President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday to ban the chemical and surgical mutilation of children, known among progressive ideologues as “gender-affirming health care.”
The act will cut back federal funding for medical institutions that provide puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and surgical mutilations to minors.
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under 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 in the 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. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization,” he added. “Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Trump’s order requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to encourage practices that will “improve the health of minors with gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion, or who otherwise seek chemical or surgical mutilation,” rather than encourage children to undergo gender transition or hormonal therapy to treat gender dysphoria.
Additionally, every executive department and agency must ensure that medical institutions that are awarded research or education grants end the mutilation of children.
The order also issued a special notice “protecting whistleblowers who take action related to ensuring compliance with this order,” such as Dr. Eithan Haim, who in 2023 exposed the Texas Children’s Hospital’s practice of performing transgender procedures on minors. Trump’s Department of Justice permanently dismissed the legal claim against Haim on Friday.
Under Trump’s executive order, the attorney general will “end deception . . . by any entity that may be misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation” and will “in consultation with the Congress, work to draft, propose, and promote legislation to enact a private right of action for children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged by medical professionals practicing chemical and surgical mutilation.”
Tuesday’s action was the latest in a flurry of orders Trump has passed in his first days in office, including efforts to destroy federal DEI programs, end government censorship of social media, reverse the electric vehicle mandate, and more.