HHS Sec. Kennedy Attempts To Stop Trans Youth Care In Hospitals Nationwide—Before New Federal Rules Take Effect

Like many of the Trump regime’s attempted powergrabs, this kind of piecemeal and disheveled rulemaking is enforced at least in part by fear and sheer uncertainty.

Gage Skidmore // Creative commons

The Trump Administration is once again beating its chest in its latest attempt to get providers of legal, evidence-based, gender-affirming care to bend the knee at his whim.

As Erin in the Morning previously reported, the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) hosted a press conference last week to unveil another wave of attacks targeting gender-affirming care and even clothing for transgender people. Much of the reporting focused on the long-awaited proposal from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). That effort conjured up a new right-wing buzzword, “sex-rejecting procedures,” and inserted it into proposed federal regulations.

The rules, which are currently undergoing a 60-day public comment and review period, declare that a hospital “must not perform sex-rejecting procedures on any child” in order to participate in Medicaid at all.

As the media frenzy fixated on the fallout, another document was also released by the HHS, which in tandem with the CMS proposal, appears to be an attempt to subvert checks and balances altogether when it comes to regulating medical care.

Titled “Safety, Effectiveness, and Professional Standards of Care for Sex-Rejecting Procedures on Children and Adolescents,” the 12-page memo purports to construct a legal and scientific basis for undermining trans people’s health care. It further threatens to withdraw federal funds from hospitals that potentially offer young trans people such treatments, including hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers.

Moreover, the government-issued standards of care takes aim at medical organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the Endocrine Society, both of which endorse the gold standards of evidence-based interventions for treating young people with gender dysphoria. This stands in stark contrast to Trump’s standards of care, which rely on pseudoscientific treatises like the Cass Review and Trump’s HHS Report on gender-affirming care for trans youth. (Neither WPATH nor the Endocrine Society replied to requests for comment from Erin in the Morning.)

In other words, the HHS memo is mobilizing the troops—but there are still ways to go before anyone can pull the trigger. Hospitals concerned about losing funding might capitulate anyways, as overcompliance with RFK’s conspiratorial and dangerous medical crazes have become a regular fixture of life under a medical surveillance state. (So too has institutional resistance—see, for example, Boston Children’s Hospital.)

If the new HHS initiative advances, it could become a formal notice of exclusion—a designation often called the “death penalty” for health care providers, usually reserved for institutions found to have committed serious crimes, such as Medicaid fraud or the illegal distribution of controlled substances.

“[A]lthough most providers can survive monetary penalties, a provider cannot survive if excluded from participating in the federal health programs of Medicare and Medicaid,” one industry compliance guide reads.

There is no federal law banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Like many of the Trump regime’s attempted powergrabs, this kind of piecemeal and disheveled rulemaking is enforced at least in part by fear and sheer uncertainty. Legal, medical, and advocacy groups are struggling to navigate these blows in real time.

“This declaration is an abuse of a policy document that is widely known to be intended for national public health emergencies and other crises that deem a coordinated, federal response,” said Khadijah M. Silver, JD/MPH, a Supervising Attorney for Civil Rights at Lawyers for Good Government. “Providers performing standard-of-care medicine that their patients need is not such an emergency—whether Sec. Kennedy agrees with it, personally, or not.”

A section from the “declaration” by the HHS on Dec. 18, 2025.

There are still hurdles that the Trump regime would have to clear in order to make this destruction of care a reality. Lawsuits can and likely will be filed across the country. Hospitals can choose to keep their doors open and fight the HHS in court. State attorneys general and civil rights groups can add this to their multiple ongoing legal battles against the regime on behalf of trans Americans and their doctors.

And even if the rule comes to pass, there will still be wholly private providers—although this will further segregate access to care, allowing it only for those who can afford it out-of-pocket. These rules could also be overturned by a subsequent president.

For now, however, RFK continues to round out the year with a full frontal assault on trans kids. The federal health official also recently made headlines for sending obscene and anatomically dubious poetry to a reporter forty years his junior; this is to say nothing of his bold and creative decision to take his grandkids swimming in sewer water.

“Doctors assume a solemn obligation to protect children,” RFK told the press conference last week. “We’re done with junk science driven by ideological pursuits.”