One day, Americans will look back in horror on the irreversible surgeries and pharmacological “treatments” to which ideologues in white coats subjected gender-dysphoric children.
Two new agreements between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and major American healthcare systems bring that day closer.
Last Friday, the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs announced that deals had been struck to end pediatric sex-rejecting procedures at both New York University Langone Hospitals (NYU) and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).
These deals follow previous agreements with New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
Do No Harm’s full list of hospitals that are pausing pediatric “gender-affirming care” in response to Trump-administration actions is available here.
As part of the new agreements, NYU and UPMC will cease performing “gender”-related surgical procedures on minors and will no longer administer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric youth.
Additionally, the two organizations will pay fines of $8.5 million and $950,000, respectively.
Announcing the two deals, Attorney General Todd Blanche stated that “[t]he Department of Justice is fighting to protect our nation’s children and working tirelessly to reach agreements with hospitals to end so-called ‘gender affirming care’ for minors.”
Referencing potentially fraudulent billing practices of the kind uncovered in a recent Do No Harm report, Blanche added that the “resolutions send a clear message: hospitals that target children in these practices and then fraudulently obtain payment for the procedures will be held to account.”
As Do No Harm argued in our coverage of the DOJ’s August agreement with Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, these victories belong primarily to the children and adolescents who will not now be subjected to irreversible, life-changing interventions based on a damaging ideology.
Those young people need society’s compassion in the form of forbearance and realism, not hasty, politically charged “medicine” based on falsehoods that activists merely wish were true.
As more and more health systems back down from the radicalism that they previously embraced, keeping children safe from that harm will become easier: Fewer hospitals offering pediatric “gender” “care” means fewer patients allowed to undergo it — or manipulated in that direction.
Yet Do No Harm and its allies can’t afford to relax.
As the DOJ’s press release makes clear, the agreements signed in the last several months proceed in part from President Trump’s 2025 direction that the Department of Justice should “prioritize investigations and enforcement actions involving violations of federal law in the provision of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ to children.”
What one administration can emphasize, another can halt altogether.
Moreover, a future DOJ led by progressive political appointees might interpret differently (or scrap altogether) the deals that are now being struck.
Simply put, to the extent that hospitals are backing off of pediatric sex-rejecting procedures because of pressure blowing in on the political winds, those gestures are reversible.
What is required in the long term is an American public so well-schooled in the horrors of pediatric “gender-affirming care” that healthcare systems cease offering it of their own volition, permanently.
That day is not yet here, but we believe it is surely coming.
