(LifeSiteNews) – The Children’s Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is the latest to join a growing list of medical institutions to retreat from “transitioning” gender-confused minors in compliance with a shift in federal rules against the practice.
On July 29, the hospital announced plans to wind down “Gender-Affirming Care services for youth under age 19” over the next 90 days. “After much consideration and based upon current understanding of federal and state directives,” the hospital said there are “no other viable options at this time.”
The news follows similar announcements by Yale Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and UChicago Medicine. All were spurred by 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.
In VCU’s case, Virginia Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares has also warned state hospitals to comply with the Trump order and that the “office will be closely monitoring this issue and the actions of the Commonwealth’s agencies.”
Direct legality of youth transitions is currently a matter for individual states to decide, but the Trump administration has 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 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% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may 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 that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“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.”
