OAKLAND, California (LifeSiteNews) — Kaiser Permanente is the latest major health system to pause gender-reassignment surgeries on minors as a result of changing federal rules, but they are not yet giving up all of their transition practices.
“After significant deliberation and consultation with internal and external experts including our physicians, we’ve made the difficult decision to pause [surgeries] for patients under the age of 19 in our hospitals and surgical centers. This pause is effective August 29, 2025,” reads a Kaiser announcement obtained by The Hill. “All other [so-called] gender-affirming care treatment remains available. We continue to meet with regulators as well as our clinicians, patients, their families, and the community with the goal of identifying a responsible path forward.”
The group cited a changing “legal and regulatory environment” for transgender interventions “since January, there has been significant focus by the federal government on gender-affirming care, specifically for patients under the age of 19.”
While the move is a “pause” rather than a permanent end, and Kaiser intends to continue non-surgical interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, detransitioner Chloe Cole responded that “these incremental wins must be celebrated! We are winning! Thank you to the Trump administration for protecting kids!!!”
From @BillboardChris
This is according to an internal email sent by CEO Greg Adams, and will go into effect on August 29.
“Since January, there has been significant focus by the federal government on gender-affirming care, specifically for patients under the age of 19. …
“In…
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) July 23, 2025
The closure is the latest fruit of one of President Donald Trump’s earliest executive actions upon returning to office: an order that ends all federal financial support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescinds or amends all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” and calls 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.
Direct legality of youth transitions is currently a matter for individual states to decide, but the Trump administration has also also announced it is investigating institutions that perpetuate it for related crimes that do fall under federal jurisdiction, such as misrepresentation and Medicaid fraud.
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.”
“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.”
California officials have urged state entities not to comply with federal gender directives, with California’s far-left Attorney General Rob Bonta part of a multi-state lawsuit against the Trump administration over the matter.
