HHS Launches Snitch Form to Report Gender Affirming Care Providers

The new HHS guidance encourages people to snitch on trans-affirming health care providers—including in instances that do not violate the law.

ajay_suresh // Creative Commons

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), run by famed vaccine skeptic and legacy hire Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has launched an online portal for “whistleblowers” reporting medical providers if they offer gender affirming treatment to trans people—an alarming escalation of President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional war on trans people’s health care.

HHS Snitch Form

On April 14, the HHS released accompanying legal guidance on how to subvert privacy laws and disclose sensitive information about doctors and their patients to a hostile government entity. It does not say that reports must be about violations of the law; it seems to encourage the reporting of any action taken by a provider that is at odds with Trump’s anti-trans Executive Order 14187, titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” regardless of actual state and federal law.

“Please reference EO 14187 in your complaint,” the portal notes. Meanwhile, the guidance says it ensures “robust anti-retaliation protections for individuals who make a report in order to ensure compliance with the Executive Order.”

It further says that a report should be filed by anyone with “a good faith belief” that a medical provider’s actions “violates professional or clinical standards.” While this is not a wholly unheard of protection for whistleblowers, Trump’s EO rebuked the widely-accepted clinical standards set forth by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). In doing so, he may have opened up the floodgates for any federal agency to create new “standards” to fit his own anti-trans agenda.

Calling trans-affirming care “chemical and surgical mutilation” is an unscientific dog whistle used by the far-right (and Trump’s EO) to characterize evidence-based, trans-affirming care. Notably, such care—including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy—does not categorically and universally lead to irreversible “sterilization” as erroneously asserted by the EO. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has gone to great lengths to ensure that the practice of invasive, permanent, and unnecessary surgeries on intersex children remains intact.

Trump’s EO was blocked by multiple federal judges, at least temporarily, but this has not stopped federal agencies from trying to enforce it anyway. The ACLU and other civil rights groups have called on the courts to take bolder action in enforcing its injunction.

U.S. District Judge Lauren King said the executive order violates constitutional protections by “treating people differently based on sex or transgender status.”

“[T]he Order is not limited to children, or to irreversible treatments, nor does it target any similar medical interventions performed on cisgender youth,” King wrote in a February ruling. “For example, a cisgender teen could obtain puberty blockers from such a provider as a component of cancer treatment, but a transgender teen with the same cancer care plan could not.”

Even more, the new HHS guidance latches on to the Church Amendments. This 1976 provision shields medical staff from disciplinary or legal action if they refuse to provide or aid an abortion or other lawful reproductive health care practice, as long as it is done so on the basis of “his religious beliefs or moral convictions respecting sterilization procedures.”

It appears Trump’s EO, in characterizing trans-affirming care as “sterilization,” is further weaponizing the decades-old anti-abortion law to empower anti-trans initiatives.

“The Church Amendments protect employees from discrimination if, based on religious beliefs or moral convictions, they refuse to participate in child-mutilation procedures—including the use of puberty-blockers or cross-sex hormones—and/or raise an objection to a supervisor about participating in such procedures,” the new HHS guidance says.

At the start of Trump’s second term, the Department of Justice dropped four felony charges that it had filed against Dr. Ethan Haim, a surgeon who had completed his residency at Texas Children’s Hospital. Prosecutors said he violated HIPAA with “intent to cause malicious harm” when, in 2023, he evidently took confidential patient records pertaining to minors who were not under his care, under false pretenses, and then leaked the documents to the far-right press.

The hospital had publicly announced it would cease gender affirming therapies for trans patients in 2022. However, it was not illegal to provide this kind of care when Haim targeted the pediatric hospital. Haim self-identifies as a “whistleblower.”

This week, Haim took center stage at a Congressional hearing dedicated to bolstering legal protections for doctors who violate the law in the name of Trump’s anti-trans agenda. "I wouldn't want this to be done to anyone, not even liberals, even if they're the craziest communists ever," Haim said during the hearing. "There's no one in this country who should be falsely accused and the entire power of the federal government be brought down on them." (It is unclear what the false accusations in question are, as Haim fully admitted to leaking the documents.)

Prosecutors did not provide an explanation for dropping the charges, but Haim told the New York Times he believed that he had President Trump to thank for it. “He’s my man,” Haim said.

Trump has waged war on whistleblowers in almost every other circumstance—including by firing the head of the government watchdog agency established to protect them.