Top Health Official Calls for Supporting People Who Halt Gender Transitions

One of the Trump administration’s top health officials has said in a new interview with The Epoch Times that support is needed for people who are detransitioning, or reversing their gender transition.

“That’s certainly an area in the future we need to concentrate,” Dr. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, said in an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program set to air on Aug. 22.

“We need to develop good practice protocols. We do need the proper coding, and so there’s still more work to be done to help these children heal. And we certainly, in this administration, we support them, we love them, and we want to help them heal.”

Christine is the top deputy to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who heads the HHS.

HHS oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recently said it would be adding in October a diagnosis code for doctors to use for patients who have gender dysphoria—the belief they’re a different gender—and have desisted.

Christine said his predecessor, Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who presents as a woman, “really pushed gender ideology on the country.” Levine was publicly supportive of gender treatments for and surgeries on children, and lobbied an international group to stop setting minimum ages for recommended surgeries, according to court documents.

HHS said in an Aug. 13 report that hundreds of health care institutions in the United States offered drugs such as puberty blockers and surgeries such as breast removal to children who might have gender dysphoria in a financially lucrative structure that focused on “captive patients.”

When minors went through the system, they required regular visits, sometimes spanning more than a decade, the report noted.

Billing data show that more than 5,700 surgical procedures were performed and around 8,500 courses of puberty blockers or hormones were provided between 2019 and early 2026, according to an outside database.

Some of the minors later came to regret the steps they took to transition and became so-called detransitioners.

Those individuals say they have since struggled to receive care.

“Once I was done dealing with the side effects of testosterone and decided to detransition, the clinicians and providers at the hospital just gave up on me,” said Layla Jane, one of the people interviewed in a video released by HHS. “I feel like the system betrayed me.”

Doctors treating Clementine Breen, another interviewee, stopped responding to emails and calls when they learned she was detransitioning, according to the report.

Children’s hospitals have recently been planning to offer restorative care for people who are working to reverse gender transitions, including Texas Children’s Hospital, and several medical groups have shifted away from broad support for gender transition surgeries.

The Trump administration has moved to curb gender transition drugs and surgeries, including ending Medicaid funding for the procedures.

It also recommended in 2025 that children with gender dysphoria should receive therapy, not drugs or surgery.

“We’re not treating these children with sex-rejecting procedures,” Christine said. “We’re taking care of them, standing for them, and treating and recommending treatment that’s appropriate.”