On December 18, United States Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. announced that transition-related health services for transgender minors would be cut.
Specifically, hospitals that offer health services to transgender youths would get their funding stripped. Additionally:
HHS said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will begin the rulemaking process to prohibit hospitals’ providing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and operations to minors as a condition of participation in Medicare and Medicaid and to bar Medicaid funding from being used for such care.
NBC News
RFK Jr. was joined by Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz, who also announced that the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a federal program for uninsured children, would cease aid as it relates to transgender care. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will also “issue warning letters to 12 manufacturers and retailers of breast binders for minors for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria… alleging that the manufacturers are participating in illegal marketing.”
Both Oz and RFK Jr. employed the term “sex-rejecting procedures” to refer to transitional care; the former term is not scientific. Both officials lack expertise in this field, and are not qualified to make medical and scientific decisions.
Contrary to RFK’s lie that doctors recommend and wantonly carry out transitional treatment and surgery on youths suffering from gender dysphoria, only 5,100 children aged eight to seventeen with private insurance “are prescribed puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones.” This is out of 724,000 children aged thirteen to seventeen that identify as transgender. So out of those suffering from gender dysphoria, very few are given hormonal medication, and only 2.1 of those aged fifteen to seventeen out of 100,000 are given surgery.
