(LifeSiteNews) — Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday new proposals to clamp down on mutilating transgender surgeries for children.
One proposed rule would ban hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding, “almost every hospital,” from performing what the HHS now describes as “sex-rejecting” procedures, Kennedy shared during a press conference at HHS headquarters.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has also proposed to prohibit any Medicaid funding from being used to fund transgender procedures for minors.
To support these measures, the HHS is also moving to remove gender dysphoria from a “disability” classification, so that policies restricting “sex-rejecting procedures do not violate disability non-discrimination requirements.”
Kennedy the same morning signed a declaration that “sex rejecting procedures are neither safe nor effective treatment for children with gender dysphoria,” based upon a peer-reviewed study of gender dysphoria. He called it a “clear directive to providers to follow the science and the overwhelming body of evidence that these procedures hurt, not help, children.”
“Doctors assume a solemn obligation to protect children. Yet doctors across the country provide needless and irreversible sex rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic oath, violating the very lives they are sworn to safeguard,” declared Kennedy.
“So-called gender affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. This is not medicine. It is malpractice,” he continued. “We’re done with junk science driven by ideological pursuits, not the well-being of children.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of CMS, called out the “grotesque” profiteering of the medical establishment from transgender procedures, which are costly: $60,000 for a vaginoplasty, and $150,000 for a phalloplasty.
READ: House passes bill to criminalize transgender mutilation of children
“This is a pathology that has afflicted the medical profession. It is shameful that clinicians have profiteered off this,” said Dr. Oz. “I do not understand how it could possibly have been tolerated by the leadership of these institutions. But it will no longer be funded.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have been caught on video and in email admitting that they pushed the treatments despite knowing they were dangerous. A 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health revealed Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor saying outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
The HHS’s recently released report “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices” found that there is “significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked” harm inflicted not only by transgender surgical operations, but by puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as well.
“These interventions carry risk of significant harms including infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret,” the report notes.
A growing number of hospitals and medical professionals have been scaling back treatments for children who are confused about their gender. The University of Michigan, Yale Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, UChicago Medicine, and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C are just a few of the medical systems across the U.S. that have either eliminated or have begun limiting puberty blockers and other drugs for minors.
However, the disturbing practice of sex-rejecting surgeries continues. To support efforts to stamp them out, the outgoing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which passed the House of Representatives Wednesday. The legislation would criminalize performing gender transition procedures on minors, although its prospects of making it through the Senate are doubtful.
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.
At present there are approximately 2.8 million Americans 13 years of age or older who identify as “transgender.” Generation Z has the highest among all generations of Americans, with roughly 7.6 percent identifying as “LGBTQ+.”
