NASHVILLE (LifeSiteNews) — Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center has cut its LGBT programs, firing LGBT-focused staff and volunteers.
In late June 2025, Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) laid off the staff from its “LGBT Health Program,” according to an Instagram post from the “Tennessee Transgender Task Force.”
“The implications will be felt throughout the community as the Program was able to connect many people who already have hesitations about interacting with the healthcare complex due to sexual orientation or gender identity to culturally competent and affirming care inside or outside of the VUMC system,” the post claimed.
VUMC further cut its “Trans Buddy Program,” which recruited pro-LGBT volunteers with the purpose of “providing emotional support” to gender-confused people at the medical center.
The $300 million budget reduction, attributed to federal research grant cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration, is estimated to result in cutting 650 jobs, including five staff members, such as the director, assistant director, and the coordinator of the “Trans Buddy Program.” Predictably, LGBT activists have criticized the decision.
DEI programs in the United States are gradually dying thanks to Trump’s January order abolishing DEI programs and policies in the federal government and declaring them “illegal and immoral discrimination” and “immense public waste.”
Additionally, during his first days in office, Trump signed an executive order banning federal funds to entities that “transition” minors.
Since Trump signed the order, many medical institutions have announced an end to the dangerous practice of irreversibly “transitioning” minors, including California’s “Center for Transyouth Health and Development” and Stanford Medicine.
Furthermore, while LGBT activists claim that their DEI programs are important resources for gender-confused individuals, medical research has found that people who persist in their gender dysphoria and undergo so-called “gender transitioning” are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given irreversible surgery.
Indeed, a significant 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.”
So-called “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.”
