WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The Trump administration’s Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is finalizing a rule to formally implement its policy excluding underage gender “transition” procedures from Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding.
National Review reported that an administration source told the publication it is in “the final stage of review for a new rule that would make it a condition of hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid that they not provide sex trait modifications to minors.”
“We are actively combing through all federal grants that go to the hospitals that still provide these procedures (surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers) to kids and sorting through what funding could be cut without jeopardizing the health and safety of other patients and critical research needs,” an insider added. “We are identifying what cuts can be made consistent with ongoing injunctions and what cuts can be made immediately after the injunction is lifted.”
The news will put into concrete action one of President Donald Trump’s earliest executive orders in his second term. Since returning to office, Trump has taken multiple steps to reverse the Biden administration’s transgender policies, including an order that ends all federal 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 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.”
