The Department of Health and Human Services has sent a two-page letter to "Health Care Providers, Health Care Risk Managers, and State Medical Boards," requesting they change their protocols and procedures when treating minors with gender dysphoria.

[T]he "weak evidence and growing international retreat" from the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to treat gender dysphoria in minors and the "risk of significant harm" (p.10). The Review explains that "many treatments (e.g., surgery, hormone therapy) can lead to relatively common and potentially serious long-term adverse effects" (p. 221). Given your "obligation to avoid serious harm" (p. 221) and the findings of the Review, HHS expects you promptly to make the necessary updates to your treatment protocols and training for care for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria to protect them from these harmful interventions.

It also gives a strong recommendation to make psychotherapy the first option in treatment.

[...] The Review documents serious concerns regarding the lack of reliable evidence of benefits and risks of significant harms for this model of care that have mounted in recent years, and points to psychotherapy (talk therapy) as a noninvasive alternative. As Sweden's national health authority has recommended, "[p]sychosocial support that helps adolescents deal with natal puberty without medication needs to be the first option when choosing care measures" (p. 247)

The letter further warns against the use of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's (WPATH) "Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People," Version 8 (SOC-8) because the formation of this so-called scientific protocol was, 

[...] fraudulent and marked "a clear departure from the principles of unbiased, evidence-driven clinical guideline development" (p. 172). To wit, in the context of developing its recommendations, WPATH suppressed systematic reviews of evidence, failed to manage conflicts of interest, and relied on legal and political considerations rather than clinical ones (p. 173).

The letter also urges healthcare risk managers to notice that WPATH and the Endocrine Society guidelines were no longer recommended for clinical use by international bodies. "These and other guidelines based on the so-called 'gender affirming' model of care should not be relied upon to harm children any further (pg. 141)."

This is quite a bombshell, meant to drive a stake through the heart of the gender-affirming care medical industrial complex. 

The executive order President Donald Trump signed in January blocked federal funds from being used for such procedures; now the federal department tasked with the distribution of funds is setting new policy to shore against lawsuits from the people and organizations that have profited the most from the cavalier mutilation of children. It is also a warning to the governing boards that threaten the certification and livelihoods of practitioners: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry among them. 

Practitioners like Dr. Eitan Haim were targeted, threatened, and persecuted by Biden's DOJ because he refused to participate in the practice and acted as a whistleblower to expose the intentional harms done to healthy children. 

Then there are the companies profiting from this practice. An exclusive Daily Signal report cites Planned Parenthood as one of the main providers of gender-affirming care services. Color us shocked.  

What about gender services such as cross-sex hormones? More than 430 clinics offer it. Out of 49 affiliates, 23 offer telehealth for gender services. Unlike other types of categories in the report, Planned Parenthood has never specified how many gender services it provides. That information is buried in an “other” category that includes several kinds of services.

The first year Planned Parenthood mentioned gender in the “other category” a decade ago, there were 8,153 services reported. This year there were 77,858. Different accounting mechanisms may be the source of the dramatically different numbers we saw in 2021 and 2022, but there’s no way to know for sure based on this report alone.

Here’s what we do know. Planned Parenthood is, by its own admission, “the second-largest provider of hormone therapy” in the nation. Thanks to other publicly available reporting we can reasonably infer that gender services in particular have caused a spike in this category.

A recent Manhattan Institute investigation found that in 2023 alone nearly 40,000 people went to Planned Parenthood for cross-sex hormones—about 40% of them between the ages of 18 and 22.

MAHA has its hands full with Big Pharma in terms of unregulated pharmaceutical use and pesticides in our food, but these companies also profit handsomely from this industry through the distribution of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other maintenance drugs. According to a 2024 financial analysis, sex reassignment is big business, and companies like Viatris, ASCEND Therapeutics, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Novartis will gain exponentially if the gender-affirming care gravy train continues to race down the track.  

The "United States Sex Reassignment Hormone Therapy Market, By Region, Competition, Forecast and Opportunities, 2019-2029F" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

United States Sex Reassignment Hormone Therapy Market was valued at USD 1.21 billion in 2023 and is anticipated to project steady growth in the forecast period with a CAGR of 4.29% through 2029.

The market encompasses a range of pharmaceutical products and medical services designed to assist transgender individuals in aligning their physical characteristics with their gender identity. This includes the administration of hormones such as estrogen and testosterone to promote secondary sex characteristics consistent with an individual's gender identity.

Trump's executive order was the opening salvo doing damage to the tracks, and this letter from HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. is the next explosion meant to blunt the train's forward momentum. State legislatures are passing or seeking to pass laws banning gender-affirming care, and they will be either affirmed or denied by the Supreme Court's decision in The United States v. Skrmetti, which challenges Tennessee's Senate Bill 1 blocking any medical procedure used to treat gender dysphoria in minors.

Will all this derail the train? Parents who are fighting for the lives of their children in states that want to allow them to be mutilated, the detransitioners who have already been harmed and are struggling to get their lives and sexual identities back, and MAHA Moms who have fought for the medical industrial complex to be reined in are rooting for these measures to succeed. 

The SCOTUS decision and subsequent legal battles playing out will tell the tale on how effective all this will be toward bringing the train to a screeching halt.