(LifeSiteNews) — White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said on Thursday that “gender transition” procedures on minors amount to “child torture,” which the Trump administration is “coordinating with state and local law enforcement to fight.”
“If a five-year-old or a six-year-old goes to school, or a seven-year-old goes to school, and the teacher … tries to turn the boy into a girl or the girl into a boy, that is child abuse, and this administration is treating that as child abuse,” Miller said at a White House press conference. “And it is a gross violation of parental rights.”
.@StephenM: “It is CHILD ABUSE to change a child’s gender … Castration surgeries, castration drugs, sterilization treatments of children are barbaric. They violate all sound medical ethics. They are completely unwarranted. They harm children for life — irreversibly.” pic.twitter.com/AMNM6eXTau
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 1, 2025
“Castration surgeries, castration drugs, sterilization treatments of children are barbaric. They violate all sound medical ethics. They are completely unwarranted. They harm children for life, irreversibly. It is child torture, it is child abuse, it is medical malpractice,” Miller went on, touting the administration’s efforts to deny federal funds to entities that continue them.
“We are using every single legal and financial tool we have at President Trump’s direction to make it clear that schools and universities are and will lose federal funds, as you’ve seen in Maine, if you allow men to invade women’s sports and women’s spaces,” he declared.
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.”
Since returning to office, Trump has taken multiple executive actions 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.
Another order prohibits males who claim to be female from competing against actual women in sex-specific athletic programs at schools receiving government funding. A third disqualifies gender-confused individuals from military service and prohibits military health services from conducting “transition” procedures, although that has been temporarily blocked by federal courts.
