Trump Administration Move To Ban Gender-Affirming Care For Trans Youth

The Trump administration has revealed proposed rules to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, threatening to cut federal funding to hospitals that provide puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or- in very rare cases- surgical procedures.

Draft versions of the proposals were uploaded to the Federal Register on Thursday (Friday AEST), with one banning hospitals from providing gender-affirming care- referred to as “sex-rejecting procedures” in the document- to minors under Medicaid and Medicare.

Another would outlaw state Medicaid plans from funding gender-affirming care, and ban State Children’s Health Insurance Program plans from funding that care for anyone under the age of 19, blocking care to trans people no longer considered minors.

The third puts forward the exclusion of “gender dysphoria not resulting from a physical impairment” from federal healthcare nondiscrimination protections, allowing programs that receive funding from the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights to deny treatment to people with dysphoria.

The proposals come one day after the House passed a bill sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth across the United States.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. labelled gender-affirming care “junk science”, driven by ideology rather than evidence.

“So-called gender-affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. This is not medicine, it is malpractice,” he said.

“The Trump administration will not stand by while ideology, misinformation and propaganda push vulnerable young people into decisions they cannot fully understand and that they can never reverse.”

The proposals are set to be officially published within the next 24 hours, and will be subject to a period of public comment of 60 days for the first two, and 30 for the third.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ own report on gender-affirming care is cited multiple times through the proposals, which the American Academy of Pediatrics labelled as  misrepresenting “the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care.”

First published in May with anonymised authors and peer reviewers, a rerelease of the report revealed that the group included members of anti-LGBTQ groups and outspoken crtiics of gender-affirming care who carried little-to-no experience in providing clinical care to young trans people.

Human rights group promise to fight

LGBTQIA+ advocates and human rights groups have slammed the proposals outright, warning that the lives of young trans and non-binary people were at risk if they were denied medical care.

“Personal medical decisions ought to be made between patients, their doctors and their families, not through a one-size-fits-all mandate from the federal government,” said The Trevor Project’s senior vice president Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen.

“The multitude of efforts we are seeing from federal legislators to strip transgender and non-binary youth of the healthcare they need is deeply troubling.”

The American Civil Liberties Union said they would be opposing the proposals in court where they to be enacted, and called them them “an unprecedented federal intrusion into the private medical decisions of families and their doctors.”

“These gratuitous proposals are cruel and unconstitutional attacks on the rights of transgender youth and their families,” said Chase Strangio, director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project.

“By attempting to strip away essential healthcare, the administration is not ‘protecting’ anyone; it is weaponizing the federal government to target a vulnerable population for political gain. Healthcare decisions belong to families and their doctors, not politicians.”

The proposals mark the latest attack from the Trump administration on the human rights of transgender people, which have included the banning of trans women from women’s sport, the dismissal of transgender service members from the US military, and the official declaration that there are only two sexes, “not changeable and… grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”.

The move comes as access to gender-affirming care for trans minors is increasingly limited across the globe, with countries such as France, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom tightening or outright banning around the prescription of puberty blockers or hormone therapy to people under 18.

Earlier today, Queensland announced it will continue its ban on gender-affirming care for new trans patients under 18 in the public system until at least 2031.

“Trans young people deserve dignity, compassion and access to evidence-based healthcare — without political interference,” said Equality Australia in the wake of the news.

“To trans young people in Queensland — you are not alone. You deserve dignity, compassion and evidence-based healthcare, without politicians standing in the way.”