Epstein Files connect child sex trafficker to US transgender advocacy
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.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com
Header image: New York Times