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Notes -
I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.
My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.
So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?
The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?
The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.
Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?
Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.
The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.
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