Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 24, 2025 / 17:23 pm (CNA).
Several children’s hospitals across the country that have performed transgender surgeries on minors are halting the procedures in response to President Donald Trump’s executive actions and his administration’s regulatory changes.
Hospital systems and individual hospitals in California; New York; Washington, D.C.; Colorado; Illinois; Pennsylvania; and other states have announced changes in recent weeks in how they treat children who believe they are the opposite sex. Some transgender clinics are shutting down entirely.
One prominent clinic that performed these operations — the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles — shut down on Tuesday, July 22. The clinic is facing an ongoing lawsuit from a formerly transgender-identifying woman who alleges that doctors fast-tracked her into a hormonal and surgical gender transition beginning when she was only 12 years old.
The clinic’s medical director, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, also faced scrutiny last year for allegedly blocking the publication of a taxpayer-funded study because the results failed to find any mental health benefits for children who are given transgender drugs, according to the New York Times.
“Despite this deeply held commitment to supporting L.A.’s gender-diverse community, the hospital has been left with no viable path forward except to close the Center for Transyouth Health and Development,” the clinic announced ahead of its closure.
In California, Stanford Medicine and Kaiser Permanente also recently announced they would halt all transgender surgeries for minors amid new federal rules.
Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., also announced a shift this week, displaying a message on its Gender Development Program webpage that affirmed it would stop prescribing transgender drugs to minors by Aug. 30 “in light of escalating legal and regulatory risks.”
Last week, University of Chicago Medicine displayed a message on its Trans CARE webpage to announce an immediate end to all transgender surgeries and drugs for children “in response to continued federal actions.” The message called the decision “difficult” and added that “this news will have a significant impact on our patients.”
Other hospitals that announced they would conform to the federal rules include the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, New York University Langone Health, and Denver Health.
A major shift in health care norms
Health care systems, including pediatric hospitals, have performed thousands of transgender operations on children across the country in recent years.
These medical interventions range from surgeries to alter the appearances of the minor’s genitals or chest to make them appear more similar to the opposite sex to puberty blocking drugs and hormone treatments that prevent natural bodily developments that occur during puberty.
The medical watchdog group Do No Harm found nearly 14,000 instances of doctors facilitating “gender transitions” in children between 2019 and 2023 based on publicly available insurance claims.
The dataset — which found nearly 5,750 surgeries — is incomplete because it does not account for uninsured patients, which lead the researchers to believe the number is higher.
In January, Trump signed an executive order to prohibit hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements from performing transgender operations or providing transgender drugs to anyone under the age of 19.
The policy changes from health care systems and hospitals come as the federal government has bolstered enforcement action against health care providers that have not yet conformed to these rules. The rules have been subject to lawsuits from LGBT organizations.
Mary Rice Hasson, the director of the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told CNA that the policy shift among hospitals is “good news.” She urged Congress to put a permanent halt to these programs through legislation.
“Over a dozen hospital-based ‘gender’ programs have closed their harmful sex-rejection ‘services’ for kids and adolescents,” Hasson said. “Kids who would have suffered disabling, disfiguring, and sterilizing ‘gender’ hormones and surgeries will be spared — for now.”
Hasson said, however, that the “bad news” is that “not one of these programs has acknowledged the harm done on their watch.”
“They are shuttering these programs for fear of losing federal funds but have not repudiated the barbaric practices that masquerade as ‘gender care,’” she added. “Most of these hospitals are poised to resume these programs if the political winds shift leftward.”
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA that recent practices from these hospitals, such as transgender drugs and surgeries, “violate human dignity by harming and mutilating the lives of those whose health they are supposed to be serving and protecting.”
“Even though individuals who have undergone gender reassignment surgeries will frequently report in the short term that they are happy and that their surgeries improved their sense of well-being, as time passes, a growing number of them begin to realize the high cost of that tenuous peace and seek to ‘detransition,’” he said.
“Sadly, in many of these situations permanent and irreversible bodily damage may have already been done.”
Amid the policy shifts, Pacholczyk said hospitals can now “address the real needs of these individuals with compassion by directing them toward supportive psychotherapy that seeks to explore and address any underlying psychiatric issues that may be prompting their desire to gender-transition.”
“Our sex is a given determinant of our innermost being from God, not a personally-negotiable or otherwise ‘reassignable’ [quality], even if we may face significant struggles to accept and fully integrate this remarkable gift,” he said.
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Bring on the lawsuits already.
Amen Miss Cleo.
Mary Rice Hasson, quoted in the article, is speaking the truth: the doctors and administrators at these “children’s hospitals” are guilty of barbaric human experiments on children and young people. These are the “New-Nazis” of the man-eating-technocrat-Establishment, funding their country club dues and semi-annual vacations at St. Barts by industrializing the mutilation of vulnerable children and young people.
In the 1940s we fought a world war against Nazi doctors who committed the atrocities of human experiments, and we put them on trial at Nuremberg and put them to death.
Now they have re-emerged, serving the same principalities and powers that animated Joseph Mengele.
Every one of these “children’s hospitals” and their doctors and administrators should be sued into oblivion, and the individuals should be put on trial for crimes against humanity and sent to prison for life.
And when their turn comes they will put US to death for being Christians. Does our putting them to death make us any better than them? Is there a case for Christian non resistance to evil? I wonder why Christ gave Peter the keys to heaven, and Satan those of the Earth?
Yes James, vengeance is mine says the Lord.
Who is talking about vengeance?
It appears you, like Mr. Connor, have misread my comment?
Otherwise, perhaps you oppose trial and life in prison for doctors who commit these heinous crimes performing surgical experiments on children and young people?
Mr. Connor:
It seems you have misread my comment? Otherwise, you may be opposed to a sentence of life in prison for doctors whose stock in trade is experimental surgery on children and young people?
Praise God, but this is perhaps only a temporary stay. Wokeism is not dead and will once again show its ugly head. The cultural pendulum never stop swinging.
This is an important major win that is not getting the attention it should, since the non progressive, progressive media is not covering this. Without President Trump this would never happened. We should all be praying for President Trump for continuing the good work. Also all these doctors and medical institutions involved should be sued to oblivion, they were doing satin’s work. They need to repent and acknowledge what they were doing and did was truly evil.
This is one of the reasons why many Americans, including me, voted for Donald Trump. The man has five children who have all turned out pretty well! And he has supported, often anonymously, various children’s charities over the years. He loves kids!
There are too many stories of young people whose lives were essentially ruined by transition surgery. No one tells the family, let alone the child, that their lives will, in all likelihood, be greatly shortened because of the side effects of this extremely radical surgery.
Since when did our medical community become “Victor Frankensteins?!” For goodness sakes, there are so many childhood diseases that kill our children–the science and medical world should turn their full attention to these maladies and allow children to grow up before deciding (or more accurately, for their parents to make the decision for them) to submit to life-changing and life-shortening surgery.
I guess it’s anything for a buck–or big bucks. I doubt this surgery and drug regimen is cheap for the patients, even if is covered by our tax money.
That’s a very good point Mrs. Sharon. There are serious diseases that can affect our children & that’s where the medical community & research should be focusing. I think sadly though that it’s not going to be a money maker like “transgender” experiments have been.
I find it interesting that so many health issues are encouraged to have mental therapists help them with their problems. Yet those who have trouble with self-identification are discouraged from seeking mental help.
It took President Trump to put the skids on this barbarous transgender surgery! It should have been the outcry of Catholic Bishops. But they are more interested in condemning lawful deportation of criminal illegal aliens whose departures can mean loss of funds for the bishops.
True.
Do you believe those hospitals would have listened to our bishops?
At the end of the day the only things that seems to make a real difference are the threat of litigation and federal mandates. Law suits are costly and no one wants to fool with the federal government.
I had a beast tumor removed; it was a hormone-based tumor. To prevent from another hormone tumor from occurring I am now on a hormone blocker. Consequently, I have an infusion every 6 months to counter the block keeping the hormone from to much hormone. The infusion builds back and strengths my bone density. I asked my doctor what is going to happen to these young people, in twenty years, who are taking these hormone blockers. They do not know. The medical profession is terrified of what will probably be occurring.