Hospitals in Colorado, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. announced on Thursday that they have stopped providing gender-affirming care for young people while they look into President Donald Trump’s executive order that seeks to reduce government funding for this type of care.
Denver Health in Colorado will no longer offer gender-affirming surgeries for people under 19 years old. A spokesperson said this decision was made to follow an executive order and to keep getting federal funding. It’s not clear if the hospital will keep offering other gender-affirming treatments for kids, like hormone therapy and puberty blockers.
In Virginia, VCU Health and Children’s Hospital of Richmond announced that they have stopped providing gender-affirming medicine and surgery for people under 19 years old.
Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. announced that they have temporarily stopped giving out puberty blockers and hormone treatment. They are doing this to follow new guidelines while they review the situation. The hospital already did not perform gender-affirming surgery on children, a spokesperson said Thursday.
Trump signed an order on Tuesday to undo Biden’s policies that aim to protect transgender individuals and their healthcare. It instructed agencies to ensure that hospitals getting federal research and education funds stop performing chemical and surgical procedures on children that alter their bodies.
Other hospitals told The Associated Press that they will keep their usual practices. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago said they are looking into the order and checking how it might affect the services they provide to patients and their families.
“Our team will keep fighting for necessary medical care, based on science and compassion for the families we are honored to help,” the statement said.
Trump’s executive order uses words like “maiming,” “sterilizing,” and “mutilation,” which do not match how gender-affirming care is usually described in the U.S. It also calls advice from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health “junk science.”
WPATH stated that limiting or banning access to essential medical care for transgender youth is damaging to both the patients and their families.
Gender-affirming medical care for transgender kids is not widely available. A recent study found that less than 1 in 1,000 U.S. teens with private insurance got puberty blockers or hormones over the last five years. Most gender-affirming surgeries are not done on young people.
The Denver hospital said that Trump’s order would harm the mental health of its transgender patients, but they will still get basic and mental health care.
“Denver Health cares about the health and safety of our gender diverse patients who are under 19,” the hospital said.
