President Donald Trump signed a broad executive order targeting transition-related medical care for minors Tuesday, APA reports citing CNBC.
The order, titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” intends to restrict access to gender-affirming medical care — including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery — for minors, which it defines as those younger than 19.
It prohibits federal funding from covering such care for minors, restricts research and education grants to medical schools and hospitals, and directs the secretary of Health and Human Services to issue regulations to end such care for minors.
The order also directs all federal agencies to rescind guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, a nonprofit association dedicated to transgender medical care that issues guidance that is widely used by health care professionals.
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the executive order states, using inflammatory language to describe transition-related medical care.
The order states that more children will come to regret receiving such care and that they are “often trapped with lifelong medical complications” and sterilization.
“Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” the order states.
Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ legal advocacy group, promised to fight the executive order in a statement Tuesday.
“This broadside condemns transgender youth to extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering, and their parents to agonized futility in caring for their child — all while denying them access to the same medically recommended health care that is readily available to their cisgender peers,” said Lambda Legal attorney Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, alluding to the fact that the order does not appear to bar puberty blockers, hormone therapy or similar surgeries for minors who are not transgender.
Transition-related care for minors has dominated headlines in recent years, with 26 states passing laws restricting such care. However, recent research has shown that a small number of minors actually access this type of care. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in January found that less than 0.1% of adolescents with private insurance in the U.S. are transgender or gender-diverse and are prescribed puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones.
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