The Federal Trade Commission appears to be targeting transgender rights, going beyond its usual ways of operating to do so, according to experts and federal employees who spoke to WIRED.

Since July 2025, the agency has been gearing up 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, described as “very strange.”

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

In January, the agency began requesting documents and materials from nonprofits that support health care providers who provide care to transgender people. The FTC issued what are known as civil investigative demands (CIDs)—instruments similar to subpoenas that an agency can use to conduct investigations—to the American Academy of Pediatrics, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the Endocrine Society. The cases are being brought by the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

“The FTC has brought lots of cases around phony cures, phony health products,” the former employee says. But those cases were targeted around issues like businesses peddling fake Covid cures. In cases where the FTC has gone after nonprofits, the former employee says, it has involved the nonprofit misappropriating donations.

These investigations will be spearheaded by Glenna Goldis, a former New York state assistant attorney general who claims she was fired by the Office of New York Attorney General Letitia James for “speaking out against pediatric gender medicine.” In a podcast interview, Goldis said that she hoped to “bankrupt” doctors, including leading them to lose “medical licenses” and “teaching licenses.” A recent update to the FTC’s organization chart shows Goldis listed as assistant director for special projects (children and adolescents). “The Office of the Attorney General has protocols and rules for all employees, including for outside activities if an employee chooses to engage in them,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told WIRED in a statement. “This employee no longer works for the office due to her violation of those protocols and rules.”

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

The former FTC employee described the agency’s move to target nonprofits as “really weird” and said it was “very unusual” to hire lawyers for a specific project or case as opposed to recruiting people based on skill sets, like data protection.

In response to questions from WIRED, FTC spokesperson Joseph Simonson said, “Virtually everything you asked is based off a complete misunderstanding of the law, this agency, and the issue of whether children are potentially suffering from unnecessary mutilation. Stick to computers.”

Fighting back against an FTC investigation is time-consuming and expensive. In a declaration supporting a motion to dismiss the CIDs in February, Mila Becker, the chief policy officer at the Endocrine Society, wrote that her organization estimates that “our costs could be well over $500,000 plus weeks of IT and other relevant staff time.” For nonprofits, she said, “this cost and staff burden is not easily absorbed and would have significant effect on our budget.” Becker also notes that the organization possesses documents that “may involve third parties with their own privacy interests, or sensitive patient or health data” that would need to be anonymized.

The former FTC employee worries that the cases will cause a chilling effect for health care providers. “If the FTC is going to go after nonprofit organizations outside its jurisdiction on these particular issues, then what about any for-profit medical group?” they say, noting that medical practitioners might feel it’s too dangerous even to mention that they have trans health care in their practice. “That's the concern, is that people are going to just quietly shut it down.”

Luke Herrine, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama’s school of law who focuses on consumer law, says that the choice of nonprofits the FTC is targeting could be a goal in itself. “By going after standard setters, it seems like they're trying to say the whole field of trans health care is inherently a deception," Herrine says.

But Herrine notes that just because the nonprofits are the ones receiving the CIDs doesn’t mean that they’re the ultimate targets for a potential case or investigation. Nonprofits can receive CIDs to investigate other, for-profit entities. Based on his reading of the organizations’ responses to the CIDs, Herrine says, “I don't know if they want to go against health care providers, but they definitely want to know who the providers are, if they can, and they definitely try to map out where the funding is.”

Even before being appointed to the helm of the agency, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson made his plans to use the FTC to target trans health care clear. In a document submitted to President Donald Trump’s team before inauguration, Ferguson noted that his plans for the FTC included fighting back “against the trans agenda” by investigating the “doctors, therapists, hospitals, and others who deceptively pushed gender confusion, puberty blockers, hormone replacement, and sex-change surgeries on children and adults while failing to disclose strong evidence that such interventions are not helpful and carry enormous risks.”

In July 2025, the FTC announced that it would be holding a workshop titled “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors” and signaled that it would be considering the issue of trans health care as a form of deceptive practice. At the time, more than 100 members of the FTC’s staff signed a statement voicing concern about the workshop, noting that it could lead the agency to “prying into confidential doctor-patient consultations.”

During the workshop, Ferguson called puberty blockers “a gateway drug to a lifetime of expensive hormone injections and sex-change surgeries” and alleged how medical providers had “coaxed” families into allowing gender-affirming care by promising that it would be a “fail-safe cure” for the mental health problems of their children. Studies show that access to gender-affirming care reduces depression and suicidality in trans teens.

The cases from the FTC constitute just one of the many ways the Trump administration has made targeting trans people a centerpiece of its agenda. One of the first executive orders Trump signed shortly after his inauguration was “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which directly targeted the trans community and stated that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

Other agencies have also targeted trans rights. In July 2025, the Department of Justice subpoenaed doctors and clinics providing gender-related care for minors. “Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” then-attorney general Pam Bondi said in a statement at the time. In December 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would bar hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid from performing gender-affirming care. Earlier this month, a federal judge overturned the HHS ban, writing, “This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law.”