Groupthink or Plagiarism? Gender Doctor Is Challenged in Arizona

His deposition raises questions about the ACLU's ethics

Mar 20, 2025

Three major lawsuits attack the Trump administration’s policies on “trans kids.”1 In each one, the plaintiffs have tapped Daniel Shumer as an expert witness. An endocrinologist, he’s testified in similar suits against conservative states since around 2021.

Just as Shumer gears up to fight for pediatric gender medicine (PGM) on the national stage, he’s been hit with a plagiarism charge.

Lawyers for Arizona alleged this month that Shumer copy-pasted his expert report in a challenge to that state’s law protecting girls’ sports. Typical of the genre, Shumer’s submission is a word salad of sexes assigned at birth and incongruent gender identities.

This post is about Shumer and his generation of pediatric gender doctors. From the start of their careers they focused on extracurricular activities — yet hospitals elevated them like they were medical wunderkinds. Now they may be headed for a fall.

The theme running through these doctors’ stories is advocacy. They value it deeply and at least a few pursued it before discovering PGM. Though I criticize their work here, it’s not because I look down on advocacy. I was a legal aid lawyer for six years and consider myself an anti-PGM advocate now. Advocacy is not all about chanting slogans and manipulating people. It actually requires rigorous investigation and original thinking. I’ll show you why the gender doctors’ work doesn’t qualify.

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room.

Why Are They So Gay?

About 2.5% of American adults are gay men. Men make up about 62% of practicing physicians – but a smaller share of psychiatrists and only a third of pediatricians. So you might expect gay men to comprise less than 3.5% of prominent pediatric gender doctors.

But when I rang off the ones I could think of (not a scientific measure … except by the standards of gender medicine), at least half were gay men: the psychiatrists Jack Turban, Aron Janssen, and Dan Karasic; endocrinologists Shumer and Christopher Lewis; pediatricians Robert Garofalo and Jason Rafferty (also a psychiatrist) and surgeon Blair Peters.

You knew this already. Everyone knows this. Unfortunately, the only gender skeptics talking about it are people with an ax to grind against gay men. Some of the homophobia even comes from the left. To avoid stoking any X beefs, I’ll quote a radical feminist of yore to show you what I mean. Marilyn Frye in 1983:

“If worship of the phallus is central to phallocratic culture, then gay men, by and large, are more like ardent priests than infidels, and the gay rights movement may be the fundamentalism of the global religion which is Patriarchy.”

If the world is ruled not by Jews but by penises – anyway, that’s not where I’m coming from. I start with a banal hypothesis: anyone looking at gender nonconformity through a medical lens (because they are a gay med student who never gets off campus) is bound to fall down the trans rabbit hole because being gay is not a medical problem.

To the extent some gay men lurk around the trans youth scene for evil reasons, their prevalence probably matches that of predatory straight men who hunt in other settings.

As a lesbian, I chronicle my treacherous sisters with great interest. There are prominent lesbian gender ideologues in media, politics, and academia. Yet they don’t seem to dominate PGM.

Why so many gay men out front? Why relatively few lesbians? In this post I can’t answer those questions definitively. But I’ll speculate.

Cure Poverty with Estrogen

Adult gender medicine grew out of cutting-edge medical clinics in Northern Europe in the mid-20th century, then developed in American ivory towers from 1966 through the 70s.

Pediatric gender medicine, on the other hand, has its roots in the slums. Young “street queens” (some of them underage) began using estrogen in the 1950s. By 1966, the endocrinologist Harry Benjamin seems to have been prescribing hormones to runaway boys in San Francisco. “Public health clinics” joined the game in 1967.

In 1974, a young endocrinologist named Norman Spack treated Boston homeless youth with hormones out of a van. He later described them as “throwaway kids” who’d been shunned by their families for gender nonconformity.

In 1979, the gender field’s first “Standards of Care” (SOC1) advised doctors only to trans minors who were “declared by the courts as legal adults[.]” SOC1’s failure to contemplate parental consent suggests gender doctors treated runaways but not teens living in stable households. (These “medical” guidelines did not weigh the physical or psychological factors that distinguished kids from adults, only the legal ones.)

In 1995, Robert Garofalo had just completed his training as a pediatrician. A gay idealist on a “fellowship in pediatric advocacy” in Boston, he was inspired by do-gooder parents and an encounter with the gay man Marsha P. Johnson:

“I was mesmerized by her. I was a meek, nerdy cis-gender white man and she was this tall, powerful black drag queen. She talked about her life's work and activism helping young drag queens and other homeless youth get food and clothing. I sat there in awe.”

A social worker cajoled Garofalo into prescribing estrogen to a 16-year old boy. He took to viewing PGM as a poverty practice:

“I saw through the lens of my patients the harsh social realities facing transgender people and the challenges, in particular, facing transgender women with regard to homelessness, violence, and HIV. I cared for my first HIV-infected primary care adolescent patient at the Borum; it was a young transgender woman.”

Garofalo earned his Masters in Public Health from nearby Harvard in 1999. Harvard’s teaching hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston (where Spack practiced), had started treating gender-disordered “patients with a broad range of … pubertal stages.” That might have included puberty blockers; SOC5 (1998) endorsed the practice.

Jason Rafferty followed a similar path. He earned an MPH along with his MD from Harvard in 2011. In 2013 he published a letter in the Providence Journal advocating for gay marriage. Citing a recent position paper of the American Academy of Pediatrics, he linked the policy to suicide prevention:

“Within my first six months practicing as a pediatrician, the hardest thing I faced was when a patient who identified as a sexual minority committed suicide because his family and community would not accept him. In medical school, the vast majority of LGBT patients I met were homeless, runaways, or in their own words - ‘throwaways.’ These unnecessary (and unfortunately not uncommon) tragedies are all the ‘evidence’ I need to guide my practice.”

Today, Rafferty is facing suit for conspiracy to defraud the public by his former patient. He’s accused of drafting an AAP statement about PGM in 2018 that distorts the evidence for it. So it’s interesting to see him put “evidence” in scare quotes.

Jack Turban wanted to advocate for patients by telling their stories. As a med student at Yale in the mid-2010s, he sought guidance from a “famous doctor-writer” on faculty, Lisa Sanders:

“I explained that I was interested in how LGBTQ patients do poorly when doctors don’t understand them. I laid out a list of potential stories: the gay man whose sexually transmitted infection kills him because he was afraid to tell his doctor about being gay, a lesbian who is too afraid to tell her psychiatrist about the shame her sexuality causes her, and a short story about how doctors support transgender kids.”

Sanders expressed interest only in the last idea. So Turban began visiting Spack’s PGM clinic once a month. In Turban’s words, Spack “believed that being transgender wasn’t a condition of the brain, but of the body.”

Birth of an Expert

And so the path to Boston was paved for doctor-advocates.

Daniel Shumer attended Northwestern for college and med school, graduating with an MD in 2008. He completed a pediatrics residency at Vermont Children’s Hospital before it had a gender clinic (though it could have been transing kids without fanfare).

Then, the big time: a pediatric endocrinology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital under the tutelage of Spack and an MPH from Harvard in 2015. Upon graduation he took his expertise to the University of Michigan — Ann Arbor, where he set up a new PGM clinic.

In 2016 Shumer argued along with co-authors in Pediatrics, the AAP’s journal, that “religious freedom” bills hurt kids:

“We are concerned with the environment of intolerance they likely create, the discriminatory messages they may teach, and their consequences for the health and welfare of young people with minority sexual or gender identities.”

Those consequences included “self-harm, suicidal ideation, and depressive symptoms.” The authors did not suggest teaching kids that the bills were borne out of philosophical disagreement — not “hate” for them.

The next year Turban, who was wrapping up his MD and Masters in Health Science (not to be confused with biology) at Yale, published an essay in the New York Times about a boy named Hannah whose puberty had been blocked:

“Critics point to flawed studies that suggest that roughly 80 percent of prepubescent children ultimately change their minds about being transgender. Even if this were true, would it have been worth forcing Hannah to live as a boy, putting her at risk for depression and perhaps suicide?”

Turban had realized his goal of advocating for patients in print. (His mentor Sanders might have helped — she was a columnist at the Times herself.) He soon went on to a psychiatry residency at Harvard.

A few months after the Times published Turban’s essay, a young gay endocrinologist named Christopher Lewis opened a youth gender center at Washington University in St. Louis. He was just three years out of residency, where he’d learned about PGM through an “advocacy rotation.” The new clinic engaged in community advocacy and provided legal assistance to patients. For example, Lewis taught the locals that sex is not binary. Educating his colleagues about “transgender health” is the part of being a doctor he finds most rewarding.

By now Garofalo, the drag queen stan, was ensconced at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Even though he’d sought out an MPH and an entire fellowship in advocacy in the 90s, in 2016 he struck a bashful tone about his extra-medical activities:

“When Lurie’s stepped into this [PGM] space three years ago, there was no way that we imagined ourselves on the front lines of the next great LGBT civil rights battle over the use of bathrooms and locker rooms by young people who are transgender. We believed that we were meeting a need for medical services, but have increasingly found ourselves involved in advocacy—helping policy-makers and the public come to understand that the notion of a binary determination of gender is antiquated.”

Back in Michigan, Shumer and a pediatrician named Ellen Selkie advocated for PGM by teaching mental health professionals that it was “best practices” for “gender non-conforming youth.” (The recording is undated but seems to be from 2017-19.) At the end, they encouraged the audience to recruit pediatricians in their towns to practice PGM themselves.

Shumer spoke about the history and theory of PGM and Selkie addressed the medical aspects. She told some whoppers – for example, that parents were wrong to worry that cross-sex hormones would cause mood issues. She pointed out the testosterone (steroids) prescribed to girls just boosted them to male levels – without mentioning that their bodies are not the same as a male’s. When asked about PGM’s long-term effects, she acknowledged trans adults had more health problems and higher cancer rates but suggested that was due to their “trouble accessing healthcare.”

Shumer hung back while Selkie parried audience concerns about hormones, not correcting any of her misinformation. He did answer a question about whether insurance covered PGM. He puffed out his chest, set his jaw, and said “We’re pretty good at convincing insurance to cover it. I can be PRET-ty convincing!”

Endocrinologist looks the other way while his colleague misleads the audience about endocrinology

Shumer testified in February that his salary is about $205,000 (he’s also earned about $150,000 in expert witness fees since 2020). Endos can earn more than this. Academia pays less than full-time clinical practice, so it’s not that Shumer’s salary is suspiciously low. But he is probably choosing this line of work for reasons other than financial.

“The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness”

In 2017, the Huffington Post published Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness. Recounting vignettes and disturbing statistics about drug abuse, gay-on-gay cruelty, and suicide, it argued that “It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men.” The piece reverberated for years. (Here’s an affecting 2020 nod to it in Tulane’s student paper by Shahamat Uddin.)

The author was a gay journalist named Michael Hobbes.

In 2018 Hobbes launched an entertaining podcast, You’re Wrong About, that challenged popular understandings of events from 10-60 years ago. It played off nostalgia and disdain for regressive media narratives. Over time on social media he traded in gay history for queer rants about the journalist Jesse Singal. In other words, he was now a shill for PGM.

For a deep dive into Hobbes’ propagandizing, try this Singal piece that contains the perfect disclosure: “I dislike Hobbes personally.”

Hobbes’ 2017 story suggested he was lonely. He wanted to be part of a strong gay community but struggled to find it. I get it. I’m around Hobbes’ age and never managed to build a lesbian friend group. Meanwhile, all the organized activities are “LGBT” — roller derby, cycling, the bar association pushing unconstitutional laws, the employee resource group where I got dog-piled by straight women for defending girls’ sports…

I wonder if Hobbes couldn’t find the gay world he sought and said OK. LGBT it is. Christen me a cis white gay and tell me what to read.

Now the co-host of Maintenance Phase, Hobbes purported to debunk criticism of PGM last year with help from four esteemed trans activists. During the episode he “pull[ed] rank … as a gay person” to vanquish anti-PGM arguments from a personal perspective — nevermind all the gay people like me who disagree with him. Anyway, he seems comfortable in his bubble. Maybe joining the PGM cheerleading squad helped him meet kindly homos who talk about protecting the vulnerable. An upgrade from the cretins he described in 2017.

I see Hobbes’ dim view of gay culture reflected in the words of gender doctors. Garofalo in 2016:

“[As an] openly gay man, many wrongfully assume that my interest and devotion [to PGM] stem from an identity as a sexual minority, but let us be honest that the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community has not always stood (as they should) in support and solidarity for transgender people, so quite honestly, my identity as a gay man has not been at the core of my commitment to transgender people or my interest in transgender health.”

The surgeon Blair Peters (he/they), in a marketing video for his employer, Oregon Health & Sciences University:

“I myself went through my own sort of gender identity and exploration of my own queerness. And as like a teenager and young adult, I clung to the term gay ‘cause that’s all I had. That’s all I knew, but it never felt right. I never felt at home in that label. And it was over time as I started engaging more and more with the queer and trans and gender diverse population that I really felt comfortable and started encountering people that looked like, and felt like I felt.”

Peters is apparently trying to drum up business from alienated gay teens for his cosmetic surgery practice. (Watch the video.) The reason it’s an effective sales pitch is because so many gay people don’t feel “at home in that label.”

And maybe it’s more than a sales pitch. Reviewing these bitter sentiments toward gay men, I can’t help but wonder if disillusionment pulled Hobbes, Garofalo, and Peters toward PGM, which annihilates young gay sexuality.

Peters lied. This photo from his wedding reception proves he is gay, not queer.

But why don’t we see lesbians leading the PGM world – why just gay men?

First, maybe lesbians are entering the field but not dominating it, finding the media spotlight, or seizing expert witness gigs. Stanford Med showcases its young gender doctors and they are mostly female:

Second, maybe lesbians are more likely to shun gender ideology than gay men are. The three American LGB orgs – LGB Alliance USA, Gays Against Groomers, and LGB Courage Coalition – are all led by lesbians. In my everyday life I’ve run into quietly-questioning lesbians and heard of more through the grapevine, but the gay men are all rah-rah. Gareth Roberts wrote a whole book, Gay Shame, about British gay men’s rigid devotion to an ideology most don’t even seem to understand.

Advocates Go to Court

So Shumer built his career in a lane that prized advocacy. While doctors in other specialties might rise by developing new treatment protocols or making a novel finding, Shumer just spread rationalizations. From the 2010s training:

Precocious puberty and delayed puberty are real medical conditions. They have nothing to do with believing you are not the sex you are. This sophistry is classic Spack.

Anyway, Shumer started serving as an expert witness in trans-kid lawsuits in 2020 or 2021. In lawsuits challenging PGM bans brought by the ACLU and other firms, endos were part of a team of witnesses that included psychiatrists, ethicists, and pediatricians. When challenging sex-segregated sports laws, endos could be the only experts – downplaying or denying the athletic edge that boys hold over girls, particularly if puberty-blocked.

The ACLU has had mixed success with pediatric endos. Melinda Penn knocked it out of the park in Gavin Grimm, a school bathroom case that the Fourth Circuit decided in August 2020. Deanna Adkins sailed through her sleazy testimony in the successful lawsuit challenging Arkansas’ PGM ban in the fall of 2022. The state barely challenged her – even though earlier that year West Virginia’s lawyers demolished her expert report in a sports case (the judge in WV ruled for the state without addressing Adkins’ testimony).

Endos’ role at trial should be to address the effects, side effects, risks, and harms of blockers and cross-sex hormones. They shouldn’t testify about PGM’s benefits because all the alleged benefits are psychological (not their area of expertise). But pro-PGM endos are determined to gloss over the physical impact of PGM. That leaves them with little to say beyond mumbo jumbo about gender identity … and baseless lies.

Alabama deposed Shumer and then moved to exclude parts of his testimony last year for lacking a reliable basis, including his opinion that withholding gender med from kids would cause suicide and gender identity has a biological basis.

In 2016 Shumer published an article acknowledging that no genes or brain structure had been linked to gender identity — contradicting his later expert report. Alabama walks us through the part of its deposition of him that addressed it (citations omitted):

“When confronted with his about face, Dr. Shumer claimed that he developed a newfound ‘understanding of gender identity’ ‘as having biologic underpinnings’ since his 2016 article. Given that the latest date on the relevant sources cited in his report is 2014—two years before his published article—that explanation made little sense. So Dr. Shumer understandably moved away from it when he was then asked about statements from the Endocrine Society in 2021 finding that ‘a clear causative biological underpinning of gender identity remains to be demonstrated’ and that ‘it is unknown if the choice to function in society in male, female or other role[s] is’ ‘affected by biological factors.’ At that, Dr. Shumer abandoned his claim of a ‘strong biological foundation,’ saying: ‘I agree that we don’t have [a] biologic variable that clearly causes a certain change in gender identity.’”

The court has not yet ruled on Alabama’s motion.

Arizona’s Move

Shumer now serves as an expert witness in a challenge to Arizona’s law protecting girls’ sports. The leaders of the state legislature are defending the law because the Arizona Attorney General opposes it. They retained D. John Sauer, a former Solicitor General of Missouri who has since been nominated to serve as US Solicitor General and is awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

Following a brutal deposition, Arizona moved to exclude Shumer’s testimony entirely. (Download the motion and depo transcript here.) He’s simply not an expert on sports. You can tell because he plagiarized his report. Plus: he can’t back up his opinion that boys don’t hold an athletic advantage over girls before puberty (they do) and he made up his definitions of sex and gender identity just for the sake of winning lawsuits.

Here’s a sample of the deposition – there are many more pages like this:

Arizona recaps the plagiarism:

“At least 22 times found in 19 paragraphs of his expert report, Dr. Shumer plagiarized the reports of two experts not involved in this litigation, Dr. Stephen Rosenthal and Dr. Joshua Safer. Shockingly, Dr. Shumer plagiarized the majority of the substantive paragraphs in his report.”

Excerpt from comparison charts submitted by Arizona. Note that Shumer excised WPATH from the spiel, perhaps because it was disgraced last year.

Plagiarizing a court report isn’t as bad as stealing paragraphs in a novel or a dissertation. When you sign your name to a court filing you’re saying something like “I think these statements are true and the analysis is fair,” not “this masterpiece reflects no one’s creative vision but my own.” Still, copying another researcher’s work is pathetic and suggests you are not actually an expert.

Worse, Arizona caught Shumer in lies about the plagiarism – claiming he didn’t rely on other expert reports when drafting it, for example. That said, Arizona isn’t arguing he perjured himself. I don’t think that’s because he’s clearly innocent but rather because the accusation is hard to prove and nuclear (perjury is a crime). It’s easier on the judge to just say: give Shumer the boot because he’s not qualified.

Advocate-Doctors Work for Lawyers

Most interesting to me is Shumer’s admission that he never described gender identity as a “component of sex” until he started testifying in court — and in fact used to define sex differently. This adds to the mounting circumstantial evidence that trans rights lawyers coach expert witnesses on what to say about matters that are supposedly scientific.

This has ethical implications. For one thing, attorneys may be making statements they know are false when they quote or paraphrase the experts. After all, they made up the lines themselves, presumably after reviewing the studies that don’t support them. The false claims include: gender identity has a biological basis; gender medicine prevents suicide; a boy is a girl.

Shumer claims he was never prompted to define sex or gender identity in a clinical setting. If true, that’s extraordinary. No parent ever said to him, “so wait a sec, are you giving my kid a sex change or what?” No maladroit teen ever characterized the treatments in a way Shumer felt the need to correct. Or maybe Shumer behaves in the clinic the same way he did at the training with Selkie — he lets the conversation ride.

With Arizona’s lead attorney, Sauer, headed to the Justice Department, we can expect to see Trump follow this playbook in the three big lawsuits challenging his PGM policies (defunding hospitals that trans kids and keeping boys of girls’ sports). Shumer is the plaintiffs’ expert endo in each of them and his reports there contain similar passages. If Arizona’s motion to exclude his testimony is successful, future courts should hold that against him when reviewing similar motions.

In the Alabama PGM lawsuit, Shumer was technically retained by the US government (which allied with the plaintiffs). Now he’s retained to oppose the US government in three lawsuits. Last week Arizona asked DOJ to investigate whether Shumer’s service for and against America overlapped, and if so, whether that was illegal or unethical.

Gender Medicine Is Plagiarism

While Shumer’s plagiarism is particularly egregious, all the pro-PGM expert reports are formulaic and glue together the same vacuous phrases.

The theory of how PGM helps gender-nonconforming kids can only be defended using the same set of words because the theory is just words. Spack is wrong when he says a physical ailment causes gender dysphoria. If his disciples were to go off script and describe their patients’ problems as they present, they’d end up speaking not about bodies but about minds – Peter Pan syndrome, eating disorders, trauma, internalized homophobia, jealousy, gnosticism, madness.

In the Michigan training, the pediatrician Selkie says something revealing:

“The teen in front of me will say that my goals for starting on testosterone, for example, are to get facial hair and to get a deeper voice. But as a physician, my reason for treating is to treat the gender dysphoria.”

Kids are telling their doctors that they want cross-sex hormones for cosmetic reasons and doctors are hearing that desire as “gender dysphoria” caused by a physical problem in their bodies.

Advocates listen to the people they represent. Gender doctors just listen to each other. They’re advocates for PGM.

In 2021, Shumer talked about his young son on a Facebook Livechat:

“You know we see gender stereotypical behavior at such a young age. My son is doing things that his female cousins aren’t doing and vice versa. And on the other hand that doesn’t necessarily mean anything because I hear all the time from some parents that, Yep, they could tell their child, there was something different about their gender identity ever since they could talk or walk and then other parents say, You know what, that’s not my story at all, that there was nothing different …”

This is blather. Shumer calls himself an expert on children’s gender but he has nothing meaningful to say about the subject. He seems like a man who learned his craft from a guru, vaulted to power at a young age, donned a cape and never doubted himself. He has no idea that he’s supposed to have ideas.

Bad Facts

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