Gender Clinics Close

From California to Virginia, youth gender clinics are pausing or halting medicalized treatments. The largest in the nation has closed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s policies.

At least 20 medical facilities will no longer be providing some of these services, according to a July 25 White House statement.

Facilities that provide chemical and surgical treatments to gender-confused children now face increasing pressure under new state laws, federal policy changes, investigations into their practices, and litigation. 

At least two disputes over gender-related treatment reached the U.S. Supreme Court this year.

In the United States, about half of the states have banned such treatments for minors in recent years. 

Court challenges followed.

At least one of those challenges made it to the Supreme Court, which upheld a Tennessee law banning transgender-related puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors. 

That landmark June 18 decision, United States v. Skrmetti, bolstered similar laws, which were enacted chiefly in Republican-controlled states.

Fourteen other states, mostly Democrat-dominant, enacted “shield” or “refuge” laws intended to ensure access to these types of interventions, according to The Williams Institute, a think tank based at the University of California–Los Angeles School of Law that focuses on LGBT-related issues.

Meanwhile, transgender activists nationwide continue to funnel children into a “pipeline” for gender-related medical procedures, Idaho counselor Peggy McFarland, who specializes in treating girls, women, and relationships, told The Epoch Times.

“It’s great that [certain clinics] are not medically harming children’s bodies anymore,” she said. 

“But the ideological war and movement behind medical transitioning, that is still very much alive.”

The Trump Factor

Days after Trump took office in January for his second term, he signed an executive order titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

The president denounced “the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.”

“This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end,” he wrote.

In the wake of Trump’s executive order and related actions, multiple health providers announced that they were putting the brakes on some transgender-related interventions for young patients.

Denver Health in Colorado, Virginia’s VCU Health and Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, and Children’s National Hospital in Washington were among the first sites to announce that they were ceasing or curtailing transgender-related treatments for minors. 

Their decisions were released shortly after Trump’s order.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles called its pediatric transgender clinic, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development, “the largest transgender youth clinic in the United States.”

The clinic closed on July 22.

About 300,000 U.S. children, ages 13 to 17, identify as transgender, according to The Williams Institute. Its 2024 report said 93 percent of those teens were living in states that have passed or proposed laws banning access to “gender-affirming care” or other transgender-related restrictions.

—Janice Hisle; Stacy Robinson

BOOKMARKS

The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that it would settle lawsuits against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Air Force Academy over their race-based admissions policies. As part of the settlement, the two schools agreed to enroll students “exclusively on merit, not race or ethnicity.”

Representatives from dozens of countries around the world are calling on Israel to allow an increase in humanitarian aid into Gaza. “All crossings and routes must be used to allow a flood of aid into Gaza—including food, nutrition supplies, shelter, fuel, clean water, medicine, and medical equipment,” the joint statement says. 

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will lawfully have access to data within federal agencies, following a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday. In a 2-1 majority opinion, Fourth Circuit Judge Julius Richardson wrote that “it does not stretch the imagination to think that an employee tasked with modernizing an agency’s software and IT systems would require administrator-level access to those systems.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has named state Sen. Jarrid “Jay” Collins as lieutenant governor, following a six-month delay. The previous lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nunez, resigned in February to take a position as interim president of Florida International University in Miami.

China is fighting an outbreak of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne illness that has symptoms similar to dengue fever, but the infection rates are uncertain. The government is mandating blood tests and experimenting with lab-altered mosquitoes to combat the outbreak.  

—Stacy Robinson