GROTESQUE: Judges Force Trump Admin to Fund Experimental Transgender Interventions

Did you know that your tax dollars have been funding experimental “transgender” medical interventions that leave kids stunted, scarred, and infertile? Did you know that when President Donald Trump tried to put a stop to it, activist groups and Democrat attorneys general sued, and judges ordered the administration to keep funding these Frankensteinian “treatments”?

It’s hard to overstate just how egregious a medical scandal this is.

Activists use the gaslighting term “gender-affirming care” to hide the ugly truth. In the name of medicine, doctors are altering the chemistry of boys and girls to prevent them from undergoing the natural process of puberty. They’re using the very same drugs that prisons use to chemically castrate sexual offenders, and they’re calling it “care.”

‘Puberty Blockers’

The drugs in question are “Gonadatropin-releasing hormone agonists,” commonly referred to as GnRH agonists. David Gortler, a pharmacologist and pharmacist who previously was a senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration commissioner on policy and drug safety, previously told The Daily Signal that physicians developed GnRH agonists to help treat certain cancers that depend on estrogen or testosterone.

Removing estrogen and testosterone from cancer patients to prolong their lives makes sense. But giving these drugs to physiologically and genetically healthy kids is a completely different story.

Gortler, a former Yale University professor, cited his preliminary review of data from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System, a database of reactions to certain drugs that users report to the FDA. According to his analysis in 2024, the system showed 70,000 adverse reactions to GnRH agonists, 2,510 of them involving children aged 14 or younger.

Kids taking these drugs had experienced hallucinations, bone disorders, cardiac arrest, abdominal pain, a clot in the heart, seizures, blindness, and more. Among patients ages 4 to 13, a total of 21 had thoughts of suicide.

Horrifyingly, the database included 30 records noting the death of a minor between zero and 14, where a “puberty blocker” was the primary suspect drug.

“Even though this drug is objectively unsafe, they seem to be selectively turning a blind eye to it, seemingly in sync with White House messaging,” Gortler said last year, referring to FDA officials following messaging from President Joe Biden’s White House.

Last year, The Daily Signal first published documents obtained by the conservative law firm America First Legal that showed a top FDA official admitting that “puberty blockers” are associated with an increased risk of suicidal thoughts but urging her co-workers to approve them anyway.

By the way, all these shocking statistics and this FDA scandal involve “puberty blockers,” which activists bill as the mild and “reversible” transgender intervention.

The Harder Pills to Swallow

Most patients who take these “blockers” will go on to take cross-sex hormones (estrogen for males and testosterone for females).

Hormone expert Dr. Paul Hruz testified to Florida officials that attempts to block fertility followed by cross-sex hormones not only impact fertility but also pose risks such as low bone density, “disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thrombosis, and cardiovascular disease.”

These interventions often lead to the most controversial and grotesque aspect of gender-affirming care, the Frankensteinian rejection of biological sex via the surgical removal of sex organs and the attempt to replace them with facsimiles of the organs of the opposite sex.

An activist organization masquerading as the international authority on “transgender health,” the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, doesn’t recommend “bottom surgery” (surgery to remove genitals) for minors, but some minors do go under the knife. An estimated 3,678 minors have undergone surgical alterations in the past five years (including 405 minors between the ages of 12 and 18 who underwent genital surgery).

No Evidence

Even advocates for gender-affirming care have admitted—in applications to receive federal funding for pro-transgender research—that there is no definitive research proving that these grotesque interventions have positive outcomes for young patients.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, in an application to receive federal funds, wrote that it aimed to “expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of [transgender and gender dysphoric] youth and, thus, is of considerable public health significance.” (Gender dysphoria refers to the condition of persistently and painfully identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex.)

The hospital’s grant application noted that, while previous studies focused on adults who underwent “treatments,” “no known U.S. studies have examined similar outcomes among transgender youth with gender dysphoria.”

That vast majority of voters don’t just balk at the idea of funding this stuff with their tax dollars—they want to outlaw it altogether!

A whopping 72% of Americans said yes to the question, “Should it be against the law to provide children under 18 with puberty blockers, drugs, and/or surgery to help them transition from one gender to another?” The poll—conducted by Napolitan News Service in November with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points—found that 86% of Republicans supported outlawing gender-affirming care for minors, as did 58% of Democrats.

The Anti-Trump Lawfare

All this brings us back to recent news. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that his administration would operate on the basis that biological sex overrides the nebulous “gender identity” Biden preferred to talk about. This means the U.S. government will no longer endorse the ideology that says it’s good to mutilate a child’s body to make it appear like the opposite sex.

It’s frankly Orwellian that I even have to write those words. But it gets worse.

Trump signed another executive order taking steps to protect children from chemical castration and surgical mutilation. The order directs federal agency heads to prohibit the use of federal funds for transgender medical interventions for Americans under age 19 to the extent permitted by applicable law. In Trump’s words, the United States “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

Perhaps the same Democratic Party that long understood the prerogatives of protecting pro-life taxpayers from being forced to financially support the killing of the unborn might instinctually grasp the need to stop propping up these transgender atrocities with Americans’ tax dollars. Oh, right, I forgot—the Democratic Party abandoned its support for the pro-life Hyde Amendment in 2020 and now believes your tax dollars should fund the killing of the unborn and the mutilation of children.

You see, transgender activists and Democrat leaders can’t stand the idea of clawing back federal tax dollars from hospitals that make a mockery of medicine by practicing this Frankensteinian “care.” They filed lawsuits to block Trump’s return to sanity, and unfortunately, two federal judges took it upon themselves to force Trump to keep the gravy train going.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in Maryland on behalf of two LGBTQ+ activist groups, two young adults, and five adolescents and their families. These plaintiffs include five gender-confused minors who have already started taking experimental drugs to alter their bodies, and they want to keep that process going. After Trump’s order, many hospitals have announced they would no longer perform these “treatments” because they want to continue to receive other forms of federal aid.

U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson, a Biden appointee in Maryland, issued a 14-day temporary restraining order to block Trump’s directive applying the Hyde Amendment’s rationale to gender-affirming care.

Then Attorneys General Nick Brown, D-Wash.; Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; and Dan Rayfield, D-Ore., filed a lawsuit with three physicians, also aiming to block Trump’s order.

U.S. District Judge Lauren King, another Biden appointee in Washington state, also issued a 14-day temporary restraining order to block the Trump rule.

Both lawsuits claimed that Trump’s order involved “discrimination on the basis of sex,” violating federal law. The big problem with this logic is that Trump’s order bars the Frankensteinian “care” for all minors, not just males and not just females. It bars “treatment” aiming to force biological male bodies to resemble female bodies and vice versa. This is not discrimination—it’s forbidding a specific type of intervention for all under the age of 19.

The Democrat attorneys general lawsuit claims Trump’s order violates the separation of powers, but the Department of Justice responded, noting that the executive order “does not purport to withhold all federal funding if an institution provides the treatments referenced in the EO [executive order]. Instead, the EO instructs agencies to implement the president’s policy preference to the extent permitted by applicable law.”

The Justice Department’s filing also warned that if the judge granted a temporary restraining order, as King would go on to do, “That sort of order—cutting off at the jump the ability of the executive branch to even pursue a general course of action—would be a remarkable intrusion on a separate branch of government, in conflict with Article II” of the Constitution.

It’s hard to disagree with that conclusion. If, as Democrats repeatedly claim, we are in a “constitutional crisis,” that is because judges have usurped the president’s authority, not because Trump is breaking the law.

Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Tyler O’Neil

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.