Why Did SEGM Remove Information On Their Leadership From Their Website?

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine has frequently been accused of providing misleading and confusing information. Now, the group seeks to confuse the public about who they even are.

by Evan Urquhart

As recently as early August the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine proudly shared the names, pictures, and biographies of 13 key individuals associated with the group, including those listed as having leadership positions with the group according to the publicly available paperwork required of them as a nonprofit 501 (c) 3. The group’s president, Roberto D’Angelo, had a bio, as did other key officers such as Julia Mason, Marcus Evans, and the first director of the group (and current secretary) William Malone. By late September, as the team behind Assigned Media’s Trans Data Library was preparing the launch of our new site, one of the people working on the site’s quality control noticed something had changed. Although there was no formal announcement of any changes at SEGM we could find, the About page for SEGM had been quietly taken down. This meant all publicly facing information about who SEGM’s core team is had mysteriously disappeared.

SEGM presents itself as a medical organization, but a team of Yale researchers found they were anything but, writing “SEGM is not a recognized scientific organization” and documenting the biased and misleading information they collect on their website. The Yale team devoted an entire appendix to documenting the way SEGM manipulates and cherry-picks research, to give itself the appearance of a legitimate source.

In other words, this is not an organization new to charges of deliberately misleading the public. Removing the bios of their key members could be a fresh attempt to conceal the thin credentials and activist associations so many of its key members have had.

Records of the earlier version of SEGM’s site still remain through the Internet Archive, allowing the Trans Data Library to continue to document who the site previously claimed constituted their core team. Here’s an example of one of the 13 bios SEGM’s site featured as recently as early August this year:

screenshot from an internet archive version of SEGM’s website from August 6, 2023

Then and now, SEGM describes themselves as “an international group of over 100 clinicians and researchers.” But the now-removed info on the About page helped give context to what that actually meant. The site showcased people with a wide variety of credentials, as well close ties to activist groups. They ranged from William Malone, an endocrinologist, to Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist and the founder of Genspect, to Sasha Ayed, a licensed counselor who co-hosts a gender critical podcast with O’Malley. Also mentioned were a sociologist, Michael Biggs, an evolutionary biologist, Colin Wright, and even an occupational therapist, Catherine Williamson, from the UK.

Even more confusingly, SEGM’s updated website now states in its FAQ that they are “not a membership organization.” If this is accurate, it seems to have been a recent change. According to a deep investigation into the group’s finances by Health Liberation Now, Stephen Levine described himself as a member under oath in 2022, during his expert testimony in a case involving a ban on trans girls in West Virginia school sports. Levine said there were about 100 members of the group who each contributed $200 or so to join.

screenshot from Health Liberation Now!

Levine is not among those who were previously mentioned by SEGM’s website as a key figure in the organization (nor is Ema Zane, who he mentions in his testimony). This suggests that SEGM was a dues and membership organization in 2022, or at least that Stephen Levine thought it was when he gave them $200. The organization has made no public statements about any restructuring. Assigned Media reached out to SEGM through their public contact form in the reporting for this article. They did not immediately response, but we will update our story to include their comments if they do so.