PITTSBURGH (LifeSiteNews) — Pittsburgh’s mayor plans to “fight” a decision by a local hospital to limit the injection of gender-confused kids with permanently damaging drugs in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order.
Mayor Ed Gainey said Pittsburgh is already a “sanctuary city” for so-called “gender-affirming care” – a misleading term that refers to cutting off healthy reproductive organs or injecting girls with hormones so they grow facial hair, all in the name of making someone look like the opposite sex.
However, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children’s Hospital has reportedly paused, or at least slowed down, its use of drugs and surgeries for gender-confused kids to avoid a loss of taxpayer funding. “Multiple families of transgender children [sic]” reported that they have not been able to take their children in for shots, for example, according to The Pitt News.
It appears new clients are not being allowed in, while others are being “grandfathered” in if they started mutilating their bodies prior to Trump’s January executive order. “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding,” Trump warned.
Transgender drugs and surgeries have been linked to suicidality, bone density loss, heart diseases, stroke, cancer, and numerous other medical problems. Puberty blockers can also cause infertility, as would be expected from drugs intended to stop the normal development of the reproductive system.
“UPMC appears to have quietly changed its policy, numerous parents and children told the Post-Gazette, including not taking on new patients under 19 for [so-called] gender affirming care,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
The directive is currently facing legal challenges.
“It is unacceptable for UPMC, Pennsylvania’s largest hospital system, to do Trump’s bidding by tearing away health care from our most vulnerable neighbors,” Mayor Gainey wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page.
He wrote further:
As Mayor of Pittsburgh, I am ready to fight alongside our trans community and their allies to stop this. We already worked with City Council to make Pittsburgh a sanctuary city for gender-affirming care to protect our trans community against the life-threatening harm caused by the MAGA movement. I’m ready to lead the fight to protect all vulnerable Pittsburghers against Trump’s attack on our health care — and I hope you’ll join me at a rally next Thursday, April 3 at 5:30 at UPMC headquarters to demand UPMC stop doing Trump’s bidding.
The rally received criticism on social media.
“This is how desperate Democrats are to castrate your children,” LibsOfTikTok wrote on X.
Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey slams UPMC for pausing sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for minors to comply with Trump’s EO. He promises to “fight” Trump and will protest so the hospital continues mutilating kids.
This is how desperate Democrats are to castrate your… pic.twitter.com/D5jnZXNEA6
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 27, 2025
“They are just brainwashed,” Emilia Henderson wrote.
Transgender drugs and surgeries harm children, are pushed by activist groups
The defense of the drugs and surgeries comes despite significant evidence that the procedures are gravely harmful. Furthermore, it is an established scientific fact that no one can change his gender.
Credentialed medical experts have warned against the drugs and procedures, as documented by LifeSiteNews. Meanwhile, standards from medical groups supporting the procedures have often been written by a small group of doctors and have involved significant political pressure.
For example, President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary of health and human services, a gender-confused man named Richard Levine who calls himself “Rachel,” pressured the activist group “World Professional Association of Transgender Health” to remove any age minimum for transgender surgeries. WPATH, in turn, tried to pressure the pro-LGBT American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to endorse its “standards of care.”
The AAP also developed its own standards with minimal outside expertise, according to a detailed report from the Washington Free Beacon.
Aaron Sibarium reported in 2022 that the group “is deferring to small, like-minded teams of specialists ensconced in children’s hospitals, research centers, and public health bureaucracies, rather than seeking the insights of pediatricians who see a wide cross-section of America’s children.”
“As rates of gender dysphoria exploded and the Covid-19 pandemic hit, that bias seeped into the organization’s medical policy recommendations, unchecked by discussion or debate,” Sibarium warned.
The Supreme Court is set to release its opinion on the legality of states protecting children from the irreversible procedures that falsely assert the idea that someone can change his or her sex. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December in the U.S. v. Skrmetti case.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, conservative justices largely appeared sympathetic to the premise that the bans fell under states’ right to regulate medical procedures. Liberal justices, meanwhile, claimed that the prohibitions were akin to racism and were “discriminatory.”