Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Will Stop Performing Child Sex Change Interventions 

Welcome news for parents and children in Southern California: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), one of the chief providers of child sex change services, is shuttering its program providing so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The decision is due to a number of actions taken by the Trump administration to crack down on federal funding of dangerous and experimental gender procedures. 

“These threats are no longer theoretical,” hospital executives said in an email to patients. “Taken together, the Attorney General memo, HHS review, and the recent solicitation of tips from the FBI to report hospitals and providers of GAC strongly signal this Administration’s intent to take swift and decisive action, both criminal and civil, against any entity it views as being in violation of the executive order.”

The email refers to the recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report which reviewed the ethics and evidence behind “gender-affirming care” and found that the “affirmation” approach to pediatric gender medicine “lacked sufficient scientific and ethical justification.”

CHLA’s pediatric gender clinic, The Center for Transyouth Health and Development, is helmed by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Olson-Kennedy had initially refused to publish the results of a multi-million dollar, federally-funded study that found that “puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” in children; Olson-Kennedy’s decision was due to fears that the results could undermine the argument for “gender-affirming care.” 

The results of the study were finally released earlier this month, finding that children’s depression symptoms and emotional health “did not change significantly over 24 months” of being on puberty blockers. 

Olson-Kennedy was also sued for medical negligence by a woman who alleged that Olson-Kennedy’s clinic put her on puberty blockers when she was 12 and performed a double mastectomy on her at 14.

CHLA is one of the most prolific and prominent providers of so-called “gender-affirming care” in the country.

According to insurance claims data compiled in Do Harm’s Stop the Harm Database, between 2019 and 2023 CHLA performed surgical procedures on over 160 patients under the age of 18. 

And according to The Los Angeles Times, CHLA’s pediatric gender clinic provides services to nearly 3,000 patient families.