
THE HILL | Published January 30, 2025
President Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive order meant to broadly restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender children and teenagers younger than 19, inching closer to fulfilling a key campaign promise to ban treatments that he and his administration have cast as experimental and dangerous, in conflict with major medical associations and transgender health experts.
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” Tuesday’s order states. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
“Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” the order states.
Every major medical organization supports gender-affirming care for transgender adults and minors, although not every trans person chooses to medically transition or has access to care.
Trump’s executive order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” tasks federal agencies with rescinding or amending policies that rely on guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), including the organization’s latest standards of care, released in 2022.
WPATH, a nonprofit professional organization devoted to transgender health care, did not immediately return a request for comment
Trump’s order tasks the incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) with publishing a review of existing literature on best practices “for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which claims that adolescents identify as transgender because of influence from friends or social media, is not recognized as a valid medical diagnosis by major professional medical organizations. In 2021, 61 professional health care organizations, including the American Psychological Association, signed a letter stating the condition lacks “rigorous empirical support for its existence.”
According to Tuesday’s order, heads of executive departments and agencies that provide research and education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, should take immediate steps to block funding for institutions that continue providing gender-affirming care to minors.
Meredithe McNamara, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale University specializing in adolescent medicine, said the provision amounts to “an immediate de facto ban on medical care” for trans youth who receive care at academic medical centers.
“It basically defunds those medical centers if they continue to provide that care,” McNamara said of the order.
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SOURCE: www.thehill.com
TITLE: Trump Issues Order Banning Child Gender Transition Care
People hold signs as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments over an appeal by U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration of a lower court’s decision upholding a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, in Washington Dec. 4, 2024. (OSV News photo/Benoit Tessier, Reuters)
NEWSMAX | Published January 30, 2025
President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday banning child gender transition care, which the order refers to as the “chemical and surgical mutilation” of children.
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the order reads. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
“Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” it states.
The order applies to individuals younger than 19 years of age, according to the document.
The phrase “chemical and surgical mutilation” within the order means “the use of puberty blockers … to delay the onset or progression of normally timed puberty in an individual who does not identify as his or her sex” as well as “the use of sex hormones, such as androgen blockers, estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone, to align an individual’s physical appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”
It also includes “surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex or that attempt to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs to minimize or destroy their natural biological functions.”
According to the executive order, “the blatant harm done to children by chemical and surgical mutilation cloaks itself in medical necessity, spurred by guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH),” which the administration says, “lacks scientific integrity.”
Agencies are directed to “rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance,” and the Health and Human Services secretary is charged with publishing “a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children” who present with gender dysphoria or “other identity-based confusion.”
In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump reiterated many of these points to justify his order.
“Our Nation will no longer fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support so-called ‘gender affirming care,’ which has already ruined far too many precious lives,” he wrote, echoing arguments he’d made throughout his presidential run. “My Order directs Agencies to use every available means to cut off Federal financial participation in institutions which seek to provide these barbaric medical procedures, that should have never been allowed to take place!”
On Tuesday afternoon, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., issued a statement in support of the president’s order, saying it was “pure insanity” to allow children to access “gender-affirming care.”
“We all know by now that so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ is anything but caring,” Tuberville said. “There’s a reason it’s illegal for kids to buy alcohol, a lottery ticket, or join the military. Allowing our young people whose brains aren’t fully developed to undergo a life-altering, irreversible procedure is pure insanity. This isn’t about politics — this is about good and evil. I’m thankful for President Trump’s commonsense leadership to end this barbaric practice in our country once and for all.”
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SOURCE: www.newsmax.com
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