Transgender Surgeries for Kids Is ‘a Stain on Our Nation’: Trump Executive Order
President Donald Trump has protected U.S. taxpayers from funding “the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” by declaring the federal government will “not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” cross-sex hormone injections or transgender surgeries.
President Trump’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” signed Tuesday, cuts off federal funding for the transgender industry, allows families harmed to sue, could institute new religious and conscience protections, and may open the door to criminal prosecution of any individual involved in certain transgender surgeries.
“Across the country today, medical professionals 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 interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our [n]ation’s history, and it must end,” states the order. “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”
The executive order requires that all medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals receiving federal “research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” at once. The order also bars the funding of such procedures by the U.S. military’s health insurance policy, Tricare, as well as all other federal benefits providers. And it previews potential regulations, including placing conditions on Medicare and Medicaid funding.
The order foresees the prosecution of so-called “gender-affirming care” providers in civil or criminal courts. The order requires the attorney general to “prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation,” enacting criminal penalties for phalloplasty and vaginoplasty. The Biden-Harris administration decried the Islamic practice of FGM as “child abuse” at the same time it sued states for protecting residents from “bottom surgery.”
The Justice Department can also sue anyone “misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation.” The DOJ will also “draft, propose, and promote legislation to enact a private right of action for children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged” by transgender procedures, including “a lengthy statute of limitations.” Detransitioners including Chloe Cole, Camille Kiefel, Clementine Breen, Kayla Lovdahl, and others have held their doctors accountable for advising and carrying out transgender procedures that caused them lifelong, irreversible damage.
Significantly, Trump orders the government to consider prosecuting blue states that facilitate the “transition” of children without parental consent for kidnapping. The Trump-Vance administration will “take appropriate action to end child-abusive practices by so-called sanctuary [s]tates” such as Governor Tim Walz’s (D) Minnesota [and] Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D) California “that facilitate stripping custody from parents who support the healthy development of their own children, including by considering the application of the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act and recognized constitutional rights.” The EO also repeals a 2022 guidance that states federal law “does not require covered entities and business associates to disclose” information about “an individual’s” health care to others without the patient’s consent. (Emphasis in original.)
The order defines “child or children” as “an individual or individuals under 19 years of age.” Although above the legal age of majority, the definition more closely comports with a recent paper from researchers at the Mayo Clinic showing that the human brain does not finish developing until nearly the age of 30.
The order could expand the religious liberty and conscience rights recognized by the U.S. government, by modifying section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, conventionally known as Obamacare. The Biden-Harris administration amended the provision last year to treat it as though it forbade medical providers of conscience from refusing to carry out transgender procedures.
It also orders the secretary of Health and Human Services “to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” and issue a report within 90 days on scientifically based best practices for minors suffering from gender dysphoria. President Trump’s HHS nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., began Senate nomination hearings on Wednesday.
The January 28 order notes the politicization and poor quality of existing, pro-transgender studies. It points out the world’s largest “expert” body on transgenderism propounds advocacy-masquerading-as-science and notes that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “lacks scientific integrity.” All federal agencies will delete any policies based on WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8. Biden’s HHS assistant secretary for health, who was born Richard Levine and now uses the name Rachel, lobbied WPATH to remove minimum age limits for transgender surgeries to serve political ends. President Trump’s new executive order requires the HHS secretary to “increase the quality of data” on these matters. Most studies supporting so-called “gender-affirming care” can be classified as “low quality/low certainty,” according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
All federal agency heads will submit a report detailing their progress within 60 days.
‘A Refreshing Return to Sanity’
The measures should prove popular with the broader public: A majority (59%) of Americans believe no one should be able to carry out chemical or surgical transgender procedures on minors — a position supported by every demographic except registered Democrats.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called the order “hugely important.” “President Trump [is] sounding the death knell for the gender mutilation industry that has been targeting our children.” Hawley took action to enshrine the executive order’s provisions into law, re-introducing the Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act, which would grant victims and their families a private right of action to sue the predatory transgender industry and defund facilities carrying out these procedures.
State Rep. Fred Deutsch (R-S.D.), who introduced one of the earliest bills to protect children from transgender procedures statewide, said it was “about time these crimes against humanity were banned.”
“We applaud President Trump for fulfilling his promise to America’s families and taking these critical steps to protect children from harmful, experimental, and often irreversible medical procedures,” Matt Sharp, director of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Public Policy, told The Washington Stand. Sharp called the order “a refreshing return to sanity.” Now, “instead of being a global outlier, America will now ‘follow the science,’ like the U.K. and other European countries have done, to ensure that we are identifying safe and effective ways to help kids who experience distress over their biological sex.”
Dr. Jill Simons, the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) called the executive order a “bold defense of vulnerable children from mutilating procedures in the name of gender ideology,” while ACPeds President Dr. Michael Artigues deemed the order “a major step toward ending harmful medical interventions on minors.”
“It reaffirms a commitment to healthy, ethical, and evidence-based pediatric care,” said Artigues. “It is essential to emphasize the importance of protecting youth and providing comprehensive, quality psychological support to all children struggling with gender dysphoria.”
“Thank you President Trump for protecting children!” said Simons. “Children are beautiful just the way they are. No child is born in the wrong body.”
Katy Faust of Them Before Us described the executive action as “a win for children’s rights.”
Trump Transgender Executive Orders Already Taking Effect
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas announced she had implemented President Trump’s Executive Order 14166, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” when she:
- Announced that one of her priorities — for compliance, investigations, and litigation — is to defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work.
- Removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” a feature in employees’ Microsoft 365 profiles, which allowed an employee to opt to identify pronouns, content which then appeared alongside the employee’s display name across all Microsoft 365 platforms, including Outlook and Teams. This content was displayed both to internal and external parties with whom EEOC employees communicated.
- Ended the use of the “X” gender marker during the intake process for filing a charge of discrimination.
- Directed the modification of the charge of discrimination and related forms to remove “Mx.” from the list of prefix options.
- Commenced review of the content of EEOC’s “Know Your Rights” poster, which all covered employers are required by law to post in their workplaces.
- Removed materials promoting gender ideology on the Commission’s internal and external websites and documents, including webpages, statements, social media platforms, forms, trainings, and others. The agency’s review and removal of such materials remains ongoing. Where a publicly accessible item cannot be immediately removed or revised, a banner has been added to explain why the item has not yet been brought into compliance.
“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” said Lucas. “It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests. And the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County does not demand otherwise: the Court explicitly stated that it did ‘not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.’”
AUTHOR
Ben Johnson
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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