Posted on Thursday, August 28, 2025
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by Matt Lamb
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1 Comments
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Fulfilling yet another 2024 campaign promise, President Donald Trump has succeeded in shutting down dozens of so-called “gender clinics” nationwide, protecting children from dangerous, life-altering surgeries amid his administration’s broader crackdown on gender ideology.
On January 28, Trump signed an executive order on “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which mandated a whole-of-government response to “the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.”
“This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end,” Trump declared. The executive order required all agencies that provide federal funding to hospitals and medical schools to ensure they “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” or lose their taxpayer support. This included lucrative Medicaid funding that many hospitals receive.
What gender ideology proponents euphemistically refer to as “gender-affirming” surgeries include elective operations to remove healthy breasts from girls and to reconfigure healthy male genitalia on boys into a grotesque approximation of female genitalia. Double mastectomies have been performed on hundreds of girls as young as 12 since 2017 alone.
Trump’s order targeting this practice has been a smashing success so far, with at least 20 facilities that provide so-called “gender-affirming care” to minors announcing they will stop operations, according to the Epoch Times. The New York Times, meanwhile, reported in July that “Hospitals are limiting gender treatment for trans minors, even in blue states.”
Within just two days of Trump signing the order, Denver Health announced it would halt “gender-affirming surgeries” for people under 19, according to Colorado Public Radio. VCU Medical Center in Virginia and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. also announced on January 30 they would be halting their transgender procedures for minors. Connecticut Children’s Hospital, one of the largest providers of transgender surgeries for minors in the country, began “winding down” its youth gender program last month.
Other prominent hospitals also announced they would stop providing transgender drugs and surgeries to kids, including Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Stanford Medicine, according to a list compiled by the White House.
Another major victory came last month when Children’s Hospital Los Angeles announced it would be closing its “Transyouth Health and Development and Gender-Affirming Care” program.
The hospital, reportedly “one of the country’s oldest and largest public providers of gender-affirming care,” according to NPR, blamed the Trump administration for the decision. Specifically, the hospital said it would be forced to close entirely within two months if it was cut off from Medicaid funds. The hospital “says it relies on federal funding more than any other pediatric hospital in the state, and losing access to funds would impact the ability to provide essential care to low-income children and teenagers,” according to ABC 7.
While these clinic closures are a resounding success, a future Democrat president could reverse Trump’s decision and allow Medicaid to begin funding gender surgeries again. But Trump appears to have shifted all the cultural momentum away from the gender ideology movement in a way that the left cannot easily reverse. 60 percent of Americans now say it’s impossible to change a person’s gender, up from 56 percent in 2021 and 54 percent in 2017.
Moreover, legal victories Trump laid the groundwork for during his first term have paved the way for conservatives to protect kids from transgender ideology at the state level. In June, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee prohibition on surgeries for minors in U.S. v. Skrmetti, clearing the way for similar prohibitions in at least 27 other states to take effect.
The 6-3 majority included all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees during his first term. If Hillary Clinton won in 2016, it is a virtual certainty that this case would have gone the other way.
The Trump administration is also turning the tables on the gender ideology narrative through robust study and data collection. For years, supporters of “gender-affirming care” argued they were backed by science and the “experts.” But a 400-page comprehensive report released in May from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed that the evidence supporting transgender interventions is “very low” and “very uncertain” – adding to similar findings like the Cass Review out of Britain.
The Federal Trade Commission under Trump is also exposing the “dangers of gender-affirming care” and seeking to expose “deceptive trade practices” from unscrupulous medical practitioners. Whistleblowers have alleged that medical professionals at children’s transgender clinics often use emotional manipulation to convince parents and kids to sign off on the procedures.
Taken together, all of these actions send a clear message from the Trump administration: gender-confused kids should not be subjected to permanent, painful, untested, and potentially life-threatening medical practices that leave them physically and emotionally scarred. Instead, gender-confused kids should be given the support and encouragement they need to embrace who they are and be allowed to grow up without being put under the knife.
Matt Lamb is a contributor for AMAC Newsline and an associate editor for The College Fix. He previously worked for Students for Life of America, Students for Life Action, and Turning Point USA. He previously interned for Open the Books. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, The Federalist, LifeSiteNews, Human Life Review, Headline USA, and other outlets. The opinions expressed are his own. Follow him @mattlamb22 on X.
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