WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) –– The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), has issued a notice to medical facilities across the country that puberty blockers and gender “transition” surgeries are dangerous and should not be used on minors, albeit without any mention of enforcement action while a court battle is underway.
The notice, dated March 5, states that “CMS may begin taking steps in the future to align policy, including CMS-regulated provider requirements and agreements, with the highest-quality medical evidence in the treatment of the nation’s children in order to protect children from harmful, often irreversible mutilation, including sterilization practices.”
“Around 85% of children with reported gender dysphoria—which includes more than 300,000 children between the ages of 13 and 17—do not suffer this condition throughout their adolescence,” it explains. “There is no reliable method by which the minority whose gender dysphoria will persist can be identified with confidence during childhood. However, thousands of children have received chemical or surgical interventions that, in many cases, are irreversible […] Organizations such as the Mayo Clinic have shown the potentially harmful long-term effects of puberty blockers related to children’s growth spurts, bone growth, bone density, and fertility. A panel of experts in neurodevelopment, puberty and adolescence, statistics, and other fields have acknowledged that ‘the existing knowledge about puberty and the brain raises the possibility that suppressing sex hormone production during this period could alter neurodevelopment in complex ways – not all of which may be beneficial.’”
Crucially, the notice points out that America “is now an outlier in the treatment of gender dysphoria in children. The United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland have recently issued restrictions on the medical interventions for children, including the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments, and now recommend exploratory psychotherapy as a first line of treatment and reserve hormonal interventions only for exceptional cases.”
The notice urges hospital staff to “follow the highest standards of care and adhere closely to the foundational principles of medicine, especially as it comes to America’s children,” and “CMS may begin taking steps to appropriately update its policies to protect children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” hinting at future enforcement action but not yet taking it.
Within days of returning to office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the federal government “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” the medical “transitioning” of gender-confused minors, “and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit” the practice.
However, Newsweek reports that U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King recently issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevents the Trump administration from denying federal funds to pro-transing medical institutions in Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and the state of Washington, while U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson did the same in Maryland.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”