Trump looks to stop gender-affirming care for America's transgender youth: report

Donald Trump's administration is proposing restrictions on gender-affirming care for trans children across the U.S.

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Proposals drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services would forbid federal Medicaid reimbursement for trans health care for those under 18, according to text viewed by NPR. Additionally, that proposal would also prohibit reimbursements via the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for trans patients below 19.

Another proposed rule would bar all Medicaid and Medicare funding for services at hospitals providing gender-affirming care to youth, NPR reports.

The Trump administration is set to publish the rules to the public next month, according to an NPR source at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Katie Keith, director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at Georgetown University, told the outlet, "These rules would be a significant escalation in the Trump administration's attack on access to transgender health care."

Keith noted that the proposal to strip Medicaid and Medicare funding from certain hospitals would be "unprecedented." She explained that since Medicare makes up a large part of hospitals' revenue, it would force these hospitals to stop providing trans health care to youth.

Almost all medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, told The Advocate in a statement, “This proposed rule is an extreme and dangerous effort to put politics between families and their doctors. It is a severe encroachment on the freedom of these families to determine what health care is right for them while threatening transgender youth with the lifelong impacts of being denied the care they need."

Block added that the ACLU would "strongly oppose this rule."

The Human Rights Campaign also condemned the news.

“This latest attempt to strip best-practice health care from trans young people would place parents and doctors in an impossible position in service of the far-right’s culture war on transgender people. Any proposed rule that would strip federal dollars from providers who dare to defy the administration’s political agenda by caring for trans youth would help no one, hurt countless families, and send a dangerous message that only the president himself – not doctors, not parents, not even you – can decide what health care you can access," Ellen Kahn, senior vice president of Equality Programs at the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement.