The Trump administration is ramping up its investigations into medical clinics and practitioners over their involvement with transgender operations on minors.
The Justice Department announced Monday that it has sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics for investigations related to health care fraud, false statements, and additional matters.
“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
The DOJ did not offer specifics on the targets of the subpoenas. The Justice Department issued the subpoenas on the same day that the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on potentially unfair or deceptive practices related to transgender procedures on minors.
The FTC workshop brought in scientists, whistleblowers, policy experts, attorneys, detransitioners, parents, and other speakers to discuss the dangers of transgender operations on children. While the FTC does not regulate medicine, it routinely takes action against false health care claims against businesses and individuals that sell products without the scientific evidence to back up their claims.
In addition, the FBI recently launched investigations into three children’s hospitals for alleged child mutilation in connection with transgender operations. Boston Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles — three of the nation’s leading providers of transgender procedures for minors — are in the FBI’s crosshairs.
The FBI investigations followed a directive from Bondi for the Justice Department to enforce child-mutilation statutes in accordance with President Trump’s executive order on protecting children from gender-transition procedures.
“The Department of Justice will not sit idly by while doctors, motivated by ideology, profits, or both, exploit and mutilate our children,” Bondi said in the memo.
Detransitioners are people who received transgender medical operations when they were mentally distressed teenagers but now regret them and wish to inform the public about the dangers of transitioning. A growing number of detransitioners have come forward to tell their stories about being rushed into gender-transition hormonal treatments and surgeries.
A growing amount of research from European countries and the U.S. has shown that “gender transitions” do not improve mental well-being in the way activists have routinely claimed. Likewise, bombshell internal documents from the leading American advocacy group for gender-transitions among minors demonstrated that the organization knew that minors could not fully consent to the transgender operations, seemingly contradicting activists’ public claims.
Last month, the Supreme Court upheld 6–3 along ideological lines the State of Tennessee’s ban on transgender procedures on minors. The ruling will probably allow similar bans to remain in place in numerous red states. The justices are now set to hear two cases about men who claim to be women competing in women’s sports.