Last week, Alan Levine, Chairman of the Florida State University System’s Board of Governors, sent a letter to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
The letter asked the LCME whether it is properly enforcing its accreditation standards given that many of the medical schools it accredits perform sex-denying interventions (such as prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and/or performing surgeries) on minors.
“In reviewing the standards of the LCME, I am curious how our nation’s medical schools have led the way, in the absence of clear evidence, to such broad use of interventional and altering treatments and procedures where permanent disfigurement and irreversible damage to the reproductive systems of minors was so accepted,” Levine wrote.
Levine cited the ever-increasing body of evidence showing that so-called “gender-affirming care” for children poses serious health risks, and that these practices are not supported by sufficient evidence.
The Department of Health and Human Services in 2025 published a comprehensive review of the evidence behind sex-denying interventions for minors and found there to be insufficient evidence to support these practices.
In 2024, the Cass Review, commissioned by the United Kingdom’s National Health Services, found “remarkably weak evidence” to support the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for gender distressed children.
And earlier this month, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons came out against sex-denying surgeries for minors, citing the lack of evidence behind such procedures.
Under the LCME regime, medical schools and associated hospitals have become vehicles for the child transgender industry; Do No Harm has documented these activities in our Stop the Harm Database.
It is clearly within the purview of the LCME to ensure that medical schools are not serving as vectors for gender ideology or, worse, committing harmful medical interventions on minors. The LCME should take action to prevent such abuses.
Levine’s letter further pointed out how existing LCME standards, such as its standards related to professionalism, would presumably already prevent medical schools from engaging in this behavior.
“Do professional standards require that there be clear evidence of a benefit before subjecting a minor to permanent, body-altering surgery?” Levine asked. “In the accreditation process, how does LCME ensure this standard is applicable in a manner such that patients are protected from experimental or other procedures which may be driven more by ideology than by clinical evidence?”
Levine’s questions are well worth asking.
It is the duty of medical education accreditors to ensure that accredited medical schools are not engaging in experimental, unsupported medical interventions that impose massive harms upon society’s most vulnerable. Indeed, it is an ethical predicate for the practice of medicine that physicians “do no harm.”
It’s also worth noting that the LCME is currently proposing changes to its accreditation standards that would remove language requiring medical schools to adopt curricula teaching about, among other things, the “importance of health care disparities and health inequities.”
A group of medical education administrators, physicians, and others, called the Coalition for Structural Competency in Medical Education, organized a petition protesting these changes.
The petition additionally calls for the LCME to incorporate medical education standards that “[c]learly define the knowledge and skills students must learn to understand how social, economic, and political structures affect health and healthcare.”
Needless to say, it’s essential that the LCME does not yield to these demands. It is not the province of medical schools to inculcate students into particular politically-charged explanations of public health phenomena.
Rather, schools have a duty to train future physicians to provide the best possible medical care.
The LCME’s job is to make sure schools fulfill that duty.
