☕️ GENDER FLUIDS ☙ Saturday, August 15, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Crime at a 70-year low — CBS credited milk. Hospitals referred to DOJ for billing Lupron as endocrinology. WPATH told a Texas judge the 'standard of care' was always just an opinion.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your Weekend Edition roundup includes: historically low crime that CBS would like to credit to milk; criminal referrals for billing Lupron as an “unspecified endocrine disorder”; and the Vatican of gender medicine telling a Texas judge that four years of settled science was always just an opinion.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Terrific news. Violent crime is now indisputably at its lowest level since the government began tracking national statistics. It is literally historic. You’d think this would be welcome news, but corporate media is responding like somebody who didn’t know about the divorce just asked how its ex-wife is doing. Meaning, politely pretending like it didn’t happen. Yesterday, for example, CBS shrank the story into, “Violent crime plummeted in 2025, with murder rate hitting 20-year low, FBI says.” And then it achieved heroic levels of bafflement over what might have caused this delightful development.

“Violent crime rates in the U.S. have plummeted,” CBS began, “with violent crime overall showing the biggest one-year drop on record.” With nearly 90% of national police departments reporting, 2025’s year-over-year reductions included: murders fell -18.1%, aggravated assaults by -7.2%, rapes -7.6%, auto theft -22.7%, burglaries -15.8%, and robberies -18.5%.

Those are only averages. In crime-ridden big blue cities, like Buffalo, New York, reductions were even more dramatic. Buffalo’s murder rate fell -33%. Denver saw homicide cases decline -48% in 2025 compared to 2024. DC is down −66% overall since the Trump crackdown started. Memphis is down −43.7%. It is more or less universal, across the board.

Well, with one exception that proves the rule. You might guess which crime category was the only outlier that actually increased. Assaults on police officers. Which you might expect if deranged leftists were constantly criticizing cops, calling them ACAB, and insisting they be defunded.

Apart from that lone exception, though, the Administration has nailed another Guinness record. CBS, of course, undersold it, by fixating on just one category (murders). But the FBI’s new homicide number isn’t just a ’20-year low,’ as CBS’s headline claimed. The 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 is tied with 1955 and 1956 for the lowest since national estimates began.

“Today I’m thrilled to announce that the FBI has just released the new Uniform Crime Report showing that in 2025, we achieved the single largest reduction in violent crime in American history,” President Trump said.

Jeff Asher, a CBS ‘expert’ who ‘owns a data analytics firm,’ agreed, “This release confirms that crime in the U.S. is falling at or near a historic clip.” (Wait till you see who this so-called expert really is, and what he thinks caused the great news.) He continued, “and the data for 2026 points to a continued large drop this year.” Hello, midterms.

👮 Before pivoting to CBS’s lame experts who claimed Trump is merely the fortunate beneficiary of “many complex factors,” CBS briefly nodded at “a hard-line approach to public safety,” including “immigration crackdowns” and National Guard deployments to big cities. Even CBS’s hostile (but “nonpartisan”—just wait) crime expert, Adam Gelb, grudgingly conceded that “the detention and deportation of people with criminal histories and charges” helped lead to “tens of thousands fewer high-risk individuals on the streets.”

This, Gelb allowed, may contribute to lower homicide numbers. You think?

CBS did not mention the closed border. It omitted all of the other crime-fighting policies, like Trump’s crackdowns on cartels, gangs, and Antifa. On his first day in office, Trump signed two crime-related executive orders. One of them, titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” ordered Homeland Security task forces (HSTFs) to every single state to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations.” The second directed the State Department to start designating FTOs. By February, Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and six more cartel gangs were designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Fox, February 19:

Nor did CBS mention that, on April 28, President Trump signed an executive order titled, “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” It delivered a raft of changes, including more immunity for cops, ending ‘consent decrees’ that limited enforcement, transferring surplus military equipment to police departments, and increasing penalties for crimes against cops.

We might also look at increased prosecutions as a potential contributor. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has charged 16,724 cases in D.C. Superior Court since last August— a +67% increase from the prior year. On his first day in office last year, Trump signed an executive order requiring the DOJ to seek the death penalty wherever justified.

Then Gelb pivoted to the point CBS was more interested in. He used a milk analogy. “The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. But right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk,” Gelb said. (No idea why he didn’t say ‘clear as mud.’ Probably some kind of milk fetish.)

Gelb let his mind roam over its desolate wilderness, tossing out any other reason he could think of besides crediting Trump’s anti-crime policies. Maybe, CBS’s expert wondered, it’s because people are drinking less. Or it could be work-from-home trends! Staying home, after all, keeps people out of murderers’ crosshairs. (Especially at the Post Office.)

CBS’s next expert, Thaddeus Johnson, an assistant criminology professor at Georgia State, “cautioned against oversimplification.” We mustn’t leap to conclusions! We may never know. Johnson’s best theory was it could be Biden-era overdoses. Johnson supposed all those overdose deaths “limited the supply” of people who would have been robbed or murdered last year, so. Thinning the herd.

👮 As ever, when I did the tiniest bit of research, I found all three of CBS’s “independent” experts were anything but. CBS described the first one, Adam Gelb, as the “CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a nonpartisan think tank.” Guess what? Expert #2, Johnson, is a CCJ “Senior Fellow.” CBS didn’t mention it, or that Expert #3, Jeff Asher, sits on CCJ’s ‘Crime Trends Working Group.’

In other words, they all know each other and work together for the CCJ. CBS just made one call to the CCJ for quotes.

So, who’s this “totally non-partisan think tank?” CCJ is funded by big progressive groups like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and calls for DSA-style decarceration, meaning closing prisons and not prosecuting people. In Gelb’s own words, from a 2020 USA Today column, the ‘movement’s’ goal is “to reduce incarceration and achieve racial justice.”

Unsurprisingly, CBS couldn’t find any expert who attributed crime reductions (or the acceleration of those reductions) to Trump. But I could. On July 9, John Lott, of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said, “Nor is it a coincidence that the record influx of illegal immigrants during the Biden administration coincided with a sharp increase in violent crime. It is equally unsurprising that crime has fallen as deportations have increased.”

Deportation records show that 70 percent of illegal immigrants deported during the Trump administration had either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States. That’s a lot of criminals off the streets. Biden’s criminals (just saying).

👮 Corporate media is desperate to credit historically low crime rates to anything else. They want everyone to think Trump was just lucky.

Of course, as I’ve pointed out many times, that’s not the slam they think it is. Even if they were right, I’ll take a lucky president over a smart one any day. Napoleon apocryphally said, “Give me lucky generals.” Scholars debate the quote’s provenance, but literally nobody wants unlucky generals. Bad luck sticks to a man like something brown, gooey, and stinky on the bottom of your shoe.

Let’s take a single example of a lucky president. On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson became the first president to experience an assassination attempt. Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter who thought he was the King of England, fired two derringers at Jackson’s heart. Both misfired. Jackson beat the would-be assassin senseless with a cane. Davy Crockett, who was in the audience, helped.

The Smithsonian later test-fired the guns: both worked. The odds of both failing to fire at the same time were calculated at 1 in 125,000.

So give me a lucky president. Please.

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The gender-bending days of lucrative transgender treatments for kids are rapidly and mercifully drawing to a close. First, on Thursday, Fierce Healthcare reported, “Trump administration refers providers, PBMs to DOJ over youth gender care billing.” Meaning criminal referrals. Accountability.

Vice President JD Vance referred hundreds of hospitals, pharmacy groups, and Planned Parenthood affiliates to the DOJ for criminal prosecution. “When providers miscode treatment in order to secure insurance coverage for gender-transitioning interventions that insurance would not otherwise cover, they should be held accountable,” Vance’s referral letter said. “If they have done so intentionally, thereby perpetrating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison.”

They checked. “One study showed that only about 4.7 percent of patients diagnosed with ‘endocrine disorder, unspecified,’ had that actual condition,” Vance wrote.

Apparently, our medical community has been, well, rather creative in their insurance billings when they provided irreversible “gender affirming” treatments to children. Shocking. An HHS task force discovered a troubling trend of these treatments being billed under a generic category called “unspecified endocrine disorder.” They should have used more accurate and specific codes relating to transgender diagnoses instead.

The honest ICD code is F64 (gender dysphoria). But insurers and Medicaid increasingly would not pay for that, and a growing number of restriction states made it a banned category. So the providers billed Lupron as if it were endocrinology, under E34.9 “endocrine disorder, unspecified” ($50 million billed for ages 9–17 between 2015–2025), and E30.1 “precocious puberty” (another $11 million for ages 13–17, an age at which that diagnosis is not a thing).

So there was the money motive. But the second benefit was avoiding scrutiny. The E34.9 claim never showed up in records as treatment for gender dysphoria. State AGs, Medicaid integrity groups, parents, and researchers looking for “gender dysphoria” only see a generic hormone disorder. Pro-trans groups like WPATH, Planned Parenthood, and QueerDoc explicitly told providers to use the non-F64 codes, which was obviously a dodge to prevent lawmakers and the public from finding out just how much of this evil stuff was really going on.

🔥 Also on Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services dropped a well-written, 64-page investigatory report packed with citations titled, “Wolves in White Coats.” You should read it if you have time. If not, they uploaded a documentary-style YouTube version, also titled “Wolves in White Coats” (12:48). In both, the horrifying stories about kids duped into trans treatments and now suffering with lifelong side-effects will curl your hair.

The Wolves report was blunt about the medical community’s motives. It was not, as they claimed, to “help” mentally ill pediatric patients stabilize. They were creating lifelong revenue streams. Kids usually only see doctors for acute conditions like infections, broken arms, or Skittles overdoses.

But, the report said, providers “promised a new stream of continuous revenue for pediatrics, endocrinology, and surgical specialties by taking physiologically healthy young people and rendering them dependent for life on the medical system.” A child becomes a “captive patient.” After “gender affirming treatments,” they need consults every three months, bloodwork every six months, and annual bone density scans, forever.

That’s the non-surgical product. When the blade comes in, it gets worse. Much worse.

🔥 A legal doctrine I’ve pointed out many times is that evidence of concealment is also evidence of knowledge of wrongdoing. They were prescribing Lupron —the chemical castration drug— hand-over-fist and billing it as a generic endocrine treatment. The National Cancer Institute noted that Lupron “is often called medical (or chemical) castration, because it achieves the same results as surgical removal of the testes.” Several states use the drug on chronic sex offenders. It erases the patient’s sex drive.

These fiends have been prescribing it to kids as a “safe and effective” treatment for an “unspecified endocrine disorder.” Well, that’s going to be a big problem for them, even in lunatic blue states that still officially allow it.

Earlier this week, I reported that Texas Children’s Hospital signed a humiliating settlement requiring it to pay $10 million, the whistleblower’s attorney’s fees, admit on its website that it did provide the banned treatments, and now must provide free detransition services for five years. That settled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s claims that the hospital engaged in false-diagnosis billing to Texas Medicaid.

Now HHS has referred hundreds more providers to the Department of Justice for similar prosecution. But wait. There’s more.

🔥 Another massive crack in the trans edifice appeared this week, also completely ignored by corporate media. So we turn to the reliable Daily Signal, which helpfully reported, “WPATH’s Legal Argument Undercuts Its Claim to Consensus.” There’s much more to the story, though.

WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which sounds like a United Nations medical NGO but is, in fact, a private advocacy shop that writes the “Transgender Standards of Care” that every big children’s hospital treated as gospel. Its Eighth Edition (2022), also called the Standard of Care-8, or SOC-8, was the document that called puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries for minors evidence-based medicine.

Insurers paid. Clinics multiplied. (Europe, conversely, looked at the WPATH studies and said “nope.”) Democrats in Congress, state legislatures, school boards, and sold-out pediatricians all cited the WPATH as settled science. In 2022, criticizing Florida’s new law banning trans “care” for kids, Biden’s Assistant HHS Secretary Rachel “Rear Admiral” Levine gushed, “there is an evidence-based standard of care for the evaluation and treatment of trans individuals, whether they’re youth or adults. That standard is set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.”

Levine’s comms director Adam Sarvana doubled down on Fox, insisting that, “There is no debate in the medical community about the medical or scientific validity of gender-affirming care.” No debate. Mark those words. They’ll be important shortly.

In March, 2022, the Cabbage in Chief said, “Affirming a transgender child’s identity is one of the best things a parent, teacher, or doctor can do to keep children from harm.”

On August 10, 2022, Biden’s DOJ filed a brief in its lawsuit challenging a new Alabama law. The brief stated, not incorrectly, that “The prevailing standards for treating gender dysphoria are set out in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care,” which, it continued, “are also taught as part of the standard curriculum in American medical schools.” Later that year, Assistant Secretary Levine announced the WPATH guidelines were “not in serious scientific or medical dispute.”

Things were going great for the overfunded NGO. It was riding high. But soon the wheels would start coming off the WPATH’s short transgender bus.

🔥 Cue up the WPATH’s ‘hot mic’ catastrophe: In March 2024, the Vatican of gender medicine left its group chat on. A cache of internal WPATH forum posts and a members-only video was leaked to Michael Shellenberger’s Environmental Progress; journalist Mia Hughes published them as The WPATH Files.

Inside their own clubhouse, the WPATH members who wrote the “standards of care” were not talking like a medical society. They were talking like people who already knew the experiment was in trouble. They anguished over a ten-year-old on puberty blockers. They worried about a developmentally delayed thirteen-year-old. They criticized genital surgery on patients with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.

WPATH’s then-president, surgeon Marci Bowers, admitted that every boy in her clinical experience would never orgasm and might not understand the implications of that until it was too late. In short, they knew minors could not give informed consent. They knew the surgical follow-up was a joke. They knew an eighteen-year-old had already died of a flesh-eating infection after surgeons tried to fashion a vagina out of his intestine.

But then they published SOC-8 anyway, confidently called it evidence-based, and handed it to insurers. So. The ‘trans bible’ was a group lie.

The WPATH Files should have ended the argument. They didn’t. The Economist noticed. Newsweek noticed. Michael Shellenberger opened the clubhouse on Substack, and WPATH did not even bother to call it fake. Democrats who had spent two years calling it settled science treated an authenticity-uncontested leak of WPATH’s listserv as a vibes problem.

The American Academy of Pediatrics changed nothing. Biden’s HHS kept the fact sheet. The New York Times largely ignored the story. But the tide was turning. Twenty-three red states had already banned the pediatric interventions. The real scandal of the Files was not that critics finally had receipts— it was that the Vatican of gender medicine read the receipts, shrugged, and went back to billing. Under the wrong codes.

Then an Alabama lawsuit blew it wide open.

🔥 In 2024, in Boe v. Marshall, the state of Alabama was defending its new youth-transition ban, signed into law in April 2022— the one Rachel Levine was gassing about. Ironically, the trans parent plaintiffs cited the WPATH as controlling medical authority. So Alabama’s lawyers subpoenaed WPATH for its internal discussions about how it developed SOC-8.

After litigation to prevent Alabama from getting them, the emails finally came unsealed in June, 2024. It was uglier than a forearm mangled in a sausage press.

In one chain, Johns Hopkins, hired by WPATH to review the evidence, had told the group there was “little to no evidence about children and adolescents.” WPATH sat on the JH review.

Chapter authors, consulting “social justice lawyers,” admitted they skipped a real evidence review because it would “put us in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits.” In their own words: “We needed a tool for our attorneys to use in defending access to care.” So they published a fake Standard of Care. For the lawsuits.

In even more damning emails with Rachel Levine’s office, the heavy hand of HHS was blunt: take the age minimums out or you will get “devastating legislation.” The AAP threatened to publicly oppose SOC-8 unless they removed age minimums.

So, like good little doggies, WPATH stripped the ages. One author admitted nobody on the committee wanted the change. “I need someone to explain to me how taking out the ages will help in the fight against the conservative anti-trans agenda,” she wrote. The co-lead answered: “The conservatives will only hone in on the ages and say that WPATH is supporting ‘cutting off healthy girl breasts at 15 years old’ for example. ... It doesn’t give them the headline.”

The New York Times finally stirred itself to comment, and its comment was a stinker. Not even the Times —whose ratlike reporters could see the SS WPATH was sinking— could defend the rot the emails exposed. Headline, June 2024:

“Age minimums, officials feared, could fuel growing political opposition to such treatments,” the Times wrote. Science! “The situation in the U.S.A. is terrible,” one WPATH emailer wrote, “and Assistant Secretary Levine and the Biden administration are worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.” They did!

Then Trump came into office. The WPATH had already provided the ammunition. The Administration only needed to take the shot.

🔥 On June 17, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission landed in a Fort Worth courtroom, along with Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, and filed FTC v. WPATH. It was not a medical-malpractice case. It was a consumer-fraud case. The FTC alleged that SOC-8 was never a guideline. It was a marketing brochure.

WPATH’s SOC-8 assured parents the treatments were medically necessary, evidence-based, fully reversible, and “lifesaving,” then handed that language to clinicians so they could close the sale, and to insurers so they would pay. The complaint was built from the emails from the Alabama case and the WPATH Files: that Johns Hopkins found “little to no evidence,” that WPATH sat on it, that Levine’s office and the AAP stripped the age limits for political reasons, and that “medically necessary” was written in because lawyers said they needed a tool.

Wait till you see the WPATH’s excuse.

🔥 It’s more Alice-in-Wonderland wordplay, true, but my goodness. Last week, the WPATH filed a motion to dismiss the FTC’s lawsuit arguing, right in the motion’s introduction, that its standards of care —the settled science taught in most American medical schools— was always just an opinion. Not a standard! No. Just something more like scientific musings, healthy discourse in a realm of “medical and scientific uncertainty,” protected by the First Amendment. Like a blog post or a TikTok short.

I should mention the WPATH’s lawyer: Abbe David Lowell. On Thursday, he was in court for his other client, explaining that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s indictment was a biased government with a revenge motive. This week he’s in Fort Worth explaining that the Transgender Standards of Care were always just an opinion. Same lawyer, forty-eight hours, two collapsing institutions.

🔥 They never meant for anyone to take it as settled science. Here it is, in legalese, right from the WPATH’s motion. Remember— Biden’s HHS called SOC-8 “the prevailing standards for treating gender dysphoria.” Rachel Levine said it was “not in serious scientific or medical dispute.” But SOC-8’s authors now call their own guidelines “nonactionable opinions” that were “tentative and subject to revision:”

They even had the stones to argue “scientific conclusions are subject to perpetual revision.” This, from the same people who relentlessly squawked “follow the science! Wraaaaawk!”

Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir, PhD, wondered, “If its recommendations are merely one ‘opinion’ in a legitimate debate defined by ‘uncertainty,’ and if doctors should judge independently whether to follow them, why should insurers follow them? Why should judges defer to them as the accepted standard of care?” Then he mused, “It’s possible that WPATH just gave up the game.”

The trans cartel has lost its enforcement powers. A little over a month ago, on June 30th, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J., which held that under Title IX, states may lawfully segregate women’s sports by biological sex. In other words, trans women (men) have no legal right to play on girls’ teams.

The court could have gone further. It might have banned biological boys from girls’ teams altogether. But Justice Kavanaugh said that issue was not before the court. In a footnote, he said the case “does not present the distinct question of whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.”

So that case could be next.

It is, perhaps, too soon to declare victory in the war against the only mental illness treated by surgeons rather than psychiatrists. But mark my words: there will come a day, maybe soon, when “gender affirming care” will have become a cautionary epithet and a punchline to black humor, just like frontal lobotomies.

Have a wonderful weekend! Coffee & Covid will return on Monday morning, bright-eyed and bushy-somethinged, to deliver an all-new installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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