Medicaid formally ends funds for ‘sex-rejecting procedures’ for minors with final rule

The development formalizes a policy of the Trump administration. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has urged government action in this area.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it has implemented a final rule that formally bans using funds for “sex-rejecting procedures” for minors, which are drugs and surgeries used to facilitate “gender transitions.”

According to a CMS news release, this includes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations. It states these medical procedures cause irreversible damage, including infertility, impaired sexual function, diminished bone density, altered brain development, and other physiological effects.

The move formalizes a policy of President Donald Trump’s administration to prevent minors from accessing these drugs and surgeries. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order that instructed agencies to adopt rules to “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

The final rule includes a tapering-off period of up to six months for children who are receiving cross-sex hormones, which allows them to be gradually weaned off the medicine. It does not affect mental health services.

“Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a statement.

“By cutting off federal funds for these sex-rejecting procedures, we’re following the science, saving taxpayer dollars, and, most importantly, protecting children from potentially irreversible harm so they can truly flourish,” he said.

Rachel N. Morrison, director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Administrative State Accountability Project, told EWTN News that government funding should never support “harmful, sterilizing, and often irreversible sex-rejecting procedures.”

“I am grateful to CMS and the Trump administration for their efforts to combat gender ideology, protect children from the harms [of] sex-rejecting procedures, and advance policies that reflect a true understanding of the nature of the human person,” she said.

The Church’s position

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) referred EWTN News to a Feb. 17 letter to CMS, which said the proposed ban on federal funding “aligns with Catholic teaching on the nature of the human person” and “reflects true distinctions between the sexes.”

“Rejection of our God-given bodies, such as by modifying them to appear as the opposite sex, is a grave matter, and when done with full knowledge and complete consent, is a grave sin,” the letter states.

In November 2025, the USCCB published a new edition of its ”Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” guidelines, which prohibit Catholic institutions from providing treatments that “aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the human body in its form or function” such as “interventions that aim to transform sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex (or to nullify sexual characteristics…).”

Joseph Meaney, past president and senior ethicist for the National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC), told EWTN News CMS “should be applauded for putting an end to federal taxpayer funding of transgender procedures on children.”

“There is substantial agreement between U.S. government policy and Catholic teaching in this area of healthcare policy,” he said.

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, an NCBC senior ethicist, told EWTN News that the implementation of the rule “is very sensible and long overdue.”

“Countless youth have already been railroaded along this path, placing themselves at great risk and damaging their bodies as they struggle with this confusion,” Pacholczyk said. “Once a young person steps onto that train, they often become ‘regular business customers,’ with a lifelong dependence on the continued prescribing of hormones and additional cycles of expensive surgeries.”

He said tax money should not pay for “a hysterectomy on a girl who wants to live as a boy, nor to provide breast implants into a boy who thinks he is a girl.” He said children “deserve far better from the world of medicine and psychiatry.”

“They are entitled to solid psychotherapy as a means of assisting them to reintegrate their subjective gender identity with their objective lifelong biology so they can recognize and embrace the beautiful gift of the biological sex they have been endowed with from the beginning,” Pacholczyk said.