Trump health chief seeks to bar trans youth from gender-affirming care

US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during an event with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 6, 2025. [AFP]

The US health department on Thursday announced proposed measures that would effectively ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, significantly expanding the Trump administration's efforts to roll back protections for trans people.

The series of sweeping proposals announced by US health chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials would cut off vital federal funding from hospitals that provide pediatric gender transition services -- including puberty blockers and surgical interventions -- even in states where they are legal.

In announcing his proposals -- which will almost certainly face legal challenges, are not final and must go through lengthy review and public comment -- Kennedy called gender-affirming care "malpractice" based on "junk science driven by ideological pursuits."

His health department this year released a report largely written by critics of gender transition that emphasized risks of gender-affirming care and urged counseling before interventions.

The proposed measures would prohibit reimbursements for minors' gender-affirming care from Medicaid, the federal program that provides health care coverage to low-income children and adults.

Even more limiting, it would revoke all funding from both Medicaid and Medicare -- the health care program for elderly adults and disabled people -- from any hospital that provides such care.

Such a move would place extreme financial hardship on medical facilities if they continued to provide such health services.

The proposals were met with alarm from LGBTQ advocates as well as doctors.

"In an effort to strongarm hospitals into participating in the administration's anti-LGBTQ agenda, the Trump Administration is forcing health care systems to choose between providing lifesaving care for LGBTQ+ young people and accepting crucial federal funding," said Jamila Perritt, president of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

"This is a lose-lose situation where lives are inevitably on the line," the obstetrician-gynocologist said in a statement. "Gender affirming care is lifesaving care."