Nonprofit hospitals responsible for performing thousands of sex change operations on children have been raking in billions of dollars in public funding every year, a Washington Examiner review of public records has found.
The Washington Examiner identified 15 hospitals performing a considerable number of transgender surgeries and prescribing large quantities of “gender-affirming” hormones using a Do No Harm database that compiles insurance claims to provide detailed information about the activities of hospitals. Collectively, the hospitals brought in over $1 billion in government grants during the most recent year for which tax disclosures are available.
Though some of the grants doled out by the federal government to these healthcare providers do explicitly concern transgender medical care, most do not. That said, the massive amount of federal dollars flowing into these hospital systems every year provides the Trump administration with significant leverage to pressure them into ceasing transgender operations on minors.
Using federal funding as a pressure point is not unprecedented. The federal government has, for example, historically used federal highway funding grants to coerce states into adopting consistent traffic laws. More recently, the Biden administration withheld millions of dollars in federal health funding from Oklahoma in 2023 after the state refused to provide patients with information about abortion access, a condition for receiving the funds mandated by the Democratic administration. The move was viewed as a way to incentivize conservative states to make concessions related to abortion.
A similar tactic could be employed by the Trump administration to place pressure on entities conducting sex change procedures on minors.
“If a hospital was still performing bloodletting or lobotomies, suspending grant funds until they stopped would be the wise and right thing to do,” Capital Research Center investigative researcher Parker Thayer told the Washington Examiner. “Sex change operations and ‘gender affirming’ hormone injections performed on children are just as barbaric and should be treated the same.”
Boston Children’s Hospital had by far the largest haul of taxpayer funds, reporting roughly $324 million in government grants between October 2022 and September 2023 on its most recent tax filings. While receiving a massive amount of support from taxpayers, Boston Children’s Hospital was providing patients between the ages of 3 and 23 “gender-affirmative care,” according to its website. The hospital provided 301 sex change treatments to minors between 2019 and 2023, per Do No Harm. These operations included castrating 17-year-old males and surgically altering their penises to resemble vaginas without obtaining parental consent and removing healthy breasts from girls as young as 15.
The Biden administration approved roughly $8 million worth of grants for Boston Children’s Hospital to fund its transgender medical research, spending records show. Millions of tax dollars were disbursed to the children’s hospital, for instance, to study how to bring about “systemic changes that increase access to gender-affirming care” in Republican-led southeastern states.
Much of the public funding directed to hospitals performing sex changes on minors has come from the Department of Health and Human Services. Newly confirmed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supports banning sex change procedures for children.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia ranked near the top in terms of government funding among the clinics performing sex change procedures on children, pulling in about $192.4 million from taxpayers between July 2022 and June 2023.
The facility, which opened in 2014, provided 122 minors with either surgical or pharmaceutical transgender interventions between 2019 and 2023, according to Do No Harm. A series of Daily Caller News Foundation investigations found that the Philadelphia hospital offered puberty blockers to children as young as 8, granted sex change surgery referrals to 14-year-olds, and trained local public school employees on how to help young children transition while concealing the process from parents.
One of the grants HHS issued to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, worth close to half a million dollars and finalized during the twilight days of the Biden administration, funds research into how children with autism or epilepsy can be assisted in their gender transitions.
Hospitals in other left-leaning jurisdictions, such as California, Washington, Illinois, New York, Minnesota, D.C., Virginia, and Colorado, collectively performed transgender operations on thousands of children while benefiting from hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding each year.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SPENT NEARLY $400,000 INTERVIEWING TRANSGENDER PEOPLE IN INDIA
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January directing the “head of each executive department or agency” to take steps to ensure that institutions receiving federal funds for research or education, including hospitals, “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.” It is unclear what strategies agency heads will employ to implement the president’s order.
While the Trump administration attempts at the federal level to clamp down on child transgender medical operations, other institutions have already made plays to work around state-level bans. After Ohio successfully banned sex change interventions for children, the Cleveland Clinic’s website continued to “meet” with children “to discuss their gender questions.” After the right-of-center consumer advocacy group Consumers’ Research publicly criticized the hospital for its pro-transgender stances, the hospital system edited the language on its webpage to say that it “supports transgender youth and their families as they explore their options.”
“Do No Harm welcomes additional scrutiny of bad actors, like Cleveland Clinic, who use their position to inject harmful and radical ideologies into the medical field,” a spokesperson for the organization told the Washington Examiner.
Some hospitals are already bucking the Trump administration’s agenda on child transgenderism.
“After reviewing the recent U.S. District Court temporary restraining orders related to the Administration’s Gender Affirming Care Executive Order, and in light of commitments from California Attorney General Bonta to seek additional protections for CHLA and its patients, CHLA is lifting its pause on the initiation of new hormonal therapies for patients seeking gender-affirming care,” the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles told the Washington Examiner. “CHLA had briefly paused beginning these therapies to allow time to assess the potential impact of recent federal policy changes.”
HHS, the taxpayer-funded hospitals offering transgender interventions to children, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.