LGBTQ+ advocates vowed to fight a Jan. 28 executive order by President Donald J. Trump that could virtually eliminate transgender youths’ access to appropriate and meaningful health care.
The order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” directs that gender-affirming care for youths (defined there as persons under the age of 19) be excluded from insurance plans covering families of the military, postal workers and other federal employees. It further suggests that medical institutions providing such care to young patients could lose federal funding.
The directive was one of many taking aim at transgender Americans, and the LGBTQ+ community overall, in the first days of the second Trump administration. A previous order mandated that transgender service members be removed from the military, for example, while references to the LGBTQ+ community were scrubbed from both the White House’s and other federal websites.
“The Trump administration’s disdain and animosity towards transgender people and other minorities appears to know no bounds,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel and Health Care Strategist Omar Gonzalez-Pagan in a Jan. 29 statement. “With today’s announcement, the Trump administration seeks to target and discriminate towards some of the most vulnerable: transgender youth. In seeking to deny transgender youth the medically sound and well-established health care that they need, this administration could put thousands of vulnerable young lives at risk. It is an outrageous overreach of government power that reveals its cruel absolutism.
“This policy by the Trump administration is morally reprehensible and patently unlawful. The federal government—particularly, this administration—has no right to insert itself into conversations and decision-making that rightly belongs only to parents, their adolescent children, and their medical providers.”
Officials from the Newton, Massachusetts-based Jewish LGBTQ+ advocacy group Keshet called the order “profoundly hurtful and dangerous.”
In a Jan. 29 statement, those officials said, “The pace of threatening executive orders issued by this Administration has been and will remain dizzying. But we know this deluge is, first and foremost, a tactic that is designed to shock, confuse, and terrify. Executive orders cannot override the Constitution or become federal or state laws. To repeat: These executive orders are not law. Our LGBTQ+ legal advocacy partners are already filing lawsuits, as they have against state laws restricting or banning life-saving medical care for trans people. We implore that our elected officials in Congress and state governments use all the powers at their disposal to fight back.”
“This executive order ignores decades of scientific research that established the safety and effectiveness of gender-affirming care for youth whose doctors prescribe it,” said Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute, who is lead author on a brief on the impact of the order. “It also disregards numerous studies that show gender-affirming hormone therapy and surgeries for youth are actually very rare which suggests that the treatments are being tailored to the youth who need them most.”
According to the Williams Institute, there are about 300,000 transgender youths in the U.S.
(This is a developing story.)
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