Former WPATH president has decades-long ties to pro-pedophilia academics, activists: report

Dr. Eli Coleman served as the organization’s president between 1999 and 2003. He is an American sexologist, professor emeritus, and former director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. He also contributed to three of the groups most recent Standards of Care (SOC): the sixth, seventh, and eighth editions. Regarding the eighth edition, the most recent edition available, Coleman served as the Chair and Lead Author for the development.

In that edition, it includes the category of “eunuch” as a protected gender identity. SOC 8 refers extensively to a fetish website called Eunuch Archive, which Reduxx describes as “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.”

The forum website was co-founded by Thomas Pidel, who has been convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his involvement in a pedophile ring. A group of academics played what Reduxx described as a “foundational role in the Eunuch Archive,” collecting opinions from anonymous forum members and publishing them as research. At the head of this work was Professor Emeritus Thomas W. Johnson.

Johnson could be seen in a private, members-only section of the forum claiming that he had worked with Eli Coleman, and had been invited to contribute to the development of SOC 8. He claimed in 2016 that he had been chosen by Coleman to rewrite a portion of the SOC, with Johnson saying that Coleman had “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.”

Reduxx also revealed that Coleman had “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)” The organization advocates for homosexual, pedophilic relationships between adult men and children.

Bullough was a founding member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), which would go on to become WPATH. Bullough reportedly communicated formally with Lawrence Stanley, a founding member of NAMBLA and the organization’s attorney.

In a letter sent in July of 1987, Stanle wrote, “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.”

Bullough replied in a January 1988 letter, writing, “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.” He suggested in a letter the following month, “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.”

Stanley was found in possession of hundreds of child pornography publications in 1989, in addition to five videotapes, which he had kept locked under his bed. Bullough submitted a character testimony in favor of Stanley in the court proceedings. Bullough would eventually go on to publish in the academic journal Paidika: The Journal of Pedophilia, which advocated for sexual relationships between adults and minors, which Stanley also published to.

Per Reduxx, “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.” Coleman also wrote Bullough’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times when he died in 2006.

Prior to his work with WPATH, Coleman had also created Sex Offender Standards of Care and advocated for the rights for men and criminals with sexual pathologies such as pedophilia. He also led the first International Conference on the Treatment of Sexual Offenders (ICTSO) in 1989 in Minneapolis.

Coleman invited Norwegian psychologist and sexologist, Thore Langfeldt, to participate in the first conference. Langfeldt had been involved with the Norwegian pro-pedophile organization Pedophile Working Group in the 1970s. He also had connections to the since-disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) of England. Through the 1970s and 80s, Langfeldt wrote about “child sexuality” and positively wrote on case studies of pedophilic relationships. His academic publications worked to portray such relationships as normal.