BOSTON (LifeSiteNews) – Far-left Democrat Governor of Massachusetts Maura Healey says the state will pick up the tab for surgically and chemically “transitioning” gender-confused minors once a new Trump administration directive cutting off federal funding takes effect.
On August 11, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a final rule, effective October 13, that “ends the use of federal Medicaid and CHIP funds” for “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors.
“Under the final rule, federal Medicaid and CHIP funding will be available for a tapering-off period of up to six months from the effective date of the final rule” for minors using hormones, the press release explains, adding that it doesn’t apply to “mental health services.”
“Medicaid’s Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT) provisions continue to ensure comprehensive coverage of mental health services for eligible children, and CHIP continues to require coverage of necessary mental health services in accordance with federal law,” it continues.
“Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits,” said CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. “By cutting off federal funds for these sex-rejecting procedures, we’re following the science, saving taxpayer dollars, and, most importantly, protecting children from potentially irreversible harm so they can truly flourish.”
In response, the governor’s office has announced that it intends to make up for the lost funds if and when the rule takes effect, WBUR reports.
“The Healey-Driscoll Administration is committed to ensuring all Massachusetts residents have access to the [so-called] life-saving gender-affirming health care they need and deserve,” a spokesperson said. “We will work with our health care partners across the state so that they can continue to offer this critically important care in the face of federal assaults.”
State officials were mum on exactly how much they intend to spend, beyond planning for the money to come from the state’s “Affirming Health Care Trust Fund,” which reportedly had $8.5 million as of this past July. The state spent $3.6 million on minors’ transgender procedures in 2024. Additionally, Attorney General Andrea Campbell intends to challenge the CMS rule in court.
A large 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.
In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”
In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through “gender transitions” had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under “transitioning” 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.”