SEGM receives $1.6M, spends over $750k to further anti-trans pseudoscience in 2024

Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine spent 2024 commissioning more systematic reviews and harming trans rights in US courts and global standards.

By Artemis T. Douglas

Editor’s Note: This article is the latest in a series of articles investigating the anti-trans hate group known as the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. The other parts will be released as it progresses.

Part 1 is here.

SEGM, or the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a non-profit organization listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group that is critical to an “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network”, has received over $1.6M in 2024, newly public documents show. With that revenue, they have spent over $750k on several outputs, including court filings, systematic reviews, and formal challenges to the World Health Organization and Germany’s transition guideline process.

Having successfully positioned itself as an objective and expert source, SEGM’s output summary from their 2024 tax filings makes special note that “SEGM's leadership in promoting scientific integrity and balanced analysis was recognized by leading media outlets including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Telegraph."

However, according to anti-hate watchdogs like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, as well as other news outlets like Erin in the Morning, SEGM is neither objective nor neutral.

As The Needle’s previous reporting shows, SEGM spent 2023 spending a large but not-specifically-disclosed amount commissioning systematic reviews into, in their words, “subjects of social gender transition, tucking and binding, 'gender-affirming' mastectomy, puberty suppression, and cross-sex hormones.”

In other words, SEGM was as of 2023 paying for studies that delegitimize social transition, transition-related clothing practices, transsexual surgery, and HRT, as well as puberty blockers.

As of 2024, the organization spent significant money to commission more studies to delegitimize, in their words, “Addressing the effects of mastectomy for individuals with gender dysphoria under the age of 26, social transitioning, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones.”

In other words, SEGM spent 2024 expanding their focus from studies to delegitimize medicine for trans kids, such as with puberty blockers, to specifically commissioning a study to delegitimize medicine for trans adult’s transition-related surgery. This, while also spending both years commissioning other studies to further delegitimize other aspects of transition and transsexual life.

They also filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court of the United States for the landmark ruling Skrmetti that allowed statewide legislative bans on transition to be upheld.  This is likely the brief they mention in their output summary.

In their output summary, they also list a “formal challenge” to the WHO and the German Guidelines process.  

SEGM’s press releases on their website reveal the nature of those challenges. As for the German process, SEGM is claiming that the German draft guidelines “diverge” from the misinformation laundered by the Cass Review.

In 2024, SEGM was pushing the German process towards their definition of “evidence-based”, or in other words, towards Cass Review-style restrictions and away from transsexual bodily autonomy.

In 2025, SEGM issued another press release criticizing the German draft guidelines that were published in March that year. In that release, SEGM makes it clear that the organization believes that the German draft guidelines weren’t “evidence-based” and that they needed a “systematic search for evidence.”

Given that SEGM spent significant sums in 2023 and 2024 commissioning such “systematic searches”, it is clear that the organization is putting its thumb, and its resources, on both ends of the scale.

As for the challenge to the WHO, SEGM’s press releases across 2023 and 2024 on the subject reveal that SEGM has effectively lobbied the WHO to revise their guidelines, issue “clarifications” that current transsexual medicine practices aren’t “evidence-based” and is planning to continue to lobby the WHO as their global guidelines review finishes.

A WHO press release confirms that stakeholder meetings in 2022 caused them to revise their process and extend the public comment period for their new guidelines.

All of this reveals a predictable but clearly effective playbook: Spend money creating anti-trans misinformation, spend more money getting it published in peer-reviewed journals as open access, spend money to court scientists and doctors to the SEGM-approved gender ideology, spend money to influence the courts, the press, and professional standards towards their cissexual gender ideology.

In short, SEGM is receiving large sums– over $3.6 million in 5 years, and spending big– almost $2.5 million in the same 5 years, specifically to polarize the world against trans people and transition itself.

This confirms what some may have speculated: that the wave of transphobia that's been afflicting the US and the world isn't a coincidence. It is in fact a product of lobbying, and is now another export from the US, together with disrespect to a country's sovereignty and its history of imperialism. Or in other words, a case of the USA making the world a less free place to live.