CHICAGO (LifeSiteNews) – UChicago Medicine has announced it is shuttering its transgender interventions for minors, citing Trump administration federal actions that it has little choice but to comply with.
“UChicago Medicine has reached the difficult decision that, in response to continued federal actions, it will discontinue all [so-called] gender-affirming pediatric care effective immediately,” the hospital announced, the Chicago Tribune reports. “We understand that this news will have a significant impact on our patients.”
“We reached this conclusion in light of emerging federal actions, which would place at risk our ability to care for all Medicare or Medicaid patients,” it added, noting that it mostly sees Medicare of Medicaid users.
“As the largest Medicaid provider in Illinois, this step is necessary to ensure UChicago Medicine can continue serving our broader community and delivering on our mission,” the hospital continued.
The halt took effect July 18. It is unknown precisely how many people are affected, but the hospital said it is “working with affected patients to discuss options going forward.”
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 left to 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.”
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.”
