Children’s hospitals nationally end transgender surgeries on minors amid Trump rules

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.

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/265551/children-s-hospitals-nationally-end-transgender-surgeries-on-minors-amid-trump-rules