(Washington) Donald Trump’s Health Department announced Thursday a series of measures aimed at de facto banning access to gender transition treatments for young transgender Americans, even in states where these medical procedures are legal.
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This announcement is the latest from the US administration against transgender people and constitutes the largest attack to date on their medical care. She was immediately condemned by associations of caregivers and defense of LGBT+ people.
The measures unveiled aim in particular to withdraw significant federal funding from hospitals offering surgical or hormonal treatments, such as puberty blockers, to minors who do not identify with the gender assigned to them at birth.
This rule would place medical establishments in “an extremely dangerous situation” if they continued to offer such care, Michael Ulrich, professor of public health and law at Boston University, told AFP.
And would lead to limiting or even preventing access to the young people concerned.
These treatments “inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people” and were motivated “by ideological considerations,” accused Minister Robert Kennedy Jr. to justify such a change during a press conference.
The actions presented are now subject to public consultation and will most likely be challenged if adopted by Democratic States or associations in court.
“Impossible choice”
The influential civil rights organization ACLU has promised to oppose the implementation of these measures, calling them “cruel” and “unconstitutional”.
Other associations, particularly those defending the rights of LGBT+ people, and caregiver groups have condemned these announcements.
The latter “would force doctors to make an impossible choice”, between “providing care for young trans people” and “protecting federal funding for all other patients”, warned the LGBT+ rights association Human Rights Campaign.
“These guidelines and proposals distort current medical consensus and do not reflect the realities of pediatric care or the needs of children and families,” said Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Gender transition treatments save lives,” insists Zoe Taylor, doctor and member of the Physicians for Reproductive Health organization to AFP. “It is completely unacceptable to decide for patients.”
Since his return to power, Donald Trump has reversed a series of achievements obtained by transgender people, notably ordering their exclusion from the armed forces.
Its Ministry of Health had already sowed doubts in May about gender transition treatments by publishing a long report which pointed to “significant risks” linked to these practices but which had been called into question by the American scientific community.
Minors’ access to these hormonal or surgical treatments has been the subject of heated debate for several years in the United States, but also in many other countries.
These new announcements come the day after the adoption by the US House of Representatives of a bill aimed at banning them.
This text, which has little chance of being adopted by the Senate, would criminalize these treatments and mean that any person carrying out such a medical procedure or helping a person to benefit from it would risk up to 10 years in prison.
