Two More Hospitals Announce an End to Gender Affirming Care

I haven’t written about this in a few weeks but there have been a bunch of new developments in the battle over gender affirming care for kids. Last month, two hospitals in Colorado announced they were suspending such care under pressure from the Trump administration.

Children’s Hospital Colorado is suspending all gender-affirming care to patients under 18 years old amid an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

On Friday, the hospital announced that it had notified patients’ families and team members of the decision. Children’s Colorado said that the HHS investigation threatens the hospital’s Medicaid and Medicare funding…

Denver Health also announced on Friday that it will suspend gender-affirming care to youth in response to the Department of Health and Human Services’ actions…

Denver Health stopped performing gender-affirming surgeries in early 2025.

Parents sued Children’s Hospital Colorado but last Friday a judge ruled against them.

District Judge Ericka F. H. Englert denied a request from the families for a preliminary injunction, which would have required Children’s to resume providing medical gender-affirming care such as hormone therapy or puberty blockers…

After weighing the arguments and testimony from a two-day hearing earlier this month, Englert made several findings in the families’ favor but ultimately concluded that granting an injunction “would pose a grave danger to the public interest that is greater than the danger to plaintiffs.”

Again, this is all preliminary so the actual case will still play out and could have a different conclusion, but for the moment the closure stands.

But a judge in California reached a different conclusion after Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego stopped offering gender affirming care for kids. The owner of the hospital was sued by AG Rob Bonta.

After Rady announced last month that it would no longer offer surgeries and other treatments such as puberty blockers, the California Attorney General’s Office sued the provider, alleging that it was ending services unlawfully…

Superior Court Judge Matthew Braner previously ordered that gender-affirming care would resume — other than surgeries — and after hearing arguments from attorneys on Wednesday, he said his prior order would remain in place…

“Right at this moment, I see kids at risk suffering relative degrees of harm,” Braner said. “Whereas at this moment, I see the existential threat to Rady of losing funding that’s going to affect 800,000 patients is just that: a threat. It’s a threat that might become a reality, but it is not yet at that stage.”

But that won’t impact other hospitals that are facing the same issue. Two more announced this week that they would end gender affirming care for kids.

NYU Langone Health announced Tuesday that it is ending its gender‑affirming program for transgender youth, citing the “current regulatory environment.”

The decision follows the Trump administration’s recent plans to withhold certain public health funding from several Democratic‑led states…

Advocacy groups, including the NEW Pride Agenda, condemned the move, calling it a “craven, cowardly decision.”

Similarly, a hospital in Massachusetts is ending such care.

Baystate Health, the largest health system in Western Massachusetts, will no longer prescribe hormones or puberty blockers to transgender patients under 18 in a move the system said would protect its Medicaid and Medicare funding.

It’s the latest retrenchment of gender-affirming care for minors in New England as hospitals and clinics across the region reassess services amid mounting federal and state restrictions.

In October, Fenway Health — one of Boston’s largest providers of LGBTQ+ health care — announced it would no longer offer gender affirming medications to patients under 19…

In a Feb. 9 letter to parents and guardians, Springfield’s Baystate Health said it would continue to offer mental health counseling for children and adolescents but would stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone medications and puberty-blocking drugs to patients younger than 18. Medication care will be transferred to Transhealth, a local health care organization specializing in gender-affirming care, or to another provider of the patient’s choice.

Obviously in New York City or Massachusetts there are going to be other options but limiting those options seems like a win for kids who won’t find themselves on this path of medicalized disruption of their sexual health before they are old enough to drive a car or vote.

Finally, Nature published a new scientific paper this week which used fMRI machines to examine the brains of men, women and trans people. The finding undercut one of the frequent claims by trans activists, i.e. that trans people have brains that more closely align with their chosen gender rather than their actual sex. Not so according to this new study from China.

To date, the knowledge about the neurobiological mechanisms associated with transgender populations, especially transgender women (TW), remains limited and lacks consensus. This study aims to fill such gaps using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method. Resting-state fMRI data was obtained from 16 TW, 16 cisgender men (CM), and 16 cisgender women (CW). Measures of local brain activity and distant functional connectivity (FC) were compared among groups. Several corresponding dynamic measures were also explored based on the assumption of fluctuating brain functional organizations over time. For local brain activity, TW showed higher amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation within the cerebellum, precentral gyrus, and thalamus, as well as lower regional homogeneity in the precuneus than cisgender participants. For FC measures, TW showed weaker FCs mainly involving the ventral attention and sensorimotor networks, as well as lower local efficiency than cisgender participants. In most of these measures, CM were intermediate among the three groups (i.e., TW < CM < CW, or TW > CM > CW). Our results suggest that TW have distinct patterns of brain function compared with cisgender people, while they are more aligned with those of CM (their sex assigned at birth) rather than CW.

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