Today Secretary Robert Kennedy announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will propose rules that will bar hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding—i.e., all of them— from performing “sex-rejecting procedures on children that expose young people to irreversible harm.” Banned procedures will include chemical treatments as well as surgery.
While the proposed rules do not appear to be public yet, Kennedy’s Declaration in support of the rules is here. And this process implements President Trump’s Executive Order directing HHS to take such actions, among other things.
The principal legal authority for the proposed rules appears to be Sec. 1861 of the Social Security Act, (e)(9), which defines an eligible hospital, inter alia, as one that ” meets such other requirements as the Secretary finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services in the institution.” On the basis of this and other statutory provisions, 42 CFR § 1001.2 provides that “when the Department has declared a treatment modality not to be safe and effective, practitioners who employ such a treatment modality will be deemed not to meet professionally recognized standards of health care.”
This is a welcome development. It can, of course, be reversed by a future Democratic administration, but it will put the brakes on pediatric sex-change procedures for at least the next few years, by which time the entire “trans” enterprise may be so discredited internationally that the issue will become moot.
