WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The University of Michigan hospital system is suspending its gender-transition practices for minors, the latest health entity giving in to pressure from the Trump administration.
“The University of Michigan, including Michigan Medicine, is one of multiple institutions across the country that has received a federal subpoena as part of a criminal and civil investigation into gender-affirming care for minors,” the institution told Talking Points Memo on August 25. “In light of that investigation, and given escalating external threats and risks, we will no longer provide gender affirming hormonal therapies and puberty blocker medications for minors.”
“We recognize the gravity and impact of this decision for our patients and our community. We are working closely with all those impacted, and we will continuously support the well-being of our patients, their families, and our teams,” it went on. “We are deeply grateful to our clinicians for their unyielding commitment to providing the highest quality care, and to all of our team members for their dedication to helping our patients, and to supporting each other, as we navigate these changes together.”
Like other medical institutions across the country, the University of Michigan received a subpoena from the Trump administration in July indicating that criminal and civil charges would be pursued if they did not cease all such activities.
UM previously landed on the administration’s radar earlier this summer when the Department of Health & Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights announced it was investigating allegations that physician assistant Valerie Kloosterman was fired in 2021 after objecting to using transgender pronouns or participating in transition procedures.
The news follows similar announcements by Yale Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, UChicago Medicine, and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.
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.
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, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, 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.”
