The Beginning of the End for Gender Medicine? Why Trump Could Be Its Toughest Foe Yet

Advocates for the lucrative field of pediatric transgender medicine are fighting back after President Trump moved to cut federal funding for treatments like puberty blockers, hormones, and gender surgeries. Those who support the move consider it a golden opportunity and perhaps the beginning of the end of the transgender movement.

Trump's January 28th executive order, "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation," says the treatments 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 treatments" and notes that these youth are often trapped with lifelong medical complications.

Attorney Sarah Parshall Perry at the Heritage Foundation says it's aimed squarely at the multi-billion dollar gender medicine industry and more than 1,000 gender clinics and hospitals across the country. "It turns off the government tap for any individual who is using Medicaid, Medicare or Affordable Care Act funding to be able to get these type of procedures," she told CBN News.

"He put some very powerful purse strings on that order," says attorney Mary Rice Hasson at the Ethics & Public Policy Center. "It's the power of federal funding saying that organizations, whether it's a hospital, a medical practice, anyone who is taking federal funds, they are now going to feel the squeeze because their institution is going to risk losing federal funds if they choose to continue with these procedures."

Chloe Cole fell victim to the industry as an adolescent. She started receiving puberty blockers and hormones at age 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15. Now at age 20, she's one of the most outspoken detransitioners in the country and sees Trump's moves as a critical step toward ending the transgender movement.

She's also warning, along with other advocates, of the fight underway. "We need to remember also that the left has spent decades building and establishing the current ideology—they're not going to vanish overnight," she said at a recent Young America's Foundation conference.

Indeed, multiple legal challenges to the president's order are underway, including one by 18 state attorneys general. It argues that the federal order conflicts with some states' laws guaranteeing access to these procedures.

Perry maintains that the order falls within the scope of the president's authority, although she admits that taking down the industry will involve more than just cutting federal funds.

"I do think it's going to take medical malpractice on a grand scale," she told CBN News.

That includes lawsuits like the one Cole has filed against health care giant Kaiser Permanente. 

Hasson says Congress could encourage such action with a federal law expanding the statute of limitations so that young adults can have time to process their trauma and come forward.

The medical advocacy group Do No Harm opposes gender ideology in the medical profession. Spokesman Dr. Jared Ross calls the president's order "an excellent step in the right direction" and is calling for more protections for children, like a federal ban on gender treatments for kids.

He also encourages the public not to ignore the pain that gender confusion can bring.

"We understand that these children are really suffering, whether that be with anxiety, depression, autism," he explained. "These children need care. They need compassionate care from mental health professionals that are free to work in a reality basis."