Once in a while, you see an action taken by a branch of government and think, "It's about time." This is one such case.
Under the Trump administration, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been digging into the problem of life-altering, irreversible "transgender" treatments conducted on children. On Thursday, HHS chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced a federal crackdown on these practices. Watch the announcements:
🚨 BREAKING: @SecKennedy announces "six decisive actions" to protect children from chemical and surgical mutilation:
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 18, 2025
"So-called 'gender affirming care' has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people... we’re done with junk science, driven by… pic.twitter.com/q4iWbmSNEj
.@DrOzCMS: "We are in a weird place in America where we have mixed politics and medicine — and you know what you get when you mix politics and medicine? Politics; there is no medicine left... Many of these children are left with the most tragic parts of all the treatments that… https://t.co/B5rIe6ajcl pic.twitter.com/pIFQXV6TXC
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 18, 2025
Also on Thursday, HHS released a declaration outlining the government's actions on this issue; you can read that in its entirety here.
Here are the key points from that declaration:
Based on the comprehensive evidence review published by the Department of Health and Human Services, documented risks of significant harm, markedly weak evidence of benefit, unfavorable riskbenefit profiles, inadequate existing clinical guidelines, growing international consensus among countries conducting rigorous evidence reviews, and applicable medical ethics principles, I hereby declare:
Sex-rejecting procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors, and therefore, fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care. For the purposes of this declaration, “sex-rejecting procedures” means pharmaceutical or surgical interventions, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as mastectomies, vaginoplasties, and other procedures, that attempt to align an individual’s physical appearance or body with an asserted identity that differs from the individual’s sex.
Anyone who has taken a freshman-level biology course would have been able to tell you that this kind of hormonal treatment is neither safe nor effective for children, many of whom have been started on these therapies before puberty.
Read More: What HHS Just Did to Biden Health Official Rachel Levine's Portrait Was Pretty Ballsy
Dr. Oz also has written an editorial that appeared in the Washington Post on Thursday, in which he states:
America’s children aren’t lab mice. They deserve quality care backed by sound evidence and should not be conscripted as test subjects in risky experiments that cause irreversible harm.
That’s why the federal government has proposed two rules today banning the use of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funds to subsidize sex-rejecting medical interventions for minors and prohibiting hospitals participating in Medicare and Medicaid from performing them. Extraordinary interventions such as cross-sex hormones and double mastectomies require extraordinary evidence, especially when children are involved. In this case, the evidence is lacking.
Comprehensive independent reviews — including by the Department of Health and Human Services, Sweden, Finland and Britain — conclude that the evidence that these treatments produce lasting benefits is “remarkably weak,” “low quality” and “insufficient” to determine “long-term outcomes.”
This indeed hits at the very heart of the matter. American children are not experimental subjects. These questionable treatments not only violate the millennia-old medical principle of primum non nocere (first, do no harm) but it also initiate these irreversible, life-altering, and often debilitating procedures and worse, surgeries, on minors who are incapable of giving informed consent.
The federal government will now limit the use of federal funding to subsidize these procedures. That's what the Executive Branch can do, for now. But Congress can and should act to end the use of these treatments in minors as "gender-affirming" care. It's time the ideological sexual mutilation of children in the United States was brought to a halt.
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