U.S. Federal health officials are taking action to prohibit puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgery on children and to support the families of children who regret undergoing such procedures.
HHS to Prohibit Hospitals From Performing Sex-Change Surgery on Kids
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., The Defender, December 19, 2025
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
Federal health officials are taking action to prohibit hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on children and support the families of children who underwent such procedures and now regret it, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said Thursday at a live press conference.
Sex-rejecting procedures, or “gender-affirming care,” refers to the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and/or surgery as a treatment for gender dysphoria. The Mayo Clinic defines gender dysphoria as a “feeling of distress that can happen when a person’s gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth.”
Children are falling prey to a “predatory multi-billion dollar industry,” said U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy cited a study that reported profits from sex-rejecting drugs and surgeries surpassed $4.4 billion in 2023, and were on track to top $7.8 billion by 2031.
Kids’ and teens’ brains aren’t fully mature yet when they decide to undergo the procedures, said Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz.
Kennedy agreed, citing a comment by one doctor who “callously” described sex-rejecting procedures in kids as a “big money maker.”
Kennedy said:
“Hospitals rake in millions of dollars by convincing boys and girls that a lifetime of off-label prescriptions for estrogen and testosterone blockers, chest reconstruction surgeries and more are the only way to achieve true happiness and belonging in life.
“It’s wrong. The Trump administration will not stand by while ideology, misinformation and propaganda push young people into decisions they cannot fully understand and that they can never reverse.”
Kennedy told his audience — which included Congress members and several attorneys general — that he signed a declaration stating that healthcare practitioners who perform sex-rejecting procedures on minors would be deemed out of compliance with professionally recognized standards of healthcare.
The “overwhelming body of evidence” shows “these procedures hurt, not help children,” Kennedy said.
The declaration is based on an HHS peer-reviewed report published last month, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” which concluded sex-rejecting procedures have an unfavorable risk-benefit profile and fail to meet professionally recognized healthcare standards.
Hospitals that perform sex-rejecting procedures on minors will no longer be eligible for Medicaid or Medicare funding. And no Medicaid funding can be used to pay for the procedures, Oz said. “We’re not going to let taxpayer money go to hurt these children.”
CMS will release a notice of proposed rulemaking to bar hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on kids as a condition of participation in Medicare and Medicaid. It will also release a notice of proposed rulemaking to prevent Medicaid dollars from going toward sex-rejecting procedures on kids.
CMS will issue its final rule after a 60-90 day period soliciting public comments.
HHS also announced it will work to reverse the Biden administration’s attempt to have gender dysphoria be considered a disability under federal law.
That’s important, so hospitals that no longer perform sex-rejecting procedures will not be charged with discriminating against those with a disability, according to an HHS press release.
Admiral Brian Christine, M.D., HHS assistant secretary and head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, on Thursday signed a public health message telling medical providers, families and policymakers that sex-rejecting procedures are not safe or effective treatments for pediatric gender dysphoria.
“Evidence shows sex-rejecting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are dangerous,” Christine said in a statement. “Providers have an obligation to offer care grounded in evidence and to avoid interventions that expose young people to a lifetime of harm.”
Doctors should ‘start slowly’ when treating gender dysphoria
President Trump charged HHS to undertake actions against sex-rejecting procedures in his January executive order, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”
The MAHA Report also named the “overmedicalization” of U.S. youth as a key driver of the childhood chronic disease epidemic, Kennedy noted.
As the number of youth diagnosed with gender dysphoria has increased in recent years, thousands of children have been “fast-tracked” into sex-rejecting procedures, Oz said.
Doctors seeing kids who have gender dysphoria should “start slowly” with the least invasive treatments possible, such as psychotherapy and evaluating for other conditions like ADHD, autism, anxiety and depression.
Gender expression is complex, and scientists are still trying to find out all the factors that play a role.
For instance, research by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist, suggests that prenatal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals can blur physiological and behavioral sex differences in offspring.
However, she and other scientists conducting similar research acknowledged the issue’s political and ethical implications.
“We have to be very careful not to frame gender non-conforming as an adverse effect,” said Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a report by Undark.
NIH to fund research supporting kids who want to ‘de-transition’
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya announced his agency, which already stopped supporting research on gender transition, will do science aimed at helping kids who are “de-transitioning” — or wanting to “de-transition” back to their original sex — and their families.
Thousands of kids and their families have been harmed by these procedures, Bhattacharya said. “We are going to fund science to help them because what I don’t want is for the answers to those families to be based on basically no evidence or presumed knowledge that we don’t actually have.”
Chloe Cole, a 21-year-old, spoke at the press conference about detransitioning at age 16 after starting on puberty blockers at age 13 and undergoing an irreversible double mastectomy at 15.
“I, myself, and every other detransitioner I know have so many different medical concerns,” she said. “They’re not being addressed because our own doctors don’t have any standards of care to refer to. They don’t know what to do with us.”
‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?’
Cole, now an activist against sex-rejecting procedures, has a bill named in her honor.
The “Chloe Cole Act,” initially proposed under a different title by the U.S. Department of Justice, would ban hospitals, clinics and doctors from performing sex-rejecting procedures on kids.
It would also allow children who underwent such procedures and their parents to sue the healthcare provider for damages. On Sept. 18, the bill was referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The bill hasn’t yet come up for a vote.
On Dec. 17, a related bill championed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene passed the House. The “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which has yet to be voted on in the Senate, would make it a federal crime to provide gender-affirming care to a minor.
“Every American needs to hear Chloe Cole’s story,” Greene wrote in a 2022 X post of a speech Cole gave about her experiences. “The gender clinic presented my parents with the classic false dichotomy: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” Cole said.
At yesterday’s press conference, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary said that the notion that parents are putting their child at increased risk of suicide if they don’t consent to sex-rejecting procedures is a “baseless claim that has never been supported with good data.”
Bhattacharya agreed. He told the audience this true story:
“There was a researcher that the NIH funded that did a study to answer the question, was it more likely that a child who didn’t transition would commit suicide?
“That researcher found the answer was no, but because the researcher’s ideology was so enmeshed in this — because if the answer is no, that means she might get canceled — she refused to release the study.”
The NIH obtained the researcher’s data and made it available for other researchers to work with, Bhattacharya said.
Makary also shared that the FDA will issue warning letters to 12 manufacturers and retailers that are illegally marketing breast binders to kids as a treatment for gender dysphoria.
Breast binders are a “class one medical device” usually used by women after breast cancer surgery, he said. Using them long-term can have negative effects, including pain, compromised lung function, lung collapse and difficulty breastfeeding.
“The warning letters will formally notify the companies of their significant regulatory violations and how they should take prompt corrective action,” Makary said.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. is a senior reporter for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Featured Image by Xuan Duong from Pixabay
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