JUDICIAL TURF WAR IGNITES OVER DOJ INVESTIGATIONS INTO TRANSGENDER DRUGS AND SURGERIES FOR CHILDREN

Hospitals shifting away from transgender ‘medicine’ for children

In August 2025, Jo Yurcaba, “an award-winning journalist covering the LGBTQ community” for the LGBT identity section of NBC News, reported that “at least 21 hospitals have ended or restricted trans care for minors since January.” President Donald Trump’s inauguration put the fear of the federal government into these hospitals, with 12 no longer giving puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to transgender minors, and four no longer offering forms of sex-change surgeries.

The number of hospitals ceasing their “gender-affirming care” for minors has continued to rise in the year since NBC’s report. Earlier this month, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio reached a settlement with the Justice Department that would see the clinic’s transgender services for children shut down for the next 20 years, with the clinic paying $308,000 to “settle insurance billing allegations” and setting aside $2 million for detransitioning services.

This is not a phenomenon that has been limited to Republican-run states such as Ohio. Hospitals in California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts have, at least temporarily, shut down these children-focused transgender units. In April, NPR wrote about a 14-year-old girl whose family fled from Texas to Massachusetts to ensure that they could pump her full of testosterone and permanently and irreversibly alter her body because she claimed to be a boy at age 12 — and claimed to be “nonbinary” prior to that. The crux of the story was that Baystate Health, “the largest hospital system in the region,” had shut down its transgender procedures for children in February, just two weeks before this girl was to receive her first dose of testosterone.

The reason for this is simple: While blue states fight Trump’s policies on transgender disfigurement of children, the Trump administration still has its hands on the purse strings. As Baystate told NPR, “Nearly 70 percent of Baystate Health’s patients rely on Medicaid and Medicare for coverage,” and the hospital system could lose “hundreds of millions of dollars in government reimbursement” under Trump’s proposed policies. While Democrats continue to fight those policies in court, some hospitals have decided to get out of the fight early, so as to be safe now rather than sorry later.

Even New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, one of the most left-wing figures running a U.S. city, has offered a temporary surrender. Mamdani is planning to open a taxpayer-funded, government-run transgender clinic in the Big Apple, but even he is currently unwilling to have that clinic provide transgender services to minors.

Detransitioner lawsuits

What outlets such as NPR fail to comprehend is that children cannot possibly understand the permanent disfigurement their doctors and parents are pushing them into and thus cannot possibly consent in any meaningful way. Most children who decide they are transgender are simply responding to the natural body dysmorphia that comes with aging and puberty. After all, how can a 12-year-old girl decide that she is somehow a boy?

We are now entering the age of detransitioners, where children have grown to adulthood and realized that the temporary dysmorphia they were experiencing when they were younger was exactly that: temporary dysmorphia. Unfortunately for them, doctors have permanently disfigured them in the name of anti-science gender transitions.

We are now starting to see a possible solution, though it’s one that comes at great cost to the victims. Earlier this year, a jury awarded Fox Varian $2 million in a medical malpractice lawsuit, the first of its kind against doctors who push children into permanent, life-altering “gender-affirming care.” Varian suffered a difficult life as a child and went through a phase of claiming to be a boy. A psychologist pushed Fox and her mother further down the transgender path, and a surgeon performed a double mastectomy on Varian at age 16.

The reckless push to validate gender transitions through Varian led to her permanent disfigurement. She grew out of gender dysmorphia and now identifies as female. Varian’s victory in court shows that there is a path to discipline medical professionals who disregard their oath in favor of gender ideology and do permanent damage to children through “gender-affirming care” that is designed to reject their actual gender.

More detransitioner lawsuits are coming. Kayla Lovdahl, 20, received a confidential settlement in her lawsuit against the Kaiser Hospital Foundation after her body dysmorphia, amplified by autism and sexual trauma, led to her contemplating becoming transgender at age 11. This was immediately “affirmed” by a therapist, leading to Lovdahl being put on puberty blockers at age 12 and undergoing a double mastectomy at age 13. Aside from having grown out of her gender dysphoria, Lovdahl is now dealing with nerve pain, urinary issues, atrophy, and fatty liver disease. Chloe Cole, a prominent detransitioner activist highlighting the damage done by “gender-affirming care,” has brought forward her own lawsuit against Kaiser after she was similarly pushed into taking cross-sex hormones and going through with a double mastectomy as a teenager.

The effects are already being seen. Shortly after Varian’s court victory, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons announced that “there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents. ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.” The American Medical Association quickly piggybacked off that statement.

‘I HAVE NO BREASTS, ONLY SCARS’: DETRANSITIONER CHLOE COLE DELIVERS TESTIMONY AT SENATE HEARING

The precarious path forward

The problem with where these policies stand in the U.S. now is that victories are either temporary or costly. It is easy to see hospitals reversing their reversal once a Republican president is no longer in the White House and the fear of losing Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements is no longer on the table. In fact, the pendulum will likely swing in a wild way under a Democratic president, who may threaten hospitals that don’t continue these transgender medical programs for children.

While the threat of detransitioner lawsuits may counteract that impulse, the fact remains that those detransitioners have already paid a brutal price. These children, manipulated as teenagers or preteens into irreversible, permanent damage to their bodies, will never be able to live the lives they could have if ideologically driven doctors and psychologists had not pushed them into these procedures. Varian, Lovdahl, and Cole are helping to protect countless children from suffering their same fate, but all three of them have paid dearly already.