on LGBTQ pediatric health education; a panel on “inclusive language” in medicine; three “poster presentations,” in a sea of the 3,000+ posters displayed throughout the convention; and finally, “A Suicide Prevention Skills Workshop.” (The session description for this one makes no mention of LGBTQ youth.)
ACCME, the national accrediting body for CME content, told Erin in the Morning in a statement that it was not privy to the specifics of all of the PAS sessions. “If someone has a concern related to an activity offered by an ACCME-accredited provider, we encourage them to consider submitting an inquiry through our regular complaints process,” the statement said.
Many gender care or LGBTQ scholars continue to sound the alarm about SEGM, the academics in its orbit, and its many tendrils—especially as it pertains to “gender exploratory therapy,” “therapy first,” “Cass-informed therapy,” and a number of other monikers that, in some form or another, have been uplifted by those involved in the workshop and compared to conversion therapy.
Gorin does not agree such practices are akin to anti-gay conversion therapy. But other scholars in youth gender care and bioethics argue this view is tinted with anti-trans bias.
“Gender-exploratory therapy is an emergent and under-defined paradigm in trans health care,” writes Florence Ashley, a bioethicist from the University of Alberta.
Indeed, many experts point out that gender exploratory therapy is an under-studied, experimental medical intervention being thrust onto trans minors without high-quality and peer-reviewed longitudinal studies, randomized controlled trials, or any of the other standards of evidence that anti-trans advocates use to discredit the ample literature that does support gender affirming care.
“Gender exploratory therapy” often blames being trans on anything from “repressed homosexuality” to autism and delays treatments like puberty blockers or hormone therapies until irreversible psychological and physical damage has already been done.
Dr. M.A. Miller, an assistant professor of gender, race, and health at WSU when Erin in the Morning first broke the news about that college’s SEGM CME courses in October 2025, told Erin in the Morning that academia is an “intense battleground space of embracing freedom of speech, even if it’s speech that we don’t like.”
However, they said, “it’s another thing entirely” to create a false equivalency between practices with decades of research behind them, and those that have been “unanimously understood as not only pseudoscientific, but also deeply, deeply dangerous.”
Adds Ashley, “How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work,” they said.
“Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition. When you begin from the premise that trans identities are suspect and often rooted in pathology, your therapeutic approach soon becomes indistinguishable from conversion practices.”
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And this is yet another reason why Trump's DOJ is attacking the SPLC and the good work they do protecting us from hate groups. Hate groups that now are now mainstream by the Trump Regime.
Thank you, S. Baum, for this incredibly well researched and written report, which contains very useful talking points with which to refute false claims made about gender by members of this panel of so-called experts who are attending this medical conference. Shame on the PAS for allowing this to happen.
You might add that the argument popular with conservatives - that trans women are just living out a sexual fetish - does not explain the majority of the gender spectrum community - folks who identify as trans men, trans-masculine, non-binary, gender fluid, and gender non-conforming.