Many Colorado Trans Youth Stranded After Denver Health, CHCO Withdraw Care

For the second time in as many years, many young trans Coloradans have suddenly lost access to life-saving care.

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It’s a new year but a familiar refrain for Colorado’s transgender youth. For the second time in a row, trans minors seeking gender-affirming care at Denver Health and Children’s Hospital Colorado have rung in the new year with a devastating tug-of-war over their life-saving medical treatments.

On one side sits science-based standards of care. On the other is a political regime hellbent on terrorizing trans children, their families, and their doctors; and some of Colorado’s premiere health care institutions appear to be capitulating to the latter. Last week, both hospitals announced that they would close their doors to transgender minors seeking puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and/or gender-affirming surgery.

“This is the latest in several years of what we’d call ‘pre-compliance’ or ‘overcompliance’— providers feeling threatened into stopping care even before they legally have to,” said Adam Polaski, communications director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, in a statement to Erin in the Morning.

It is not illegal to provide transgender youth with gender-affirming care in Colorado, but that hasn’t stopped the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Donald Trump from targeting the practice anyway. The White House and its underlings have threatened to strip hospitals of critical funding via Medicaid and Medicare if they provide such care to trans kids in need.

“These closures will surely be a significant blow to access and I don’t want to minimize that,” Polaski said. “We also know that there are providers all over the country doubling down on keeping their doors open, staffing up, expanding hours.”

Implicit in Trump’s threats are costly and draining legal battles. But in abandoning the duty to provide equal access to care for everyone, cisgender and transgender patients alike, these same health systems put untold lives at risk.

Denver Health, for its part, branded the care stoppage as “necessary.” Children’s Colorado has painted it as the inevitable product of threats wielded by the HHS, arguing that keeping its gender clinic doors open to trans youth would be “risking care for hundreds of thousands of children.”

Spokespersons for the hospitals emphasized that psychiatric care will continue, but for many trans youth, that simply isn’t enough. Such Faustian bargains tend to accrue interest. If trans kids’ care is deemed acceptable collateral—even in the interim as court proceedings play out—it begs the question of who will be on the chopping block next.

Denver Health and Children’s Hospital Colorado made headlines in February last year under similar circumstances. They stopped certain kinds of gender-affirming care for trans youth after Trump threatened to pull federal funding. However, the hospitals reinstated such care following favorable court proceedings.

This time around, the programs shuttered following a Dec. 30 tweet from Mike Stuart, the general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He says he “referred” the Children’s Hospital Colorado “for investigation” at the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG)—this despite the fact that state law protects if not compels hospitals to provide equal access to both cisgender and trans people’s care.

The office usually focuses on investigating claims of fraud and professional misconduct, but like many government bureaucracies, the Trump regime has turned the oversight body into a political spectacle in hopes of drumming vitriol from its base and inciting fear from its political enemies—in this case, transgender children.

Rachel See, who spent over a decade as a senior attorney in the federal government in senior enforcement and management roles, told Erin in the Morning that Stuart’s social media declaration was “unusual,” but that general counsel does not determine the results of an investigation. At the same time, Trump has been known to oust Inspectors General whose findings don’t adhere to his agenda.

The bottom line: “This is the Trump Administration, through HHS, opening up yet another front in its campaign against trans healthcare,” See said. “It is another shot that is intended to—and likely will—make institutional healthcare providers feel that providing trans healthcare puts them at risk, legally.”

Private clinics as well as initiatives like the Trans Youth Emergency Project have cropped up in hopes of softening the blow of such care cuts, but inevitably, diminishing treatment options from Colorado’s largest providers is bound to see many trans kids, especially those from low-income families, fall through systemic cracks.

These capitulations mark a grave turning point for a state once touted as a progressive “haven” for trans youth—in a region of the country otherwise hostile towards their existence.

In December, the HHS announced a proposed rule change to defund hospitals that “perform sex-rejecting procedures” on minors, the latest rhetorical creation of the same party that arbitrarily redefines sex and gender on a routine basis.

“The idea that Robert Kennedy and Dr. Oz, who have no medical expertise and have been discredited, are questioning and condemning the judgment of real medical providers and families is disgusting,” said Mardi Moore, chief executive officer at Rocky Mountain Equality, when news of that proposal first broke.

“They don’t know what they are talking about.”