Next federal agency for gender affirming care

The FTC appears to be targeting transgender rights, and going beyond its usual ways of doing so, according to experts and federal employees who spoke to WIRED.

Since July 2025, the agency has been preparing to frame gender-affirming care for minors as a consumer protection issue, in a move that a former FTC employee, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, called “very strange.”

“I think their ultimate goal here is to be on the front page, to be warriors for Trump’s anti-trans agenda,” they claim.

In January, the agency began requesting documents and materials from nonprofit organizations that support health care providers who care for transgender people. The FTC has issued what are known as Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs) — tools similar to subpoenas that the agency can use to conduct investigations — to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the Endocrine Society. Cases are filed by the agency’s Consumer Protection Bureau.

“The FTC has brought a lot of cases about bogus treatments and bogus health products,” the former employee says. But those cases targeted issues such as companies selling fake treatments for Covid. In cases where the FTC has gone after nonprofits, the former employee says, it has involved the misappropriation of nonprofit donations.

These investigations will be led by Glenna Goldis, a former assistant attorney general of New York State, who claims she was fired by the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James for “speaking out against gender medicine for children.” In a podcast interview, Goldis said she hopes to “bankrupt” doctors, including losing their “medical licenses” and “teaching licenses.” The FTC’s latest regulatory chart update shows Goldis being listed as Associate Director of Special Projects (Children and Teens). “The Attorney General’s Office has protocols and rules for all employees, including outside activities if the employee chooses to participate in them,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s Office told WIRED in a statement. “This employee is no longer employed by the office due to her violation of these protocols and rules.”

Around the same time Goldis was brought into the agency, the FTC began publishing job applications for attorneys whose roles appeared to be dedicated to investigating gender-affirming care. These job postings from earlier this year reveal that the FTC is hiring attorneys at the highest levels of the federal pay scale whose work will focus on “unfair and deceptive practices affecting children and families, including investigations related to the treatment of gender dysphoria in children.”

The former FTC staffer called the agency’s move to target nonprofits “really strange” and said it was “very unusual” to assign lawyers to a specific project or case rather than recruiting people based on skill sets, such as data protection.

In response to WIRED’s questions, FTC spokesman Joseph Simonson said: “Almost everything I’ve asked is based on a complete misunderstanding of the law, this agency, and the issue of whether children may suffer unnecessary mutilation. Stick to computers.”

Fighting FTC investigations is time-consuming and expensive. In an announcement supporting a motion to dismiss CIDs in February, Mila Baker, chief policy officer at the Endocrine Society, wrote that her organization estimates that “our costs may exceed $500,000, plus weeks of IT and other related staff time.” For nonprofits, “this cost and staffing burden cannot be easily absorbed and will have a significant impact on our budget,” she said. Baker also notes that the organization possesses documents that “may include third parties with their own privacy interests, sensitive patient or health data” that must be anonymized.