Hospitals in some of the country's most treatment-friendly states are quietly shuttering youth gender clinics under pressure from Washington. At least six major institutions—Texas Children's, Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, UPMC Children's in Pittsburgh, and Connecticut Children's—have agreed to halt gender-transition care for adolescents and pay penalties to resolve a Justice Department probe into alleged billing fraud and consumer deception. Several will also fund care for patients seeking to manage side effects or "detransition."
STAT News reports there are "dozens" of hospitals across the US taking similar action. The moves mark a significant policy win for the Trump administration, which has argued that the risks of youth gender transition outweigh the benefits and has used legal and financial levers to push providers to stop offering it, even in states where it remains legal, per the Times. Critics say the fraud investigations are a pretext to achieve ideological goals and warn that hospitals are abandoning patients.
"It's devastating to watch," says Raquel Willis, co-founder of the advocacy group Gender Liberation Movement, which has led protests in New York. Legal challenges are already underway, and experts note that no federal authority has found that providing this care to minors is itself illegal, even as a proposed rule threatens to cut federal funding to hospitals that continue it. The hospitals haven't conceded there's been any wrongdoing on their part, notes the AP. "It's a really dangerous precedent when the federal government is allowed to politicize any one group of people's care and end it," says Eliel Cruz, another co-founder of GLM.
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