The Epstein Files just connected a child sex trafficker to the foundations of America's transgender medicine industry.

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Newly released DOJ files show that Jeffrey Epstein funded research tied to key figures in transgender medicine, encouraged academic work on ‘transgender biology,’ and circulated the topic among elite institutional networks.

The financial architecture tells a more complicated story.

Independent investigators had already traced billionaire funding networks that helped build the infrastructure of gender clinics, advocacy organizations, and media campaigns. My own reporting documented medical systems transitioning toddlers and research linking prenatal synthetic estrogen exposure to transgender identification rates up to 100 times the baseline. But what was missing was primary documentation — evidence capable of moving the debate beyond journalism and into courtrooms and congressional hearings.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act provided that documentation.

Six documents released in January and February 2026, drawn from Jeffrey Epstein’s private correspondence, connect him directly to key institutional nodes in transgender medicine. They show him funding the surgeon who built America’s first comprehensive academic transgender surgery program at Mount Sinai. They show him commissioning and financing research into “transgender biology.” And they show him circulating the topic among elite contacts — including Bill Gates, MIT affiliates, and Obama’s former White House Counsel — during the years the field was consolidating its institutional power.

This is not a story about social proximity or island visits. It is a story about influence — about who financed, shaped, and legitimized a rapidly expanding medical industry that has overridden informed consent, bypassed parental rights, and subjected children to irreversible procedures.

What follows relies exclusively on primary documents and independently published reporting.

The Surgeon: Dr. Jess Ting and Mount Sinai

Dr. Jess Ting is a plastic surgeon at New York's Mount Sinai Health System. In 2016, he became the surgical director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery — described at its launch as the first full-spectrum academic program in the United States focused on transgender surgery and care. He would go on to spearhead Mount Sinai's first transgender-related vaginoplasty and become one of the most prominent figures in gender-affirming surgical practice in the country.

His connection to Jeffrey Epstein predates his transgender work by years — and it runs deep.

The Island Visit

In March 2013, Ting accepted an invitation — extended through an Epstein assistant — to visit Little St. James, Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Ting proposed bringing a female friend and her three young children, ages eight and under. An Epstein assistant subsequently wrote to Ting: “I hope you had a nice visit to Jeffrey’s island last Friday.”

The $50,000 Grant

Correspondence shows that Epstein agreed to provide Ting with a $50,000 grant for breast cancer research. Ting described the offer as “extremely generous.” By May 2016, Ting emailed Epstein to report that “the research you supported with a $50,000 grant has borne fruit,” noting that a paper summarizing the results had been submitted for publication. The research — examining how the tumor microenvironment influences breast cancer metastasis following surgery — was funded through the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, according to a Mount Sinai announcement archived in the released files.

The Transgender Pivot — and the Pitch

In that same May 2016 email, Ting informed Epstein that he had been named director of Mount Sinai's new transgender surgery program. By July 2017, Ting told Epstein he had "given up plastic surgery and jumped into the world of transgender surgery," calling it "the most gratifying, worthwhile, and fascinating thing I've ever done."

Then came the ask.

Ting directly solicited Epstein’s financial support for a documentary about the Mount Sinai transgender program — the film that would become Born to Be, released in 2019 and later nominated for two Emmys. “If I could just be really forward,” Ting wrote to Epstein, “I was wondering if you would be interested in supporting this documentary? If so, the producer, director and I would love to come and give you the pitch in person. This is an exciting, groundbreaking project — both the center and the documentary — that will do good for the world. I hope you can be a part of it.”

Available documents do not reveal whether Epstein agreed to fund the film.

The 2018 Email — and the Forward

On April 24, 2018, Ting emailed Epstein again. The email, preserved in EFTA02667053, reads:

“Hi Jeffrey, I wanted to share with you some changes in my career that you may find of interest. I have switched specialties from plastic surgery to gender-affirmation surgery (AKA transgender surgery). This is a documentary about the creation of the new center at Mount Sinai: Transformation-film.com. Check it out. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever been involved with.”

What happened next is the detail that matters most.

On May 10, 2018, Epstein forwarded Ting’s email to Stephen Hanson — a close associate. The subject line: “Fwd: Film project.” Epstein wasn’t passively receiving updates from a surgeon. He was circulating information about the transgender surgery program within his network. The forwarding of this email transforms it from a one-way communication into evidence of active engagement — Epstein sharing, routing, and potentially brokering connections around transgender medicine.

Media Management

The emails also document how Ting navigated media inquiries about Epstein — and the degree to which Epstein controlled the narrative. In January 2015, a Reuters reporter contacted Ting as part of a story examining Epstein’s philanthropy, seeking confirmation of Epstein’s support for medical research. Ting forwarded the inquiry to Epstein’s assistant, writing: “See below. Would Jeffrey like me to respond to this?” He then proposed sending the reporter’s written questions to Epstein first — offering to let a convicted sex offender vet his responses to the press about their financial relationship.

The documents do not show whether Reuters ultimately received a response or whether Epstein reviewed or edited any reply.

Institutional Response

When The Advocate contacted Mount Sinai in February 2026 asking whether the institution had reviewed the newly released EFTA emails, whether Epstein had any involvement in projects connected to the transgender program, and what institutional safeguards governed outside donors — a Mount Sinai spokesperson said only: "We've encouraged Dr. Ting to respond to your questions." The institution did not address the substance of the questions. Ting, for his part, said his interactions with Epstein were limited and described the initial relationship as a professional wound care referral for a model injured in a car accident.

It should be noted: Ting has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s alleged crimes. But the documentary record establishes that the founding director of America’s first comprehensive transgender surgery program maintained a yearslong relationship with a convicted sex offender — one that encompassed travel to his private island, a $50,000 research grant, and direct solicitations for additional funding — during the precise years when the program was being conceived, launched, and promoted to the public.

The Biologist: Robert Trivers and the Research Commission

If the Ting correspondence reveals how Epstein attached himself to the institutional infrastructure of transgender medicine, the Robert Trivers correspondence reveals something more alarming: Epstein actively directing the production of pseudo-scientific research on transgender biology — and paying for it.

Robert Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist known for influential work on reciprocal altruism, parental investment, and self-deception. He is also a man who accepted $40,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, publicly defended Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors, and was suspended from Rutgers University in 2015 after refusing to teach an assigned course.

The EFTA files document a decade of correspondence between Trivers and Epstein — from 2009 to 2019 — that escalates from financial dependency into something far more troubling.

The Financial Relationship

The first known correspondence dates to 2009 — after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea to solicitation of prostitution involving a minor. Epstein invited Trivers to his Florida home to discuss his research, paying for travel and accommodations. By 2015, Epstein emailed Noam Chomsky boasting that he was Trivers’ “major funder” — context for why Trivers had been “thrown out of Rutgers for good this time.”

The financial dependency was profound. By 2019, Trivers would describe it as “7 years of continuous support” — and when it stopped, he was reduced to begging for adjunct teaching positions that paid less than his rent.

The Commission

On February 5, 2016, Trivers wrote to Epstein: “I was stunned and extremely happy to receive the extra money and appointment as an advisor to your Foundation.” He described how he was following Epstein’s “counsel” and redirecting his work “entirely toward the theoretical work you have urged upon me.”

Epstein’s response the next day was not a pleasantry. It was a directive (EFTA00835004): “you are unique .. i want to see you piece on transgender in the bio world. this is for you. not me.”

Two months later, Trivers reported back: he was “getting to the end of ‘transsexuality.’”

Three years later, the leverage became explicit. On March 15, 2019, Trivers wrote to Epstein in desperation (EFTA01035762): “after 7 years of continuous support, you seemed to flip, no support at all for past two years nor response to requests.” He described being offered “$5500/semester” at Hunter College — “my God, Jeffrey, rent is 8 grand, i would like to eat, have a modest social life and an occasional psychosexual experience.”

Epstein’s response the next morning laid bare the transactional architecture: “I thought that you might want to focus on transgender biology. people would be interested and i would fund.” He dismissed Trivers’ honor killing research and sprinter genetics as “detrimental” with “little public interest,” then framed his refusal to fund alternative topics in paternalistic terms: “I wouldn’t give you drugs if you asked because it was bad for you. giving you money for subjects that would be in my strong view detrimental to your future creates a problem.”

Trivers capitulated: “yes i agree it is time to write up my thoughts on transsexuality — i don’t think they would take long but we shall see.”

Read this exchange carefully. A convicted sex offender is using financial leverage over a desperate, aging academic — a man who cannot make rent — to compel specific research on transgender biology. He is not merely funding research. He is commissioning it, rejecting alternatives, and conditioning financial survival on compliance.

The Content

What Trivers produced under Epstein's direction is documented in the EFTA emails — first analyzed by STEM researcher Ev L. Nichols — and it is disturbing.

In the 2016 correspondence, Trivers wrote to Epstein describing transgender women in explicitly dehumanizing and sexualized terms, reducing their existence to male sexual fantasy. He described trans women as desirable “organisms” for men with homosexual inclinations, writing that such a person would “smell like a woman, be softer and more hairless like a woman” while retaining male genitalia. He dismissed trans men as “unhappy and lonely — they are men with mum-pums, the worst of both worlds.” This is the language of a man who views transgender people not as human beings but as biological specimens to be evaluated for sexual utility.

In 2018, the correspondence escalated. In a December email with the subject line "Trans," Trivers evaluated transgender women's bodies through the economics of the sex trade — writing that "so many transsexual women are very attractive and easily make money which in turn they assert promotes their prostitution since they have to pay hefty fees for injections every week." He was explaining the commercial sexual viability of surgically feminized males — to a convicted sex trafficker. In the same email, Trivers described early hormone interventions for children: “BTW we are now pushing the intervention earlier — so you notice your 3-year old son has trans tendencies, so now you intervene with hormones — i would be frightened to do that but who knows?”

He described transgender medicine in terms of producing “novel phenotypes” through molecular control over development — “more feminine men, by blocking testosterone receptors (or castration), and at the same time, increasing estrogen production.” He noted that young men receiving these interventions would still be able to orgasm despite the treatment.

The actual research Trivers produced along these lines included work on gender identity based on the ratio between the lengths of the second and fourth fingers — the so-called 2D:4D ratio. This methodology has been widely criticized by researchers; University of Vienna psychologist Martin Voracek compared such research to phrenology, calling it "a house of cards built on an unknown and uncertain base."

Read those passages again. A biologist funded by a convicted child sex offender is writing to that offender about hormonal manipulation of children’s bodies, in language that emphasizes sexual viability and physical feminization of young males — and describing how early intervention preserves youthful appearance. The “research” he produced was pseudoscience. But the commission itself — a sex offender paying a man who defended sex with minors to write about transgender children — is the fact that matters.

The Defense of Abuse

Trivers’ moral framework was no secret. In a 2015 Reuters interview, asked about his continued relationship with Epstein despite the sex abuse conviction, Trivers said: “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous.”

He described Epstein as “a person of integrity” and, in a 2017 Huffington Post interview arranged by Epstein’s public-relations team, praised their relationship: Epstein “gives me consistent, warm support without me having to write endless applications for grants, and trusts me to put it to good use.” The Chronicle of Higher Education later reported that this glowing profile was the result of a coordinated PR campaign — Epstein had directed his publicist to put Trivers in front of reporters.

In 2017 and 2018, Trivers used Epstein as a sounding board for complaints about the #MeToo movement, lamenting the “strong national trend” of well-known men “being brought low for alleged misbehaviour toward women.”

The Network: Transgender as a Managed Topic

The Ting and Trivers trails would be significant on their own. But the newly available EFTA documents reveal something additional: transgender wasn’t a peripheral interest for Epstein. It was a topic he actively managed across his network of elite contacts throughout 2016–2018 — the precise years when the transgender medicine field was undergoing explosive institutional expansion in the United States.

Pitching Bill Gates Through MIT

On August 10, 2017, Epstein emailed Joi Ito — then director of the MIT Media Lab — with instructions on how to pitch Bill Gates on science funding. The email (EFTA01038315) reads:

“I would tell gates if i were you, that one science is the most exciting. forget transgender its transcience... but cutting edge. brain stimulation, plant and human interaction. mathematics that can deal with millions of inputs. biology, vs few inputs physics needs to be developed. I told him he would have FUN at the theory level, instead of being under melindas thumb (fat thumb)”

Parse this carefully. Epstein is curating which science topics to present to the world’s richest philanthropist — and transgender is explicitly part of his taxonomy. He’s telling Ito to pivot Gates away from transgender toward what Epstein considers higher-value “transcience.” The email reveals that Epstein was thinking about transgender as a science-funding category — one he had opinions about, and one he was actively routing through institutional channels connected to the Gates Foundation and MIT.

This email was sent less than two months after Ting told Epstein he had “given up plastic surgery” to devote himself entirely to transgender surgery. Epstein was receiving progress reports from the surgical front and simultaneously managing how the topic was positioned in elite science philanthropy.

Wall Street and Weinstein

On October 15, 2017, Epstein emailed Kathy Ruemmler — who had served as White House Counsel under President Obama — with a stream-of-consciousness pitch for how Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein should handle an interview in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Buried in the email (EFTA02582780) is this:

“transgender not yet on wall street. :)”

The smiley face is the detail. Epstein isn’t observing a social trend. He’s tracking transgender as a force that hasn’t yet hit the financial industry — with evident amusement. In the same email, he discusses women as “a new economic hurricane force,” mentorship, equal pay, and the new power of social media as a “regulator” — framing the entire landscape, including transgender issues, through the lens of disruption and opportunity.

Ruemmler’s presence as the recipient matters. She was at the intersection of elite legal, financial, and political networks. Epstein was pushing analysis about transgender dynamics into that intersection.

A Term Paper Topic

On November 27, 2016, someone identified as “Shanson900” asked Epstein for contemporary term paper topics for someone named Brynn. Epstein’s reply (EFTA02669232):

“transgender? life on mars. self driving cars. genetic engineering. living to 120 years old”

Transgender appears first on the list — ahead of genetic engineering, autonomous vehicles, and radical life extension. This was the same month Trivers thanked Epstein for “extra money,” to which Epstein responded with his directive about transgender research. The topic was front-of-mind across every register of Epstein’s correspondence — from academic commissions to casual conversation.

The Pattern

Stand back from the individual transactions and a pattern emerges.

Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted sex offender whose documented crimes involved the sexual exploitation of minors — was simultaneously:

1. Funding the surgical infrastructure: A $50,000 grant to Dr. Jess Ting at Mount Sinai, followed by years of relationship-building during the precise period when Ting transitioned from plastic surgery to founding America’s first comprehensive transgender surgery center — a center that would become one of the most prominent transgender surgical programs in the United States. When Ting emailed Epstein about his career shift to transgender surgery, Epstein forwarded the email to an associate (EFTA02667053).

2. Commissioning the scientific rationale: Directing and funding Robert Trivers to produce research on “transgender biology” (EFTA00835004) — and when Trivers tried to pursue other research, explicitly conditioning financial survival on compliance: “I thought that you might want to focus on transgender biology. people would be interested and i would fund” (EFTA01035762). The resulting “research” consisted of dehumanizing descriptions of transgender people and enthusiastic discussion of hormonal manipulation of children’s bodies, written by a man who publicly minimized child sex abuse.

3. Managing the topic through elite channels: Advising Joi Ito on how to pitch transgender science to Bill Gates (EFTA01038315). Tracking when transgender would reach Wall Street with a smiley face in an email to Obama’s former White House Counsel (EFTA02582780). Listing it first among the contemporary topics of greatest interest (EFTA02669232).

4. Seeking involvement in public promotion: Ting’s direct pitch for Epstein to fund Born to Be, a documentary designed to normalize and celebrate transgender surgical procedures.

This is not a coincidence of interests. The emails show Epstein actively directing Trivers away from other research and toward transgender biology. They show Ting voluntarily updating Epstein on every stage of the transgender program’s development. They show Epstein routing the topic through the highest levels of science philanthropy, finance, and government. They show a convicted sex offender positioning himself at the intersection of emerging medical infrastructure, pseudoscientific production, and public narrative — in a field that operates on the bodies of children.

What Remains Unanswered

The released documents raise questions that demand answers:

For Mount Sinai: Did the institution conduct any review of Epstein’s involvement in research connected to Dr. Ting’s work when the transgender surgery program was launched in 2016 — three years after Ting visited Epstein’s island and accepted his research funding? What due diligence was performed on the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation grant? Has the institution reviewed the EFTA emails released in 2026?

For MIT: The Epstein-Ito email (EFTA01038315) shows Epstein actively managing which science topics to pitch to Bill Gates through MIT’s Media Lab. Was transgender science among the topics Ito subsequently discussed with Gates? Ito resigned from MIT in 2019 after his financial relationship with Epstein was revealed, but this specific email — showing Epstein curating the science agenda for Gates — has not been previously reported.

For the transgender medicine field: How many other programs, researchers, or advocacy organizations received funding from Epstein or entities connected to him? The EFTA documents cover only what has been released — not what remains sealed, redacted, or unprocessed in the remaining millions of pages.

For Congress: The Trivers correspondence — a convicted sex offender explicitly commissioning research on transgender biology from a man who defended child sex abuse — warrants congressional examination. The House Oversight Committee has access to the full, unredacted EFTA archive. Has anyone searched it for additional transgender-related correspondence?

For parents: The man who maintained financial and professional relationships with early institutional figures during the field’s rapid expansion was a child sex trafficker. The biologist he hired to produce the science publicly stated that sex with 14-year-olds is not “so heinous.” The surgeon he funded visited his island and solicited his money while building a program that operates on children. These are facts documented in federal records. They deserve to be part of the public conversation about who built this system and why.

The Broader Picture

Independent investigators have been documenting the institutional money flows behind the transgender medicine industry’s rapid expansion for years. Feminist journalist Jennifer Bilek, writing at The 11th Hour Blog, has traced the roles of billionaire philanthropists — including the Pritzker family, John Stryker’s Arcus Foundation, and tech-sector figures like Martine Rothblatt — in funding the institutional scaffolding: gender clinics, legal frameworks, media campaigns, and educational programs that drove a medical industry from near-nonexistence to hundreds of pediatric gender clinics in barely a decade. Learn more by watching her stunning interview here: Trans Inc.: How Wall Street and Silicon Valley Profit from Gender Chaos

The EFTA documents add a previously missing piece to that picture: a convicted child sex trafficker operating at the intersection of surgical infrastructure, research production, and elite network management — routing the topic through MIT, the Gates orbit, and Obama’s former White House Counsel during the precise years of the industry’s greatest expansion. Whether Epstein was a peripheral figure or a central node in these broader money flows is a question the remaining millions of pages of unreleased EFTA documents may help answer.

Why This Matters Now

On December 18, 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. formally declared that so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors constitutes chemical and surgical mutilation — ending federal funding, barring participating hospitals from performing these procedures on children, and reclassifying the entire practice as outside recognized standards of medicine. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary called the practice “predatory.” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz accused major medical associations of betraying an estimated 300,000 American youth.

The HHS announcement addressed the what — what these procedures do to children, why they fail recognized standards. The EFTA documents answer a question the policy debate has not yet addressed: who built it, and with whose money.

Consider what these six documents, taken together, actually show.

These documents do not prove that Epstein built the transgender medicine industry. They do, however, reveal that he maintained financial and professional relationships with individuals involved in its early institutional development — while simultaneously encouraging research on transgender biology and circulating the topic within elite networks.

These are not abstract institutional questions. They are the exposed wiring behind a machine that processed children.

Informed consent requires that patients and families understand not just what a procedure does, but whether the evidence supporting it was produced in good faith. The Trivers correspondence obliterates that assumption. A sex offender commissioned the research. A man who defended child sex abuse wrote it. The methodology was compared to phrenology. And the entire enterprise was funded through a financial relationship built on coercion and dependency.

Parental rights require that mothers and fathers have access to the full picture of who built the system asking for authority over their children’s bodies. The Ting correspondence shows that the founding director of America’s first comprehensive transgender surgery program maintained a yearslong relationship with a child sex trafficker — visiting his island, accepting his money, soliciting his patronage, and offering to let him vet press inquiries — during the precise years the program was launched and promoted as a model for the nation.

And the network correspondence — Epstein routing transgender through Gates, MIT, and Obama’s White House Counsel — reveals that the topic was not simply emerging organically into elite consciousness. It was being managed, curated, and positioned by a man whose primary documented skill was leveraging access to powerful people for purposes that served his own interests.

The question is no longer whether the system should be reformed. The federal government has already acted. The question is whether the people and institutions that built it will be held accountable — and whether the documents that reveal its foundations will be admitted into evidence or buried again.

A convicted sex offender funded research conducted by the founding surgical director of America’s first comprehensive academic transgender surgery program. He commissioned the research. He routed the agenda through the most powerful institutions in the country. He did all of this after his conviction — while continuing to abuse children.

The parents who were told to trust this system deserved to know. Now they do.

As Congress, HHS, and state legislatures weigh accountability, these documents should be part of the evidentiary record. Whether Epstein was a peripheral figure or a central node in the broader money flows behind transgender medicine is a question the remaining millions of pages of unreleased EFTA documents may help answer.

Additional sources: The Advocate (Feb. 2026); Daily Caller News Foundation (Feb. 2, 2026); them.us (Ev L. Nichols); Jamaica Gleaner; Chronicle of Higher Education; NJ.com; Reuters (2015); Martin Voracek (Science.org, 2019); Wikipedia (Robert Trivers); FOX 56 (Kentucky); Jennifer Bilek, The 11th Hour Blog. Dr. Ting has not been implicated in any crimes. All email excerpts are drawn from EFTA documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

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