HHS moves to slash funding and access to care for transgender minors

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would begin to take steps aimed at ending transition-related care — or what HHS has termed “sex-rejecting procedures” — for minors nationwide.

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would begin to take steps aimed at ending transition-related care — or what the Department of Health and Human Services has termed “sex-rejecting procedures” — for minors nationwide.

The proposals — which, if enacted, would pull federal funding from hospitals that offer transgender care to minors — are the latest effort by the administration to restrict access to certain transgender care.

Doctors across the country “provide needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic Oath, endangering the very lives that they are sworn to safeguard,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a news conference Thursday.

“The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children who suffer from gender dysphoria,” Kennedy said. “This is not medicine, it is malpractice.”

A person holds a flag on the day of a Transgender Day of Visibility rally on the National Mall in Washington on March 31.Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters fileDr. Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in an emailed statement that the HHS “policies and proposals misconstrue the current medical consensus and fail to reflect the realities of pediatric care and the needs of children and families.”