University of Michigan Medical Center becomes latest to drop transgender services for minors amid Trump pressure
The University of Michigan Medical Center announced that it will cease providing puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone treatments to transgender-identifying minors under the age of 19. This decision follows a Department of Justice subpoena issued in July as part of a nationwide investigation targeting doctors and clinics accused of performing transgender procedures or prescribing such treatments to minors. The move aligns with pressure from the Trump governance to shift away from medical transitioning treatments for gender dysphoria in minors. Other healthcare providers, like Kaiser Permanente and Children’s National Hospital, have made similar decisions recently.
Attorney General Pam Bondi criticized the Biden administration’s promotion of gender-reassignment surgeries and hormone therapies for minors, citing a lack of empirical evidence on long-term safety. The Department of Health and human Services (HHS) released a report expressing serious concerns about the risks of puberty blockers, hormones, and sex-change surgeries, highlighting potential irreversible harms such as infertility. HHS also referenced international caution regarding these treatments due to their experimental nature.
The University of Michigan, heavily funded by federal research grants-receiving over $1 billion last year including $734 million from the NIH-made this decision amid increasing federal scrutiny as part of broader political and legal efforts to limit transgender healthcare services for minors.
University of Michigan Medical Center becomes latest to drop transgender services for minors amid Trump pressure
The University of Michigan on Monday announced it will no longer provide transgender-identifying minors with “puberty blockers and gender affirming hormones.”
The university released a statement revealing that its medical center, Michigan Medicine, is suspending such treatments for patients under the age of 19 due to a Department of Justice subpoena issued to the school in July. The subpoenas were issued to more than 20 doctors and clinics nationwide as part of a government investigation into suspects accused of performing transgender procedures on minors or providing them with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which are labeled by proponents as “gender affirming care.”
“In light of that investigation, and given escalating external threats and risks, we will no longer provide gender affirming hormonal therapies and puberty blocker medications for minors,” wrote the University of Michigan, which received over $1 billion in federal funding last year.
The announcement makes the Michigan medical center the latest to comply with the Trump administration’s pressure campaign to revert to traditional forms of treatment for gender dysphoria as opposed to the medical transitioning to the opposite sex that Trump’s DOJ has accused the Biden administration of incentivizing.
Kaiser Permanente, one of the country’s largest healthcare providers, announced in July plans to end sex-change operations for minors, a decision mirrored by a host of other institutions, including the Gender Development Program at Children’s National Hospital.
“The [Biden] Department of Health and Human Services promoted gender-reassignment surgeries and hormone replacement for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors and pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to eliminate age minimums for reassignment surgeries in its 2022 guidelines,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in the July memo revealing the DOJ had issued subpoenas to roughly two dozen doctors and clinics suspsected of dispensing transgender services to minors.
Bondi suggested that at the same time, the National Institutes of Health knew that there was “little to no empirical data” supporting the “long-term safety of puberty blockers and hormones.” To address “the lack of scientific support for his agenda,” former President Joe Biden allocated “more than $8 million of taxpayer funds for transgender hormone studies on mice,” the attorney general’s office wrote.
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The Department of Health and Human Services in July released a review raising “serious concerns” that puberty treatments, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries pose “significant risks [to children]—including irreversible harms such as infertility—while finding very weak evidence of benefit.” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department pointed to health authorities “in a number of countries,” including the United Kingdom, that have imposed restrictions on the transgender services due to concerns about “the experimental nature of these medical interventions and their potential for harm.”
The Trump administration’s investigation into the University of Michigan comes as the federal government has become the largest sponsor of the university’s research activity. It reported $1.17 billion in federally sponsored research expenditures in fiscal 2024. The school receives the third-most NIH funding, which supports medical research, among U.S. universities, according to Bridge Michigan. In 2024, the university received $734 million in NIH grants.
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