Ban on Gender “Medicine” Grounded in Evidence

By | 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 30 (C-Fam) The Trump administration announced that organizations promoting gender ideology, including transgender medical interventions for minors, will be ineligible for U.S. funding for their work overseas. Along with other recent policies, this aligns with the conclusions of the recent report on youth gender dysphoria published by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The 400-page review of the scientific literature on youth gender medicine was first published last May, with an updated, peer-reviewed final version arriving last November.  The author concludes that the evidence supporting so-called “gender-affirming” procedures for minors, such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-rejecting surgeries, was weak and unreliable.

In response to outraged transgender activists, the authors of the report published a response defending their work and pushing back on attempts to smear them collectively as “anti-LGBTQ.”

“The fallaciousness of the allegation is obvious,” they wrote, noting that many of the authors are liberals who vote for Democratic politicians. “[O]ur skepticism of the evidence is dismissed because we are ‘anti-LGBTQ+,’ and we are called ‘anti-LGBTQ+’ because of our skepticism of the evidence.”

Instead of irreversible medical interventions, the report recommends gender exploratory therapy, a form of talk therapy designed to identify and address potential underlying issues behind the patient’s gender dysphoria. This approach is derided by critics as a form of “conversion therapy.”

The HHS report is an important contribution to a heated international debate over best practices involving gender dysphoria, especially for minors. An increasing number of countries, including several in Western Europe, have backed away from supporting youth gender medicine, including the United Kingdom.  The UK’s “Cass Report,” cited by the HHS review, arrived at similar conclusions in 2024.

There has been increasing skepticism of the benefits of youth gender medicine, some of it published in noted liberal-leaning publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times.  Meanwhile, transgender activists continue to point to a supposed “scientific consensus” in favor of these interventions, based heavily on the opinions of a group of professional associations known for being highly politicized, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society.

The HHS report authors reached out to several of them for peer review, but only the American Psychiatric Association (APA) was willing to do so.  Despite providing a highly critical review of the report, the APA did not identify any significant errors.  After responding to its critiques in depth, the authors of the HHS report thanked the APA, “a leading mental health organization,” for not mischaracterizing gender-exploring psychotherapy as “conversion therapy” as other critics had done.

The Trump administration has lost no time in acting to protect vulnerable minors from sex-rejecting interventions, both at home and abroad.  In addition to the new policy blocking funding to groups promoting gender ideology overseas, the State Department recently updated its guidelines for compiling its annual country-level reports on human rights.  U.S. embassies are now instructed to report on the practice of sex-rejecting medical procedures for minors as a human rights violation.

In the U.S., the HHS is moving to bar hospitals from administering sex-rejecting procedures to minors. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said, “under my leadership, and answering President Trump’s call to action, the federal government will do everything in its power to stop unsafe, irreversible practices that put our children at risk.”

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter