The administration of President Donald Trump published on Thursday an extensive review of medical care for transgender people who advocates a greater dependence on behavioral therapy instead of broad medical care of gender statement for young people with dysphoria.
The Report of the Department of Health and human Services questions the standards for the treatment of transgender young people issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and will probably be used to support the abrupt change of the government in how to take care of a subset of the population that has become a controversial issue.
This new “best practices” report is an answer to an executive order that Trump issued days after beginning its second term, which states that the federal government should not support gender transitions for children under 19 years.
“Our duty is to protect the children of our nation, not expose them to not proven and irreversible medical interventions. We must follow the gold standard of science, not the activist agendas,” said the director of the National Health Institutes, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
However, the department indicated that its report is not a clinical guide and does not make any policy recommendation. The report is also limited to children and does not address adult treatment.
Gender statement care for transgender young people under standards widely used in the United States includes support conversation therapy and may not always – involve puberty blockers or hormonal treatment. Gender statement surgeries for transgender minors are rare.
A judge has blocked key parts of the Trump order, which includes denying investigation and educational grants for medical schools, hospitals and other institutions that provide gender statement to people 18 years of age or less. Several hospitals throughout the country stopped providing attention. The White House said Monday that since Trump assumed the position, the Department of Health and Human Services has eliminated 215 subsidies for a total of 477 million dollars for research or education on gender statement treatment.
Most of the Republican states have also adopted prohibitions or restrictions on gender statement care. A ruling of the Supreme Court is expected after the judges heard arguments in December in a case about whether the states can enforce such laws.
The executive order of January 28 is one of several administration policies aimed at denying the existence of transgender people. Trump has also ordered the Government to identify people as men or women instead of accepting a gender concept in which people are located throughout a spectrum, eliminating members of the Army Transgender Service and prohibiting transgender women and girls participating in sports competitions that align with their gender. This month, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a guide to protect the complainants who report on doctors or hospitals that provide gender statement care. The judges are blocking the application of several of the policies.
This last report from the Department of Health and Human Services, which Trump requested while campaigning last year, represents a change in federal policy. The administration of mental health services and substance abuse, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, found that no research had determined that behavioral health interventions could change gender identity or someone’s sexual orientation. The 2023 update of the 2015 finding is no longer on the agency’s website.
The administration says that this new report will go through a peer review process. Meanwhile, he is not saying who contributed to him, “to help maintain the integrity of this process.”
The report says that medical groups have trusted medical treatment instead of behavioral therapy for transgender young people in part due to a “misrepresentation of such approaches such as ‘conversion therapy’”, which approximately half of the states have banned for minors.
The Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has said that the evidence shows that conversion therapies inflict damage to young people, including high suicidal ideation rates. And the Medical Association has urged States not to prohibit gender statement attention for minors, saying that “empirical evidence has shown that trans and non -binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
