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President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday launched what it described as a complete evaluation of gender-related medical interventions for kids and adolescents, warning of “significant risks” related to puberty blockers and surgical procedures.
The 400-page report was issued with out named authors—a departure from scientific norms however nonetheless defended by the Division of Well being and Human Providers as a measure “to help maintain the integrity of this process.”
Youth gender medication is a extremely polarizing problem in lots of nations, with medical professionals in search of to strike a steadiness between assuaging psychological misery, respecting affected person autonomy, and guaranteeing that interventions are evidence-based and applicable for creating our bodies and minds.
However the Trump administration’s file of hostility towards transgender folks—together with efforts to ban them from the army and erase language round gender identification from official paperwork—has raised questions concerning the objectivity of the evaluation.
The report states that gender-affirming therapies carry dangers “including infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret.”
“Our duty is to protect our nation’s children—not expose them to unproven and irreversible medical interventions,” mentioned Jay Bhattacharya, director of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being. “We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.”
Aisha Mays, a household doctor in California and member of the nonprofit Physicians for Reproductive Well being, referred to as the report “propaganda” that aimed “to delegitimize the perfectly safe, effective, and evidence-based health care that transgender people access to be who they are.”
“Being transgender, just like being cisgender, is not a choice nor can it be reversed by any medical or social method,” she added. “The same way cisgender people know who they are, so do trans people. The same way cis people receive gender-affirming care, so do trans people.”
Whereas Well being Secretary and famous vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has drawn scrutiny for brash statements at odds with scientific consensus, the report itself is essentially written in sober, tutorial prose and closely cites medical literature.
Nonetheless, it ranges robust accusations—most notably in opposition to US medical associations, which it claims “may impede or even oppose evidence-based medicine when the professional or financial interests of their members are threatened by medical practice reversal.”
The report additionally denounces phrases like “assigned sex at birth,” arguing that it “suggests an arbitrary decision—not unlike ‘assigned seating’—rather than the observation of a characteristic present long before birth, namely the child’s sex.”
Uncommon interventions
Its launch follows a landmark evaluation in the UK final yr, led by retired pediatrician Hilary Cass, which urged “extreme caution” in prescribing hormone therapies to youth.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which helps entry to medically needed gender-affirming care and opposes laws that restricts it, mentioned it was “deeply alarmed” by the U.S. report.
“For such an analysis to carry credibility, it must consider the totality of available data and the full spectrum of clinical outcomes rather than relying on select perspectives and a narrow set of data,” the group mentioned, including that its personal tips had been misrepresented.
Regardless of intensifying political rhetoric, knowledge present gender-affirming care amongst minors stays uncommon.
A research in JAMA Community Open discovered that gender-affirming surgical procedure occurred at a charge of 5.3 per 100,000 amongst adults, in comparison with 2.1 per 100,000 amongst minors aged 15 to 17; 0.1 amongst these aged 13 to 14; and nil instances amongst kids 12 or youthful.
One other current JAMA Pediatrics research reported that fewer than 0.1% of privately insured minors with a transgender or gender-diverse analysis obtained puberty blockers or hormones—and none had been below 12.
© 2025 AFP
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Trump administration releases report important of youth gender care (2025, Could 2)
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