LGB Courage Coalition | August 6, 2026
Original article can be viewed HERE
Photo Credit: LGB Courage Coalition

Dr. Solheim’s story is in the Free Press today. We have been beside her since long before it arrived.

We have always known that the gender medicine scandal would not be exposed only by outsiders. It would also be exposed by the people who were inside it — the clinicians who believed what they were told, followed the guidelines they were given, and then examined the underlying evidence for themselves.

Dr. Karla Solheim is one of those people.

She is a board-certified OB/GYN, the former Iowa Section Chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a Fellow of ACOG, and a lesbian. She performed gender-affirming hysterectomies herself until 2023, fully believing — as she was told, as her training required her to believe — that the guidelines governing those procedures were grounded in evidence.

Then she read the evidence.

What She Found

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health — WPATH — is the organization whose Standards of Care underpin the gender medicine guidelines issued by ACOG, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and every other member of the coordinated bloc of medical organizations that presents itself as unified medical consensus on gender medicine.

Dr. Solheim went to the WPATH guidelines after she was faced with concerning patients. The guidelines did not read like most other guidelines do, so she started looking further.

Then she went through hundreds of pages of internal WPATH emails, published by the Alabama Attorney General, and found what those documents show: that WPATH leaders manipulated the methodology and conclusions of their own Standards of Care to produce predetermined outcomes, avoid legislative scrutiny, and present weak and contested evidence as settled science. The documents show WPATH leaders arguing internally that “specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation,” and directing staff to replace language like “insufficient evidence” with “medical necessity.”

What she found was academic fraud — fraud that has been used to guide the clinical decisions of tens of thousands of physicians across the country, including the decision to place puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures into the standard of care for gender-distressed youth.

Dr. Solheim’s response was not to go public immediately. Her response was to try to fix it from the inside.

What She Did

She submitted her article to ACOG risk management before publication and held it pending their response. She wrote to ACOG’s District VI Chair. She raised concerns through ACOG’s CME channels. She wrote to ACOG President Steven Fleischman — by name, to his personal email — asking to be directed to whoever at ACOG handles academic fraud investigations. She wrote directly to ACOG’s Chief of Education and its Chief Legal Officer. In every communication, she explicitly exonerated ACOG, framing the situation as an organization that had acted in good faith on fraudulent representations and still had the opportunity to get ahead of the scandal with its credibility intact.

She spent four months on this.

She received no substantive response to any of it.

What ACOG Did

More than two months after her letter to ACOG’s president went unanswered, ACOG mobilized. Not to investigate. Not to engage the evidence. To manage the speech.

ACOG’s VP of Membership invoked ACOG’s Policy on Public Statements by Board Members, Committee Leaders, Officers, and Those Seeking Nomination to Office. ACOG’s Chief Legal Officer — a woman who spent more than five years as a senior attorney at the Human Rights Campaign before joining ACOG — was brought into every subsequent communication.

You can find out more about her in our Hall of Shame: Entry No. 3: Molly Meegan — ACOG’s Top Lawyer, Partnered With WPATH’s Own Attorney, Abbe David Lowell.

ACOG’s District VI Chair, who had known about Dr. Solheim’s concerns since November 2025, participated in the removal process rather than facilitating any internal resolution.

The meeting to discuss her future was deliberately staged. According to the pre-meeting agenda email, two ACOG clinical officials would join the first part of the call so that Dr. Solheim’s concerns would be “on their radar.” They would then leave. The remaining group — VP of Membership, Chief Legal Officer, District VI Chair — would conduct the discussion about whether her leadership was “compatible” with her views.

At the meeting, Dr. Solheim was given a choice: stop speaking publicly, or resign. She resigned.

ACOG told her she could stay only if she stayed silent. We told her that her courage is worth its weight in gold.

Why This Matters to Us

LGB Courage Coalition exists, in part, because of what happens to people who tell the truth about gender medicine from the inside.

Our Co-Director, Jamie Reed, was a case manager and clinical research coordinator at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She believed what she was told. She followed the protocols she was given. And when she saw what was actually happening to the patients in her care — the children who were not being screened adequately, the red flags that were being ignored, the procedures moving forward without genuine informed consent — she submitted an affidavit to the Missouri Attorney General and published her account in The Free Press.

She is not the first person we have walked alongside. Tamara Pietzke, a Washington State mental health therapist, published her account of mandatory affirmation-only protocols at MultiCare — one of Washington’s largest hospital systems — in The Free Press in February 2024. She was fired for raising questions her supervisors refused to answer. Washington State opened a professional investigation against her. We have been with her through that process too.

What happened to Jamie is what happens to people who tell the truth about this industry. What happened to Karla Solheim is what happens inside the institutions that are supposed to police themselves.

We see Dr. Solheim as a whistleblower. We are proud to be a place where she has found support, and we are honored that she has joined us as our Medical Director — and we are committed to making sure her account reaches the people who need to hear it.

She is not the only physician who has seen what she has seen. She is one of the first to say so from inside a major medical organization, on the record, with documentation.

We Are Here

If you are a physician, a nurse, a researcher, a therapist, a social worker, or anyone else working inside the gender medicine industry who has seen what Dr. Solheim has seen — we want to hear from you.

LGB Courage Coalition was founded because we believe that the medicalization of gender-distressed youth — a population that is disproportionately same-sex attracted — is one of the defining civil rights issues of our time. We believe that the institutions supposed to protect these young people have instead protected the ideology that is harming them.

We have been a place to land for people who told the truth before it was safe to do so. We will continue to be that place.

If you are a whistleblower in medicine and you need support, contact us at lgbcouragecoalition.org.

If you believe this work matters, please donate. The documentation, the research, and the advocacy we do on behalf of people like Dr. Karla Solheim is only possible because of your support.

Share this piece. Follow Dr. Solheim’s Substack. Read the full documentation on our website. Listen to our Informed Dissent Podcast episode.

The medical scandal of our time will not be exposed all at once. It will be exposed one physician at a time, by people like Dr. Karla Solheim who read the evidence and chose not to look away.

We are grateful she is courageous and willing to be named.