Hall of Shame Entry #3
If you are here to learn more after reading about Dr. Solheim in The Free Press, you are in the right place.
Quick summary before we dive in: Molly Meegan is the top in-house lawyer for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) — the largest professional group for OB/GYNs, the doctors most American women see for reproductive health care. Meegan is partnered with a prominent Washington attorney named Abbe David Lowell. Lowell’s current client is WPATH, the organization whose clinical guidelines form the basis for gender-transition medical care nationwide — including the guidelines ACOG itself has adopted. That means the person overseeing ACOG’s legal response to an internal challenge to those guidelines is partnered with the lawyer defending the organization that wrote them.
Here’s how we know that, and why it matters.
First, some background: who and what we’re talking about
ACOG (the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) is the largest professional membership organization for OB/GYNs in the United States, representing more than 62,000 physicians. It writes the clinical guidelines that tell ob-gyns how to treat patients, trains medical residents through a curriculum called CREOG, and lobbies Congress and state legislatures on women’s health policy. When ACOG issues guidance, ob-gyns across the country follow it — it functions as the standard of care.
WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) is a separate organization that publishes the “Standards of Care” for treating transgender patients — essentially the rulebook most U.S. medical organizations, including ACOG, point to when deciding how to prescribe hormones or perform surgeries for gender transition. If a patient is offered testosterone, puberty blockers, or gender-affirming surgery in the U.S., the guidelines behind that care almost always trace back to WPATH.
HRC (the Human Rights Campaign) is the largest LGBTQ political advocacy and lobbying organization in the country. It is not a medical organization, but it has spent decades shaping the political and legal framework around gender-identity policy — including the medical consensus that ACOG and other groups have adopted.
With that in mind, here is the specific problem:
The Conflict at the Center
Molly Meegan, JD, is ACOG’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel. In plain terms: she is the top lawyer inside the organization that writes the rules ob-gyns follow, and she has final say over how ACOG legally responds when someone inside the organization challenges those rules — which is exactly what happened in the case described later in this entry.
Before joining ACOG in January 2022, Meegan spent more than five years as a senior attorney at HRC — first as Associate General Counsel (2016–2019), then as Deputy General Counsel (2019–2022). She holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center and a BS from Cornell University, and has received HRC’s own National Ally of Justice Award.
So the person now running legal affairs at ACOG spent the five years before that working for the country’s largest LGBTQ political advocacy group — the same movement that helped build the medical and legal consensus ACOG has adopted for treating transgender patients.
It gets closer. Meegan has been publicly identified — at events including the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and multiple Shakespeare Theatre Company galas between 2018 and 2025 — as the partner of attorney Abbe David Lowell, a founding member of the law firm Lowell & Associates, PLLC.
Lowell is not a random defense lawyer. He is WPATH’s own attorney of record — the organization whose Standards of Care are the basis for the guidelines Meegan’s office defends at ACOG. On February 18, 2026, WPATH sued the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to block a federal investigation into the organization. In WPATH’s own press release announcing that lawsuit, Lowell is quoted directly, on the record, as WPATH’s lawyer: “The FTC’s investigation is a blatant and retaliatory attack on the first amendment rights of WPATH,” he said. “This complaint should serve as a warning light for the medical community.”
Source: WPATH, “WPATH Takes Stand for First Amendment Rights of Medical Community; Files Complaint to Stop FTC Investigation,” February 19, 2026.
Put simply: the top lawyer at the organization that tells American ob-gyns how to provide transgender medical care is partnered with the lawyer currently in federal court defending the organization that wrote the guidelines behind that care from government scrutiny. That is not an inference or a guess — it is a documented professional relationship on one side (Meegan’s ACOG title, Meegan and Lowell’s public pairing at events) and a direct, on-the-record quote on the other (Lowell’s own statement as WPATH’s counsel).
Why this matters: the case that started this entry
In late 2025, an ACOG leader named Dr. Karla Solheim ran into exactly the kind of institutional wall this conflict of interest would predict. Dr. Solheim was ACOG’s Iowa Section Chair — an elected leadership role — and a physician who had herself performed gender-affirming hysterectomies (surgical removal of the uterus, sometimes done as part of gender transition) until 2023.
Dr. Solheim submitted a formal concern to ACOG’s national leadership. The concern: internal WPATH documents, made public through a legal case brought by the Alabama Attorney General, showed that WPATH’s Standards of Care — the same guidelines ACOG had built into its own clinical guidance, its residency training curriculum, and its official policy positions — had been shaped by political and legal strategy rather than scientific review. In their own internal communications, WPATH leaders had argued that “specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation,” and directed staff to replace language like “insufficient evidence” with “medical necessity.” In other words: according to WPATH’s own internal records, language in its medical guidelines was changed for legal and political reasons, not because the underlying science had changed.
Dr. Solheim raised this concern as an insider, not a critic. She spent four months trying to resolve it through normal internal channels — writing to ACOG’s president, its Chief of Education, its CME (continuing medical education) leadership, and its Chief Legal Officer, Molly Meegan. She explicitly said she did not believe ACOG had acted in bad faith, framing the organization as a potential victim of a deception it now had a chance to correct.
ACOG’s response was not a scientific review of the concern. It was the invocation of a policy governing public statements by ACOG leaders — essentially a speech restriction — applied to a sitting section chair who had raised an evidence-based concern about the guidelines her own members were using to treat patients.
Dr. Solheim was given a choice: stop speaking publicly about WPATH and gender medicine, or resign her leadership position. She resigned.
ACOG has not, to date, announced any review of the WPATH evidence Dr. Solheim raised. It has not issued any statement addressing the substance of her concern. It continues to promote WPATH’s Standards of Care as the governing framework for how ob-gyns should treat transgender patients.
What ACOG’s authority means for patients
This isn’t an abstract policy dispute. Ob-gyns are a primary point of contact for women and girls seeking testosterone, continuous-use hormonal birth control prescribed for “gender affirmation,” and gender-affirming hysterectomy. ACOG’s guidelines shape the standard of care patients receive directly at the point where a prescription is written or a surgery is scheduled.
That means patients currently being prescribed testosterone, or scheduled for one of these procedures, are receiving care built on WPATH’s Standards of Care — the same standards an ACOG section chair tried, and failed, to get reviewed.
None of this is incidental to why ACOG exists. The health of women and girls in this country depends on an organization that sets and enforces rigorous, evidence-based standards — and that corrects course when the evidence demands it. As the medical profession works to reckon with what went wrong in pediatric and adolescent gender medicine, institutions like ACOG are not the obstacle to that reckoning; they are the mechanism through which it has to happen. ACOG’s credibility, its independence, and its willingness to apply its own standards without exception are not just organizational virtues — they are a precondition for patients being able to trust the guidance their physicians follow. That is the standard we are applying here.
Other ties worth knowing about
The Meegan-Lowell connection is the clearest example of how closely ACOG’s leadership is tied to the advocacy movement behind WPATH’s guidelines, but it isn’t the only one.
ACOG’s own Committee Opinion 823 — its official policy document instructing ob-gyns on how to treat transgender patients, including when to provide or refer patients for gender-affirming care — lifted its glossary of terminology directly from HRC’s website, the same advocacy organization Meegan worked for before joining ACOG.
Separately, among the ACOG clinical officials brought into the internal meeting convened to address Dr. Solheim’s concerns was a Senior Advisor for Reproductive Health Policy — an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood and a Fellow of Physicians for Reproductive Health. Three weeks before that meeting, she had testified before the U.S. Senate and declined to say that men cannot get pregnant when asked directly by Senator Josh Hawley. That exchange was viewed more than 30 million times online.
We are not suggesting that any individual acted with malicious intent. We are pointing out what the institutional record shows: ACOG’s response to a documented, evidence-based internal challenge to its gender medicine guidelines was handled by officials whose own professional backgrounds and personal ties run directly through the advocacy movement behind those guidelines.
One more data point, for context rather than as a central claim: Lowell & Associates also represents New York Attorney General Letitia James. James fired one of her own assistant attorneys general, Glenna Goldis, in January 2026 after Goldis publicly criticized pediatric gender medicine — a firing Goldis described in a January 27, 2026 Free Press essay.
The standard we’re asking ACOG to apply
Gender medicine is not a special category of clinical practice that gets to skip the evidentiary standards ACOG applies to everything else. When the evidence behind a clinical guideline is credibly called into question — when an organization’s own internal documents show its methodology was shaped by political strategy rather than science — ACOG’s own institutional mission requires a real review, not a speech policy aimed at the person who raised the concern.
That is not an attack on ACOG. It is an argument for ACOG’s credibility. The medical profession is going to have to account for what happened in pediatric and adolescent gender medicine. The only question is whether that accounting is led by the institutions responsible for evidence-based care — or forced on them from outside. ACOG is exactly the kind of institution that should be leading that process voluntarily. The alternative is a continued erosion of the public trust that makes its guidance meaningful in the first place.
Ob-gyns are among the primary clinical providers of cross-sex hormones in the United States. The guidelines governing that care were adopted from an outside organization whose own internal communications are now public record. ACOG built those guidelines into its clinical standards and its residency training — meaning they are being passed down to the next generation of physicians as settled medicine, without the review Dr. Solheim asked for.
Dr. Solheim was doing exactly what ACOG’s own standards ask of its members: raising a good-faith, evidence-based concern through internal channels. The question is whether ACOG will hold itself to the same standard it asks of her.
All claims in this entry are sourced from the email records provided to LGB Courage Coalition, from WPATH’s own public statements, and from other publicly available materials.