EXCLUSIVE: Former WPATH President Linked to Multiple Pro-Pedophilia Academics and Activists Over Several Decades, Previously Advocated for Sex Offender Rights

Reduxx can reveal that a leading figure behind the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an organization which promotes the medical ‘transitioning’ of children, has a long history of working with pro-pedophile academics. Eli Coleman, a former WPATH president who oversaw and influenced the Standards of Care for transgender medical protocols for decades, has professional ties to multiple academics who either defended or advocated favorably for adult-child sexual relations, and had himself previously drafted Standards of Care for sex offenders.

Coleman is an American sexologist, professor emeritus, and former director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health (previously the Program in Human Sexuality) in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota — where WPATH was previously based for several years. Coleman was an instrumental figure in the development of WPATH Standards of Care (SOC), specifically contributing to the three most recent iterations: the sixth, seventh, and eighth editions.

Significantly, Coleman served as the Chair and Lead Author for the development of the Standards of Care 8, which recommended the validation of a “eunuch” gender identity, and would later be revised to remove specific age limitations on the prescription of puberty-halting drugs to children.

On December 3, 2021, WPATH released draft guidelines which included, for the first time, the category of ‘eunuch’ as a protected “gender identity.” WPATH’s SOC 8 recommends medical treatment and services for those with a self-declared gender identity, and describes the relationship between “eunuch-identified people and other transgender people.”

The document states, “Eunuch-identified people may share with other gender-diverse people a desire for reduction or elimination of masculine physical features, masculine genitals, or genital functioning.”

It also goes on to claim that “eunuch-identified people may suffer the same minority stress as other stigmatized groups,” and refers extensively to research collected from a hardcore fetish site called the Eunuch Archive — a site that features child sexual exploitation fantasies centered around stopping little boys from going through puberty, as well as erotic stories about sexually abusing children.

Through a series of investigative reports, Reduxx revealed that the Eunuch Archive, the forum sourced by WPATH, was co-founded by a man who would be convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his involvement in a pedophile ring. Thomas Pidel was linked to over a dozen individuals who had subscriptions with a Belarus-based child pornography enterprise which sold thousands of paid memberships internationally to access child sexual abuse content.

Pidel, who described himself as a “boy lover,” was active in multiple Usenet groups dedicated to pedophilia activism and castration fetishism in the years just before his arrest in 2004. Some of the groups Pidel was active in during this time were alt.support.boy-lovers, alt.fan.prettyboy, and alt.eunuchs.questions, the latter of which would become the Eunuch Archive.

The most popular stories in the Eunuch Archive depict the forcible castration of children, and, as previously revealed by Reduxx, of the approximately 10,000 pornographic stories on the site, over one-third involved minors.

Three academics identified exclusively by Reduxx as having played a foundational role in the Eunuch Archive gathered opinions from anonymous forum members which was published as research. The leading figure behind this work, Professor Emeritus Thomas W. Johnson, presented research they co-authored together at a 2009 conference in Oslo held by WPATH.

In May 2010, the contents of the Oslo presentation were published in The International Journal of Transgenderism, an academic journal issued by WPATH. Johnson were again invited to speak at a 2011 WPATH conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It was during this conference that the decision was made to de-classify Gender Identity Disorder as a psychological condition. In its place, Gender Dysphoria would become the recommended terminology.

In the private, members-only area of the Eunuch Archive forum accessed by Reduxx, Johnson could be seen claiming he worked with Eli Coleman, and was “personally invited” to contribute to the development of the SOC 8.

In 2016, Johnson claimed to have been specifically chosen to rewrite a portion of the Standards of Care by former WPATH president Eli Coleman, who “pointed at me and announced that I was expected to provide input on eunuchs for the revision. Now is our opportunity to help devise the standards of care that will be most helpful.”

For nearly twenty years, the Eunuch Archive has hosted an annual “Meeting of Members.” The event has typically been held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where former WPATH president Eli Coleman has lived and worked for decades.

But the disturbing connections between Coleman and pedophile-adjacent academics does not end there. By purchasing archival records from a California-based university library, Reduxx learned that Coleman sought approval for his WPATH leadership position from a fellow sexologist, Vern Bullough, who had direct professional contact with a founding figure behind the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), an organization which advocated for adult male homosexual relationships with children.

For years Bullough, himself a founding member of the organization which would become WPATH — The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), kept a formal correspondence with a founding member of NAMBLA, and the group’s attorney: Lawrence Stanley.

In July 1987, Stanley wrote to Bullough imploring him to read and consider his article “The Hysteria over Child Pornography and Pedophilia,” which was soon published in Paidika and Playboy. In an introductory letter, Stanley told Bullough: “With respect to sizeable collections of child pornography, it is my impression that the Kinsey Institute’s is larger than the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.”

Stanley’s article, “The Hysteria over Child Pornography and Pedophilia,” argued that law enforcement officers engage in deliberate entrapment schemes. “Under the guise of ‘protecting children,’ millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to investigate and prosecute would-be consumers of child pornography, many of them individuals who do not pose any immediate danger to children.”

Bullough replied in a letter dated January 1988, congratulating Stanley on the publication of his article. “As far as collections of movies of child porn, the San Francisco Institute is much larger, simply because the major distributors of porn films in the United States, particularly child porn, got rid of incriminating evidence by donating it to the Institute in San Francisco.”

In a follow-up letter the next month, Bullough suggested: “If you get good duplicates of material and don’t know where to send them, I would like to add to my collection, most of which is now in the California State University, Northridge, library.”

In September 1989, Stanley was found in possession of hundreds of child pornography publications, as well as five videotapes, which he had kept locked in a safe under his bed. As the court proceedings were underway in 1991, Bullough submitted a character testimonial in favor of Stanley, calling him a “knowledgeable professional in the field of human sexuality,” and that he would “strongly vouch for his character and integrity.”

Bullough wrote: “I have known Lawrence Stanley for four or five years and worked closely with him for part of that time in publishing a newsletter for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex.”

Bullough, who was influential during the formative years of WPATH, would also go on to publish the academic journal Paidika: The Journal of Pedophilia, which advocated for sexual relationships between adults and children.

Coleman and Bullough frequently contributed to the same sexology texts and compiled volumes throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Both served alongside each other on editorial and advisory boards for peer-reviewed academic journals in sexology, including the Journal of Sex Research.

When Bullough passed away in 2006, his obituary, published by the Los Angeles Times, was penned by former WPATH president Eli Coleman.

“It would be very hard to find somebody that had so extensively studied so many areas within sexuality,” Coleman said. “Vern was all over the field — not in a superficial way but in a very deep way.”

Prior to working with WPATH on the Transgender Standards of Care, Coleman had also previously devised Sex Offender Standards of Care and advocated for the rights of sexual criminals and men with paraphilias, or sexual pathologies, including pedophilia.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, while directing the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota, Coleman co-authored and led the development of clinical treatment standards for adult sex offenders, and published an initial proposed set of clinical guidelines in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation.

Coleman partnered with a nun belonging to the Catholic organization Sisters of Mercy in order to promote medical treatments for sex offenders. In 1990, Eli Coleman and Sister Margretta Dwyer authored “Proposed Standards of Care for the Treatment of Adult Sex Offenders”, which was published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. The document was subsequently approved by the United Nations as aligning with its Sustainable Development Goal 16, “Peace.”

“From puberty through adulthood, males more than females experience erotic fantasies and dreams of a paraphilic type. A paraphilia is a condition of compulsive response to, or dependence upon, an unusual and unacceptable stimulus in the imagery of fantasy, for optimal initiation and maintenance of sexual arousal, and the facilitation or attainment of orgasm,” write Coleman and Dwyer.

“Various ‘appropriate care’ philosophies have been suggested by many professionals who have identified themselves as experts on the topic of sex offenders,” the paper continues. “Although some standards exist, until the present, no statement of the ‘Standards of Care’ to be offered to the sex offender has received official sanction by any identified viable professional group.”

Coleman led the first International Conference on the Treatment of Sexual Offenders (ICTSO) in 1989 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This event was followed by two further conferences in the same city in 1991 and 1993. The fourth conference, in 1995, was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

As the founding organizer of the ICTSO series, Coleman co-chaired and organized the Amsterdam meeting alongside European hosts. In that role, he would have had significant influence over who was invited to participate in the meeting.

At the inaugural First International Conference on the Treatment of Sexual Offenders in Minneapolis, Coleman invited a Norwegian psychologist and sexologist with deep connections to multinational pro-pedophilia advocacy, including the now-disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) of England.

Thore Langfeldt was among the international participants invited by Eli Coleman and the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota to the first conference, which served as the initial gathering to build an international network of clinicians and set the groundwork for the collaborative drafting of the Standards of Care for the Treatment of Adult Sex Offenders. He also attended and spoke at the subsequent three conferences organized by Coleman.

Thore Langfeldt has written extensively about “child sexuality” and positively conveyed case studies of pedophilic relationships throughout the 1970s and 80’s. His academic publications sought to portray adult-child sexual contact as normal and non-pathological.

Previously a schoolteacher, Langfeldt was involved with the Norwegian pro-pedophile organization called the Pedophile Working Group (Pedofil Arbeidsgruppe – NAFP) in the 1970’s. The NAFP was established at the University of Oslo in 1975, where the group had registered a post office box – and where Langfeldt was specializing in psychology. That year, Langfeldt wrote a letter to the Ministry of Justice requesting an alteration to the criminal code which would lower the legal age of consent from 16 to 14 years old.

The NAFP directly invited the leader of the Paedophile Information Exchange to speak at a panel event in Oslo, the Amnesty for Love and Affection conference, at the Hotel Viking in June of 1979.

While attending the inaugral ICTSO, having been invited by Coleman, Langfeldt argued that sex offenders can be identified in childhood, and that some boys, even as young as toddlers, had an urge to castrate themselves. “We have known that these children have existed for a long time, but people working at the kindergarten level have refused to acknowledge the existence of sexuality in children,” Langfeldt said.

Following his participation in the Minneapolis and Amsterdam meetings, Langfeldt joined Eli Coleman as a co-author and reviewer of the subsequent revisions of the Standards of Care for the Treatment of Adult Sex Offenders.

However, Coleman’s professional relationship with Langfeldt did not end there. In 2009, Langfeldt organized a WPATH conference in Oslo — the same conference attended by academic representatives of the pedophilic forum the Eunuch Archive, who claim to have been invited directly by Coleman himself to contribute to WPATH Standards of Care.

On June 18 of that year, Langfeldt presented on the topic of “The Child in the Discourse of Transsexualism.” According to the abstract, Langfeldt’s lecture used “cases from the shemale movements and pornography to question the medical discourse and its power in forming the child into a suitable medical diagnosis.”

The ICTSO series, of which both Coleman and Langfeldt are charter members, was rebranded during the fifth international conference. The International Association for the Treatment of Sexual Offenders (IATSO) was formally founded on March 24, 1998, formalizing the ongoing international conference series that Eli Coleman and his colleagues had initiated in Minneapolis in 1989.

Langfeldt was selected by the IATSO Scientific Committee to deliver a headline plenary address in the conference’s main hall on Friday, August 29, 2025, titled “The history and current state of our understanding of pedophilia.” During his presentation, Langfeldt argued that minor-directed attractions should be evaluated as a disorder requiring treatment.

Similarly, the Norwegian psychologist served as the Scientific Conference President for the 11th International IATSO Conference, which was held in Oslo, Norway, from September 1–4, 2010. Just months before, in June, the Sexual Offender Treatment, IATSO’s official academic journal, published Langfeldt’s article: Is “Pedophilia” a Useful or a Confusing Concept? An Empirical Study on Sexual Abuse of Children, Sexual Orientation and Typology: Implications for Therapy.

Protocols devised by Coleman to treat sex offenders included the recommended usage of anti-androgens, sometimes referred to as chemical castration when used in a punitive sense. For decades, Coleman has written about the treatment of pedophilia with pharmacological management alongside cognitive therapy.

As clinical options evolved, Coleman, alongside fellow researchers, have reviewed the efficacy of more recently-developed GnRH agonists, such as Lupron, which lower testosterone levels to castrate men with pedophilic tendencies.

After devising Standards of Care for the treatment of pedophiles, Coleman’s work shifted towards Standards of Care for WPATH, or “transgender health,” which advise clinicians to administer castrating drug Lupron to children. Protocols published by WPATH recommending the medical “transitioning” of children through the use of drugs which halt puberty have since been implemented internationally, and in 2022, the transgender health authority removed specific minimum age requirements for puberty-blocking drugs such as Lupron, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that were present in previous drafts.

Early versions of the WPATH Standards of Care, and specifically revisions 1 through 5, published between 1979 and 1998, explicitly listed the administrative contact address as: Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Program in Human Sexuality, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis.

Coleman’s personal academic office at the University of Minnesota served as the official publicly listed mailing headquarters for WPATH for years. This exact suite housed the University’s Program in Human Sexuality, now renamed the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, where Coleman served as director and professor emeritus.

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