The World Health Organization has quietly axed a trans activist with extreme views on medicating children from its transgender health policy panel.
DailyMail.com reported last week that Florence Ashley was among the WHO’s 21-person committee tasked with setting international treatment guidelines for treating gender dysphoria.
Following the selection, it emerged the Canadian – who has no medical background – had published several papers calling for trans children to be given puberty blockers without mental health evaluations.
The committee members were announced on January 3, but a revision to the list published Monday no longer listed Ashley as a panelist.
Florence Ashley, a law professor in Canada, believes puberty blockers ‘ought to be treated as the default option’ for children with gender dysphoria.
The official line from the WHO is that Ashley had scheduling conflicts that prevented them from participating. It came just a few days after DailyMail.com reporting about their views on allowing transition medicine for children
The WHO said the exclusion was due to ‘a conflict in schedules’. Despite announcing just a few weeks ago that Ashely would be included on the panel, the latest version of the biographies list said Ashely ‘notified WHO in 2023 that they would be unable to participate’.
Ashley – whose pronouns are they/them/that b***h – is a Canadian law professor WHERE? WHAT UNI? who specializes in transgender rights.
They have co-written a study that said puberty blockers and hormone therapies ‘ought to be treated as the default option’ for children with gender dysphoria.
They have also said that social transition, such as calling a child by their preferred pronouns, and puberty blockers ‘should be made readily available to all those who wish for them. Together we must recognise that exploration is best fostered not by delaying transition, but through transition.’
They have a significant TikTok following where they express hardline views on trans issues, calling for mental health checks on trans children to be scrapped before they are given puberty blockers and hormone drugs.
Ashley said on TikTok recently when discussing an academic paper they co-authored on the subject: ‘Is there any reason to ask people to go through a lengthy and complex gender assessment in order to access gender-affirming care, or is that useless and should the time best be put in supporting decision-making.
‘And what our article concludes is that there’s really no evidence that gender assessments work… it’s just a lengthier process for no real reason.’
They added: ‘Gender assessments are really an unnecessary form of gatekeeping that trans communities have been opposing for a while.’
Nearly two-thirds of the panelists are human rights lawyers, activists, and policy advisors, while just slightly over a third of them are trained medical doctors
Insurance claims for puberty blockers in the US have doubled since 2017
Ashley did not publicly acknowledge the WHO’s updated list of panelists or their reason for dropping out, but said on X: ‘Tough time to be a troll.’
The move was met with some celebration online.
Leor Sapir, a politics researcher at the right-leaning thinktank the Manhattan Institute, said: ‘This is a good first step; WHO was probably eager to ditch a figure that could cause embarrassment.
‘One gets the sense this was a symbolic sacrifice at best.’
But the makeup of 20 other panelists has drawn ire from even those at the United Nations.
Reem Alsalem, a Jordanian human rights advocate at the UN, slammed the WHO for including more activists than medical experts.
She said: ‘Stakeholders whose views differ from those held by transgender activist organisations do not appear to have been invited.
‘Such stakeholders include experts from European public health authorities who have taken the lead on developing an evidence-based and consequently cautious approach to youth gender transitions (eg England, Sweden and Finland).’
Eleven members do not have a medical background but are a mixture of activists, social justice advocates, human rights lawyers, STD researchers, and policy advisors.
Seven are trans themselves, ten have a medical background and of those, eight are doctors.
The panel also includes members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a nonprofit dedicated to promoting medical treatments for gender dysphoria, which has been accused of being too pro-medication.
The WHO’s goal with this group is to set global guidelines for the ways that healthcare workers around the world can increase access ‘and utilisation of quality and respectful health services by trans and gender-diverse people.’
The WHO also said that guidelines will focus on five areas of policy: the provision of transition care including hormone therapies, health polices that support gender-inclusive care, and laws that respect an individual’s right to express their own gender in the way that feels right to them.
These laws often include new updates to official documents such as IDs to reflect the individual’s self-identified gender, not the one they were born with.
