BALTIMORE (LifeSiteNews) — Federal Judge Brendan Hurson has issued a 14-day block against enforcing the Trump administration’s ban on federal funding for medical institutions that surgically or chemically “transition” gender-confused minors, siding with activist families who claim that not subjecting their children to dangerous, life-altering procedures would cause “irreparable harm.”
The Trump order ends all federal support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescinds or amends all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” and calls for a review of the medical literature on the subject, enforcing all existing restrictions on underage “transitioning,” and taking regulatory action to “end” the practice to the greatest extent possible under current law.
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The Associated Press reports that several families, LGBT activists, and doctors joined forces to challenge the order, alleging it violates both anti-discrimination law and “parental rights” despite widespread evidence that “gender transition” procedures lead to serious injuries, including death.
Hurson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, declared that, in his view, the order was not motivated by a desire to protect children but rather “seems to deny that this population even exists, or deserves to exist,” and claimed that disrupting “transition” interventions could cause “irreparable harm.”
The Trump Justice Department (DOJ) has argued that the president has “well-established authority” to direct the operation of executive-branch agencies, which “dooms plaintiffs’ likelihood of succeeding on their claim that the president exceeded his presidential authority in issuing the EOs.”
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“Plaintiffs also are unlikely to succeed on their constitutional and statutory discrimination claims: the EOs do not discriminate based on sex or any other protected class, and they bear a substantial relationship to important governmental objectives regarding the protection of children and adolescents from potentially dangerous and ineffective [interventions] such that they satisfy any possible standard of constitutional scrutiny anyway,” the DOJ has said.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”