The Death of Trans Clinics for Kids Is a Huge Victory | The American Spectator

Back in late January, it was just another headline in the flurry of headlines that assailed the average American voter. While it was all very exciting to watch a president do what we, the people, had elected him to do, it felt like if you blinked you’d miss the signing of some monumental executive order.

The American people might have missed the headlines, but the hospitals — especially the children’s hospitals — did not. After all, Executive Order 14187 threatened billions of dollars’ worth of federal grants for hospitals offering “gender-affirming care” (i.e. surgical and chemical mutilation) to children and a hospital tends to notice when the government threatens to withhold millions of dollars in funding.

It’s one thing for a president to sign an executive order, and it’s another for that executive order to actually mean something. This week we found out that President Donald Trump’s order “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation” does mean something.

In late June, the FBI launched investigations into three children’s hospitals: Boston Children’ Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, following Attorney General Pam Bondi’s announcement that the Trump administration would be enforcing a federal statute that outlaws female genital mutilation.

Then, on Tuesday, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) shuttered its trans clinics — one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Evidently the hospital conducted a “thorough legal and financial assessment” and determined that it would no longer be profitable for it to continue transing the kids.

CHLA is among the latest to have made that determination.

Stanford Medicine and Kaiser Permanente, both major medical providers in California, have announced they’ll no longer be offering transgender surgeries for minors. They’re joined by transgender clinics across the country that have either announced similar changes to patient “care” or have closed their doors entirely.

This is, to put it mildly, a major victory.

Common sense should have told us that mutilating kids for the sake of affirming their (or their parents’) delusions was a bad idea. Failing that, recent scientific literature and the lawsuits of young adults who’ve discovered the incredibly negative lifelong impact of “gender-affirming” surgery should have shut down clinics a long time ago.

But the American medical system, which prides itself on being at the cutting edge of medicine, refused to listen to the research — or in some cases, even to make that research publicly available. Take, for instance, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who formerly ran CHLA’s transyouth program, and who publicly admitted to having withheld the results of taxpayer-funded research that failed to find a positive correlation between puberty blockers and improved mental well-being in children. She later said she feared that the research would be “weaponized.”

Olson-Kennedy was probably right to be worried that such research would hamper her activities in Los Angeles. A similar study conducted some years earlier by a British research group with similar findings “prompted the National Health Service in England to stop prescribing the drugs outside of a new clinical trial, following similar pullbacks in several other European countries.”

As a general rule, the United States’ medical system is behind on the research when it comes to transgenderism. Almost exactly three years ago, England’s largest transgender clinic, Tavistock, was shuttered after a bombshell report discovered clinic operations were problematically subpar; its closing prompted Dr. Hilary Cass, who led the review of the clinic, to call for “a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.” Meanwhile, Denmark, Sweden, and France have “moved to limit their use to research settings or in exceptional circumstances.”

Needless to say, the closing of American transgender clinics for minors is a step that’s long overdue merely from a scientific point of view (much less from a common-sense perspective), and it should be a feather in the cap of this administration that it’s finally getting it done.

This is just the beginning of the road. As Mary Rice Hasson, the director of the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Catholic News Agency, “not one of these programs has acknowledged the harm done on their watch …. They are shuttering these programs for fear of losing federal funds but have not repudiated the barbaric practices that masquerade as ‘gender care.’”

Not only is decisive congressional action needed to make this a change that lasts longer than Trump’s four-year term, but the doctors and medical institutions involved in the mutilation of children need to admit that they were wrong to walk down this path in the first place. That’s a goal that may take years and require reshaping and purging our medical institutions, but it’s worth pursuing for the safety and health of our children.

READ MORE from Aubrey Harris:

Trump Is Making Our Parks Great Again

Are We Ready for AI to Go to War?