And it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker for the evening. Andrew N. Ferguson is chairman of the United States Federal Trade Commission. Mr. Ferguson was nominated by President Joe Biden in 2023 to serve as a member of the five-member Federal Trade Commission and was then selected by President Donald Trump to chair the commission in January of 2025. Before this, Mr. Ferguson was solicitor general of the Commonwealth of Virginia. And prior to that, he served as chief counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the then Republican leader of the United States Senate. He also served as a Republican counsel on the US Senate Judiciary Committee and practiced law at several law firms in Washington DC. Chairman Ferguson earned his undergraduate degree and law degree from the University of Virginia. And after law school, he clerked for Judge Karen L. Henderson of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and also for US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Now, the mission of the Federal Trade Commission is, quote, to vigorously enforce the law to protect Americans from anti-competitive, unfair, and deceptive business practices without unduly burdening legitimate business activity. And they do this through a combination of law enforcement, advocacy, research, and education.
So, you may be asking, why in the world has a group like the North Carolina Family Policy Council invited the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to speak at our event? Like Mitch said, that's a great question. I'm so glad you asked, and I'm going to answer it for you.
Last summer, I had the privilege of hearing Chairman Ferguson speak at three separate events during three consecutive weeks in the month of July. The first event was a daylong workshop the FTC held in Washington DC on the dangers of gender affirming care for minors. At this event, the FTC was essentially examining the administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and the performance of gender surgery on minors as an unfair and deceptive trade practice. The next week, I heard Chairman Ferguson at Alliance Defending Freedom's annual summit in Orlando, Florida, speaking about child welfare and parental rights. And then the next week, he was at our annual family policy council conference in Indianapolis, highlighting a number of incredible pro-family advancements that had been championed and implemented during the first five months or so of the current presidential administration.
And I will tell you, in each instance I was incredibly impressed and encouraged by what I heard. And frankly I was blown away that it was the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who was in many respects leading the charge on a number of our core issues from the standpoint of our core values. I said to myself then, self, we have got to get this guy to come speak at one of our events because he has so much important to say, and I'm so glad that we have been able to accomplish that. So with that, Mr. Chairman, thank you for being with us this evening. Please come forward and share with us about your very important work at the Federal Trade Commission. Friends, Andrew Ferguson.
Good evening. I promise, notwithstanding my July speaking schedule, that I do do work other than speaking.
But I'm really grateful for that kind introduction. And I want to thank John for that introduction. And I also want to thank Mitch for inviting me to speak to you all this evening and for organizing this incredible event. For over 35 years, the North Carolina Family Policy Council has faithfully served North Carolina's families. And it has done so with an unwavering commitment to the biblical values that inspired our nation's founders and our entire civilization and led them to adopt a constitution that is the envy of the world.
This event pays homage to those famous words penned by Thomas Jefferson which speak to our equality as creatures and our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We would do well to recall that these words were written in a spirit of defiance against tyranny. But tyranny has many forms and it is not exclusive to kings.
We can find tyranny in the collusion of private companies and public officials to silence your dissent. We find tyranny in the oppressive mandates of regulators and bureaucrats. And we find tyranny in the exploitation of children online, in school, and in medical clinics. Tyranny is nothing more than the abuse of one's power to subordinate the interests of many to the ideology or profit of a few.
Above all, however, tyranny stems from a rejection of those truths that our founders believed were self-evident and of any truth that might restrain the perverse will of the tyrant. The tyrant will not submit to what is true. He denies the force of reason or of right because he interprets freedom as license, as power, as indifference to good and evil. For the tyrant, as Pope St. John Paul II explained not so long ago, the essence of freedom becomes self-love carried to the point of contempt for God and for neighbor, which leads to an unbridled affirmation of self-interest and refuses to be limited by any demand of justice.
Without obedience to the truth, the truth about God and man, the truth about man and woman, and the truth about virtue and vice, human freedom becomes the means of our enslavement. Rather than a path to flourishing, it becomes a cage of confusion, of libertinism, and of relativism.
The only kind of human freedom that can be the foundation of a healthy republic such as ours must be anchored in the truth about our purpose as creatures whose earthly mission is to steward God's creation to make it plentiful and to fill it with many more souls devoted to God. Indeed, true freedom is not found in our mere capacity to prefer and pursue one option over another. Apes and lesser animals enjoy that freedom. True freedom consists in our capacity to choose what is good and true, to pursue our own flourishing, or as Jefferson and his fellow patriots called it, happiness.
In the hereafter, when we meet God face to face, we will no longer be able to choose anything other than him. And yet, our freedom will be beyond present comprehension.
If we live our earthly life in obedience to the truth, the truth that is the answer to Pontius Pilate's question posed in the Gospel according to St. John, what is truth? We will be truly free because we will have a heart and will set on union with God who is all truth.
I have stressed here the important connection between freedom and truth. And I did so because tonight's topic illustrates how a person's freedom to choose the good in many cases depends on whether others are truthful about content and consequences of someone's choice. Nowhere is this more evident than in the life-altering medical procedures which for good reason our society has always required to depend on the informed consent of the patient. But the informed consent of the patient is meaningless if surgeons, nurses, psychiatrists, and medical associations misrepresent or altogether omit the possible risks and benefits of a procedure to a patient. You all, I'm sure, are familiar with the all too common story of children and parents who underwent so-called gender affirming care. Lured by the promise of a failsafe cure for all their mental health problems and kept in the dark about the permanent and irreversible effects of medical transitioning, these young people and their parents were coaxed to open their minds, their hearts, and their wallets to the miraculous healing powers of puberty blockers, hormone injections, and sex change surgeries.
There's only one problem. It isn't true. And that's not from me. That's a quote from someone else. That's a quote from The Atlantic written by the same reporter who had previously accused the Trump administration of carrying out a, quote, nasty campaign, end quote, on this issue. Indeed, mainstream press outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic now acknowledge that the scientific consensus on which these health claims were based, particularly the claim that parents with gender distressed children faced a choice between suicide or sex change surgeries, was based primarily on politics and not science. And litigation against the Biden administration by the state of Alabama revealed that federal officials, including Rachel Levine, were encouraging medical groups to write guidelines favoring pediatric sex change procedures, even as those groups acknowledged a lack of evidence that such procedures were good for children. This was a shocking and unforgivable betrayal of your children by our government.
Europeans have a few decades of empirical evidence to offer us on this too. A 2020 report on gender identity services commissioned by the UK's National Health Service, called the Cass report after its author, found no evidence to support the claim that puberty blockers improved a child's body image or gender dysphoria. No evidence to support the claim that gender affirming treatment or sex hormone injections reduced a child's risk of suicide. And no evidence to support the claim that social transition in children led to positive mental health outcomes. And most importantly, the report did not find sufficient evidence to support the claim that gender affirming care, puberty blockers, or sex hormone injections had a positive effect on the psychological well-being of patients.
This point was driven home all too clearly when Justice Alito asked an ACLU lawyer in the Skrmetti case whether there was any evidence that these procedures reduced the risk of suicidality, and the lawyer, obliged by his duty to be honest with the court, had to answer no.
Since the publication of that report and thanks in large part to efforts of organizations like the North Carolina Family Policy Council as well as the election of our President Donald Trump, we've seen tremendous movement on this front. Just one week after his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order declaring that the federal government will no longer fund those treatments and instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind or amend all policies that rely on standards of care promoted by the World Professional Association of Gender Health or WPATH.
In keeping with the president's order, HHS has issued two proposed rules that would prohibit Medicaid and Medicare from funding hospitals that perform or for individuals electing to undergo that care, including puberty blockers, sex change hormones, and surgical operations. In addition, HHS published a comprehensive review of all of the available evidence and best practices for pediatric gender dysphoria, which formed the basis for Secretary Kennedy's recent declaration that, quote, sex-rejecting procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors, and therefore fail to meet professionally recognized standards of healthcare.
Outside the federal government, more than 25 states have passed laws prohibiting such procedures for children. And the Supreme Court decisively affirmed in Skrmetti the constitutionality of such laws. In state courts across the country, there are over 20 cases involving detransitioners who allege that they were victims of medical malpractice by their physicians and therapists.
One such much-watched case in New York, a jury awarded Fox Varian, a detransitioner who underwent a double mastectomy at the age of 16, a $2 million award in damages because her therapist and surgeon did not follow accepted standards of medical care in treating her gender dysphoria. Soon thereafter, the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons announced their new conclusions that such procedures should not be performed on children or minors, citing the low quality of the evidence that these procedures are effective at all, as well as concerns about their long-term harms for children. In the face of these developments, even the New York Times published an article acknowledging that the scientific consensus that had prevailed in the United States was generated by medical associations as a political matter without evidence to support it. Under this administration, we are witnessing a present-day reckoning both inside and outside of government for those who have tricked or unfairly treated children and families under the auspices of medical care. And that's where my role as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission comes to bear on this issue: whether children, their parents, or adults seeking so-called gender-affirming care were deceived about its efficacy, its benefits, and its risks.
Consistent with the FTC's authority under section five of the Federal Trade Commission Act to prosecute deceptive acts or practices, we've taken steps to investigate whether claims made by proponents of so-called gender affirming care are misleading or deceptive and whether such claims have been the cause of consumer harm to parents and to children. This past July, the commission convened a groundbreaking workshop that gathered detransitioners, their parents, medical professionals, legal experts, and whistleblowers to discuss whether and in what ways those involved in this type of care misrepresent the effectiveness of surgical interventions or otherwise deceive individuals about their purported benefits. Shortly thereafter, we issued a request for public comment on the same issues. And after the public comment closed and we received thousands and thousands of comments, we undertook a major investigation to evaluate whether the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, or WPATH have made or assisted others in making false or unsubstantiated representations or engaged in unfair practices in connection with the marketing and advertisement of pediatric gender dysphoria treatment. A district court is going to hear a challenge to my investigation against the AAP later this month. And a district court previously enjoined the FTC's ability to implement or enforce our subpoenas issued to WPATH and to the Endocrine Society. But I tell you this, our investigation against those entities will continue nonetheless.
Finally, we hired Glenna Goldis, a brilliant consumer protection lawyer, to serve as a senior litigator in our Bureau of Consumer Protection. Many believe that Glenna was fired from her position as an assistant attorney general in New York for her public criticism of activists and clinicians that may have painted a misleading picture of the efficacy of puberty blockers and surgical transitions. At the FTC, Glenna is taking a leading role in investigating potentially false or deceptive claims about health care and beyond.
In taking these actions, I am not guided by partisan or ideological concerns. As chairman of the FTC, I am not charged with passing moral judgment on anyone's ideology, lifestyle, or medical choices. But I am charged with protecting my fellow citizens from deception. And I am responsible for making sure that those who make claims about the treatment of vulnerable children are held to the same standard we apply to everyone else who engages in commerce. People confronted with the choice of making life-altering changes to their bodies deserve all the facts. They deserve actual evidence, not politics, on whether these interventions are going to improve their lives. They deserve the actual truth, not obfuscation and propaganda on the risks of treatment, especially when the patient is a child just beginning his or her journey through life.
Earlier, I spoke of a present-day reckoning for those who have advocated for medical interventions with apparent disregard for the truth of whether those interventions are safe or even work as intended. While that reckoning might be necessary for justice, it isn't sufficient for healing.
Beyond protecting our young boys and girls from manipulation and deception, we need to foster our nation's commitment to an evidence-based, nonpartisan approach to the care and support of gender-distressed Americans. Such an approach avoids the dogmatism of those who see no differences among gender-distressed people, no alternative pathways to their healing, and no future life for them except one that involves walking the road of surgical and hormonal transition. That dogmatism is caused not only by a certain ideological blindness, but also and more fundamentally an unwillingness to listen, to hear the desperate cries of the distress of children who have undergone these procedures and the voices of those who have borne the weight of years of intense suffering and trauma. Even the word science, rather than being true science, has become a shibboleth, a dogma, a magic incantation shouted to silence detransitioners and their supporters.
In pursuit of this dogma, in pursuit of a politics of relativism, many have lost sight of the truth. In the end, gender-distressed Americans need what all Americans need: a free society built on fidelity to the truth, where, quote, the cry of those who suffer finds welcome and listening opens paths toward liberation, making us eager and ready to contribute to building a civilization of love.
Those inspiring words come from the Lenten message of Pope Leo XIV, and the society he envisions would not be possible without organizations like this one which work to promote, preserve, and protect the cornerstone of any authentic civilization of love: families who live out the biblical mandate to be fruitful and multiply, protected and served by a government devoted to their flourishing and to the common good of all. In such a society, every suffering child will find a home to welcome them, a community that supports them, and a society that protects them from predation and harm. And while I am chairman, the FTC will work night and day to protect your families and to promote their flourishing.
Thank you for all you have done and will do in service to families of the great state of North Carolina. I look forward to our conversation and God bless the United States.
Well, again, I'm so pleased to be here. And the way that I have conceived of this issue in terms of the law that I enforce is that one of the things that the FTC has done the longest, the FTC is over 100 years old, 111 years old, is that it has gone... You look great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of work done. But is that for decades and decades and decades, the FTC has prosecuted people who make bunk health claims. And I mean from literal snake oil salesmen in the early 20th century to pharmaceutical companies who misrepresented either the risks or the benefits of their drugs.
Even the Biden administration, I imagine they regret this now, but even the Biden administration brought claims against companies selling supplements and they would make all sorts of crazy claims about their supplements or cures for autism and things like that. And the Biden administration would pursue these cases, and they would win because this is what the FTC Act is for. And one of my predecessors, my extraordinarily left-wing predecessor, put out a press release after one of these victories that said, quote, this is a reminder to all markets that in America you can't make health claims without strong science to back them. And I said, yep, I agree.
And so, but I think a consistent theme runs through these sort of junk science health claims that the commission has had almost a century of experience dealing with, which is they prey on the vulnerable. Snake oil salesmen were not walking down the streets of early 20th century America looking for healthy people or people who had their wits about them or people whose lives were going well. They were looking for people who were in trouble and needed a way out. And it has consistently been the case across the entire American economy that people who are going to deceive someone look for people in a vulnerable position. And if you have not seen the footage, because we recorded the whole thing and put it online and it's available for free, of our workshop and a panel that I moderated with detransitioners and their parents, there are no more vulnerable people in the world than children who are experiencing gender distress and their parents who are at their wits' end about what to do for these children that they love more than anything on earth in the face of a doctor saying it's suicide or surgery. And this is just sort of the same sort of story that human history is laced with, which is people preying on vulnerable people in their time of need. And a consistent theme with all the detransitioners that I've ever talked to was that when they went to the doctor in gender distress, they had suffered some sort of horrifying physical or psychological trauma. Truly horrifying. Something that no human being, much less small children, should have had to deal with. In addition to, in their teenage years, the changes to which puberty has subjected us all. And that is the reason that we have focused on this, because if there have been lies being told in those rooms that have led to those now adults going through what they have had to go through and what they will spend the rest of their lives going through, the government has to act.
And the answer that I've always gotten, or the criticism I've always gotten from the left on this is, well, this isn't normally what the FTC does. And my answer has been, yes, it is. We do health claims all the time. You just didn't care about these because it was in your politics. And so, if anyone has let politics determine outcomes here, it was you for turning a blind eye on this, or in the case of the Biden administration, for actually trying to promote this ideology. I meant what I said when Alabama sued the Biden administration and got access to Rachel Levine's emails. HHS was putting pressure on the medical associations not to follow the Europeans and say that children shouldn't be subjected to this because it would be bad for the trans movement in states that were adopting laws to protect children from these surgeries. It's unconscionable that that's what HHS is. It is, however, a reminder that elections have consequences. Biden gave you Rachel Levine and Trump gives you Dr. Oz, and it is just a night and day difference in the way that HHS is run.
And so to sum up, people are more prone to believing lies when they're in a tough spot. Scammers know that. Fraudsters know it. And that the FTC has understood for a long time, and that is why it is so important that we ensure that the light of truth shines in those doctors' rooms in that moment, because those parents and children are the most vulnerable people you can imagine.
