Erica Anderson

Erica Anderson is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating transgender children. After coming out as a transgender woman in 2016 on the TV show Allt för Sverige (Everything for Sweden) she worked at a child gender clinic at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) until 2021. She was the first transgender president of the United States Professional Association of Transgender Health and was on the board of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health between 2019 and her resignation in 2021.

She is controversial among the trans community and trans healthcare providers. She has given interviews, written op-eds, and testified in court that transgender children should require more assessment than they are given and may be transitioning "because it's trendy".

Early life and education

Anderson was born to an advertising executive and schoolteacher turned housewife in 1951 and grew up in the town of Edina, Minnesota. She had two younger sisters. She was a boy scout and church youth leader. She imagined being a woman at 12 and was trying on her sisters clothes in secret at 14. She married when she and her future wife were finishing graduate school and relocated to Minnesota, where she had a postdoc. The couple stayed together for the next 30 years and had two children together.

She received a master's degree in theology.

Transition

At 45 years old, Anderson visited an endocrinologist who refused to prescribe her gender-affirming hormone treatment. She was also a psychology professor at UCSF. She was interviewed by Abigail Shrier, an author who activists consider anti-trans, in an article on Bari Weiss's substack titled "Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care". Anderson said that there has been "sloppy healthcare work" in this field and that she expected regret rates of transition to increase because of a lack of sufficient mental-health evaluations. Her colleagues, including USPATH president and UCSF professor Madeline Deutsch, said "we were all broadsided".

Anderson attracted increased criticism from peers for her positions. In November, the USPATH board privately censured Anderson. In December, the board imposed a 30-day moratorium on speaking to the press for all board members and Anderson resigned from her position as USPATH president and WPATH board member in protest. She had not previously raised her concerns at board meetings before speaking to the media. She told the LA Times the USPATH board was "not equipped" to deal with the issues because fellow board member Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the only other youth specialist, had voiced skepticism of psychological assessments. She continues to be a member of WPATH and supports the updated SOC8 guidelines. The Southern Poverty Law Center said "the ADF sees more success with experts like Levine and Anderson because their involvement, relevant clinical expertise and claimed political positions allows the ADF to mask the extremism of the policies it is defending in court" and despite its infamy for anti-LGBTQ+ positions "self-proclaimed moderates and liberals like Erica Anderson, Stephen Levine and James Cantor can all claim that they’re not extremists by working with the ADF, and that their individual positions are moderate and science-informed."

The same year, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs began claiming that 60% of kids "are given automatic affirmation and put on some sort of hormone therapy" at their first appointment based on a 2021 study. Higgs declined to comment to the press and referred them to James Cantor and Anderson, who repeated the study's figure. The author of the study in question, Greta Bauer, stated this was a misrepresentation as the youth had to first receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and, on average, see 2.7 other professionals and wait 269 days from referral. She stated Anderson and Higgs had not cited the study responsibly and were "portraying a misleading picture of what's happening in medical care".

In 2024, she described the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine as the most important group of clinicians and scientists in the field and said they do "not exist so much to oppose gender-affirming care as to determine the best approach to gender-questioning youth".