The Trump administration announced Tuesday afternoon that Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, will stop funding for gender-affirming care for transgender youth, including cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and transition-related surgeries. The rule will cut off thousands of teenagers from life-saving transition care who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
“Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator 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.”
The rule will cut off thousands of teenagers from life-saving transition care who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
Oz and the Trump administration have maintained without evidence for years that gender-affirming care for trans youth, which has been the international gold standard of care for youth gender dysphoria for about 20 years, is harmful to kids. The truth is that this administration’s political ideology demands that trans people stop existing; its members are morally opposed to gender transition. They see transitioning as “harm” even though we have ample evidence that youth being unable to transition is a studied factor for youth suicidality. The irreversible harm in many such devastating cases could not be more clear.
Instead the administration has attempted to argue that trans youth should be subject to denial of care and conversion therapy, according to related HHS reports. HHS cites the controversial Cass Review, produced by a British official with no experience in trans healthcare, as the basis for its claims, even though the report has been torn apart in multiple analyses.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who rose to fame and his current position as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services while denying the science of a whole range of common treatments like vaccines, repeated Oz’s language in his own statement about the new rule. “Today, we are ending federal taxpayer funding for sex-rejecting procedures on children,” Kennedy said in a statement.
“Sex-rejecting.” It’s an odd turn of phrase. It’s obviously designed as a direct refutation of the generally accepted term “gender affirming,” but it hides a more sinister and controlling agenda underneath. By saying “sex-rejecting,” Oz and Kennedy are signaling a denial of the basic identity of every young trans person. And they are doing so with the full force of the federal government.
It’s even worse that they aim to “fix” trans kids by using political and legal force to stop them from living a trans life, forcing them to instead accept the birth sex that gives these teenagers clinically verified distress. It is the official government position that a person’s sex at birth is the right and natural order that dictates the rest of their lives: how their face and body looks, the gender role they should adopt in life and even how they play sports.
But if living as your birth-assigned sex is as natural and obvious as they make it out to be, why do we need to devote so many government resources to discourage trans people from existing?
When this news broke Tuesday, I took a moment to think about May Pollard, an Idaho trans teenager who took her own life in January. As the NBC News story about her says, suicide is complex, but Pollard’s life was not helped by the conservative politicians in her state who on the federal level decided that they knew better than her, her doctor and her parents.
“In Idaho alone, within the last few years of May’s life, state legislators proposed more than four dozen bills aimed at LGBTQ rights, and Gov. Brad Little signed 15 into law,” NBC News noted. “Many targeted youth, banning trans minors from getting treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy and prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in public K-12 schools.”
Those legislators, along with Oz and Kennedy, all claim to be protecting children with their actions, but instead, they are endangering all of them.
I thought too of another trans teen who took their own life 12 years ago. News of Leelah Alcorn’s passing and subsequent suicide note left on Tumblr went viral at the time, and genuinely got society to take the plight of trans youth seriously for the first time. “My death needs to mean something. Fix society. Please,” her note famously read. Alcorn was raised by very religious, conservative parents in Ohio, who, like today’s conservative leaders, believed Alcorn was rejecting her sex, and sent her to multiple rounds of conversion therapy before her death.
When this news broke Tuesday, I took a moment to think about May Pollard, an Idaho trans teenager who took her own life in January.
Her passing touched former President Barack Obama and led his administration to begin the process to cover gender-affirming care for trans youth on Medicaid and CHIP in the first place.
The conservative approach to trans youth care did not work 12 years ago. It does not work now. Alcorn should be alive today having graduated college and entering the workforce. Pollard should be in class today. Both were failed by conservatives and the entire media apparatus that has convinced so many in American society that trans youth are false and punishable by the government.
Shame on us for failing to protect these kids. They won’t be the last trans kids we lose in this fight.
Alcorn’s final words are as true today as they were 12 years ago when they were written: “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights.”
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