BOSTON (LifeSiteNews) – Fenway Health in Massachusetts is the latest prominent medical system to stop conducting gender transition procedures on anyone under age 19 in response to the Trump administration cutting off federal funds to providers of such practices.
Fenway made the announcement on October 13, citing a “change in federal requirements’ that ‘requires us to adapt in order to remain compliant, sustainable, and able to provide healthcare, support, and services to all our patients and the community. Fenway Health is a federally qualified health center (FQHC), and we are required to maintain compliance with HRSA regulations. Being an FQHC allows us to continue delivering high-quality comprehensive care for more than 30,000 residents of New England and beyond. Losing this status would challenge our ability to meet the needs of all who rely on us.”
The Advocate reported that Fenway says it will attempt to refer patients to other providers, but Boston.com added that PFLAG Greater Boston executive director Nina Selvaggio said she was unaware of other providers in the area capable of filling the gap left behind by the move.
Former Fenway board member Alejandra Caraballo condemned the decision as a “cowardly capitulation sacrificing trans youth,” and other pro-LGBT activists took to social media to claim it was unnecessary, and that Massachusetts’ left-wing state leadership could resist the Trump administration.
In August, Democrat Gov. Maura Healy signed an updated shield law to make it harder for out-of-state law enforcement to stop Massachusetts physicians from acting across state lines to help other states’ residents get around restrictions on abortion and transitions, although that concerns cooperation with other states attempting to prosecute offenders, and cannot compel the federal government to release federal funds.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
