WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday it has issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and medical facilities suspected of committing “gender transition” procedures on minors and breaking federal law in the process.
Shortly after returning to office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that ended all federal support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescinded or amended all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” and called for a review of the medical literature on the subject, enforcing all existing restrictions on underage “transitioning,” and taking regulatory action to “end” the practice to the greatest extent possible under current law.
As a unilateral presidential action rather than a new law, that order did not and could not directly criminalize underage “transitions,” but it opened the door to taking a closer look at how left-wing medical professionals skirt other laws in the course of facilitating them. Accordingly, the latest round of subpoenas concern investigations into “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more,” the DOJ said in a press release.
“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi declared.
The Daily Wire adds that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) explains that it has “broad authority to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” which “could be implicated if there is evidence that medical professionals or others omitted warnings about the risks or made false or unsupported claims about the benefits and effectiveness of [so-called] gender-affirming care for minors.”
At a Wednesday FTC workshop on the issue, DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle implored the public, “if you are someone who has been harmed please come forward and let us know.”
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 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners 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 in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 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.”
