Cleveland Clinic Establishes Second “Detransition” Center in the Country After DOJ Settlement

“There continues to be no increased need, and it is a bigoted, sad performative farce the Clinic is choosing to promote.”

Cleveland Clinic // Wikimedia Commons

The Cleveland Clinic has come under fire for what many in the trans community, their families, and their providers have described as the latest in a series of betrayals from medical institutions capitulating to the Trump regime’s politicized attacks on care.

The Department of Justice announced last week it settled with the Clinic, which operates in three states and four countries, over its provision of gender-affirming care (or as the White House is trying to rebrand it, “sex rejecting procedures”).

Gender-affirming care for minors, which may include supportive psychotherapy, puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and sometimes surgery, is not federally unlawful, despite Trumpian chest-beating in the form of executive orders trying to mislead Americans into believing otherwise. Ohio banned medical transition for those under 18 years of age back in 2024.

Although the Clinic already agreed to wind down its pediatric gender care, this didn’t sate the DOJ’s anti-trans crusade. So they went a step further.

“The Cleveland Clinic Foundation (‘Cleveland Clinic’) has entered into agreements with the Department and the Ohio Attorney General that include a decades-long commitment to not perform or offer sex-rejecting procedures—which includes the administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—for minors,” a federal press release reads.

Cleveland Clinic agreed to pay a monetary penalty upwards of $300,000 and, in a “landmark commitment,” dedicate over millions to establish a clinic for “detransitioners.”

The GOP has been open in its efforts to use and abuse the auspices of insurance fraud to attack transgender people’s health care. “The agreements, announced June 5 in a Justice Department news release, resolve allegations that Cleveland Clinic submitted false billings to public and private payers to secure insurance coverage for gender-affirming procedures performed on minors,” Becker’s Hospital Review, an industry publication, reported. “Cleveland Clinic denied all allegations, and the Justice Department acknowledged the health system’s cooperation throughout the investigation. The settlement does not include a determination of liability.”

“The dollar figure isn’t what we are obligated to pay, rather a commitment of care to patients who want this service—which we already do,” a hospital spokesperson added in a statement to The Advocate.

“Detransition” narratives have risen to prominence as a sort of mirror to the evangelical “ex-gays” of a bygone era. But it’s important to note that the word “detransitioner” is a loaded, inexact, and unscientific term. People “detransition” for many reasons—overwhelmingly due to anti-trans bigotry and hindered access to care—as opposed to sudden reidentification with their assigned birth sex.

For the Cleveland Clinic, the implications of this capitulation transcend state and international boundaries. The Clinic also services Nevada and Florida, as well as Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. All of these locations will cease to offer most kinds of gender-affirming care for at least two decades.

“The Clinic is jumping to the front of the line to comply not with science and medicine, but with cruelty and anti-trans hate,” Dara Adkison, executive director of TransOhio, told reporters from Signal Ohio and The Buckeye Flame.

“Detransition services were always a part of gender affirming care,” Adkison continued. “There continues to be no increased need, and it is a bigoted, sad performative farce the Clinic is choosing to promote.”

On social media, Alejandra Caraballo, Harvard Law instructor and LGBTQ rights activist, said that in settling the clinic “caved to the extortion.” Meanwhile, Assigned Media founder Evan Urquhart chimed in on Bluesky to call it “a huge PR win” for anti-trans activists in that it “cements the idea that detransitioning is a big problem.”

This is the second such settlement in as many months, resulting in a “detransition clinic,” following that at Texas Children’s in May.

“A clinic created by a politician via legal intimidation is not in the best interests of any patient,” Kellan Baker of the LGBTQ thinktank Movement Advancement Project told The Texas Tribune at the time. “Doctors should be the ones making decisions about how to provide medical care, not politicians.”

Brad Pritchett, CEO of Equality Texas, further told The Tribune the settlement is a political and legal maneuver by the Attorney General’s office “blackmailing a hospital system into creating a resource that no one is asking for.”

“When it comes to care for trans kids, we have found a new low,” added Jesse Thorn, host of NPR’s Bullseye, and an outspoken ally to the trans community—his own daughter is transgender. They reside in California.

As he explained in his own reaction video to the situation, the Department of Justice has been targeting transgender kids by strong-arming hospitals into ceasing their care and by launching fishing expeditions in an attempt to obtain kids’ private medical records.

“They’re doing this by claiming that gender affirming care is medical fraud. Why? Because medical records are protected by law. The feds just can’t walk into a hospital and start pulling up files unless they say they are investigating a crime. So if they claim gender affirming care is fraud and fraud is a crime, then they can get the files, and if they’re getting people’s private medical files, they can intimidate families and doctors,” Thorn said.

Some hospitals and activist-lawyers have been fighting back. Attorneys for patients at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles were able to stop the institution from handing over de-anonymized records through a class action lawsuit.

But in other cases, the DOJ’s tactic has been working, despite no actual findings of criminal wrongdoing.

“They already stopped providing gender affirming care, but that didn’t satisfy the feds, so the Cleveland Clinic went one step further, or actually a bunch of steps further,” Thorn said.

“This is the ultimate punch in the gut to vulnerable kids and to their families and to their doctors and to everyone who knows that this whole thing is an ideological extortion racket, the kind where if we want to defend patients, defend medicine, defend the law, we have to stand together—or alternately, I guess, follow the Cleveland Clinic model, which is drop a few million dollars on nonsense, let some kids die, and hope the government starts picking on somebody else.”

As young trans Ohioans have become health care refugees fleeing their own state government, the Trump regime made a point of thanking the Clinic for its acquiescence.

“In working towards this settlement,” last week’s DOJ statement reads, “the United States acknowledged that Cleveland Clinic took significant steps entitling it to credit for cooperation with the Department in its investigation.”