The movement to stop hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on children — and to commit funds for the medical care of detransitioners — has just racked up another win. Following investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center has agreed to both terms.
The Hartford institution had long been one of the nation’s top practitioners of so-called gender-affirming care for minors. As its archived webpages make clear, the hospital’s “Gender Program” provided not only hormone therapy and puberty blockers but “sex-change” surgeries for children under the age of 18.
Moreover, Connecticut Children’s served as an evangelist for pediatric transgender services, creating, for example, a “portal” whereby children from states that banned sex-rejecting procedures for minors could access “gender-affirming” information and “care.”
The institution published a list of reading resources, including explicit material, for children, arguing that “there is no age that’s ‘too young’ to start teaching kids to be allies for gender and pronoun diversity.” The reading recommendations included The Pronoun Book for children ages 0–3, The Bare Naked Book for children ages 3–6, and Sex Is a Funny Word for children ages 8–10, all of which present transgender messaging to minors too young to critique it.
Now, thanks to the DOJ’s efforts, Connecticut Children’s will no longer perform “gender-affirming” procedures or surgeries on minors. Additionally, the institution will pay an undisclosed monetary penalty and will provide $500,000 in medical care for detransitioners — men and women who, as the DOJ’s press release puts it, are “living with the harmful consequences of ‘gender affirming care.’”
This is a victory for the children and adolescents who will not now be subjected to irreversible, life-changing interventions based on a damaging ideology.
It is also a victory for Do No Harm, which operated on the ground in Hartford to put a stop to Connecticut Children’s harmful activities — creating, for example, a robust public-awareness campaign of digital and billboard advertising that exposed Connecticut Children’s outsized role in promoting sex-rejecting procedures across the country.
The win comes on the heels of similar triumphs in Texas and Ohio. In May, Texas Children’s Hospital agreed to fund a “detransition clinic” for men and women who regret the harm done to them by transgender interventions. (That settlement was finalized earlier this week.) In June, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation made a similar move, agreeing to “provide detransition care” to patients.
These are major breakthroughs in the fight against pediatric transgender ideology, a phenomenon based not in science but in politics. If hospitals and “gender clinics” can be made to understand that a bill may eventually come due, they will be less likely to prescribe life-altering hormones to children or remove the healthy body parts of adolescents.
Do No Harm awaits the day when such interventions on minors will once again be what they were for most of human history: unthinkable.
