This is important to be precise about: no federal funding has actually been cut. What happened here is preemptive compliance, not enforcement.
For the Trump administration to legally do what they’re threatening, they would have to clear multiple hurdles they haven’t even started climbing yet: pass new law or issue a valid CMS rule through formal notice-and-comment, survive Administrative Procedure Act review, avoid unconstitutional coercion under the Spending Clause (you can’t threaten an entire hospital system’s funding over a narrow category of care), provide due process to each institution, and then win prolonged federal litigation against hospitals and states. That’s months or years, not a memo and a scare tactic.
None of that has happened. Not once. There is no precedent for CMS successfully pulling Medicare/Medicaid funding from a hospital for providing gender-affirming care.
Mary Bridge didn’t lose a legal fight — they chose not to have one. Understandable from a risk-averse executive perspective, maybe, but not neutral. Every institution that folds early teaches the federal government that intimidation works without courts, rules, or accountability.
That’s the danger here. If trans kids are acceptable collateral today, the list of “politically inconvenient” care that gets quietly dropped tomorrow only grows.
Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital should be ashamed.
A children’s hospital — a place that exists to protect the most vulnerable — chose to abandon transgender kids because politicians threatened its funding.
That’s not “difficult decision-making.” That’s moral collapse.
Let’s call this what it is: a hospital caving to political blackmail and sacrificing a small, already marginalized group of children to protect its bottom line.
Trans youth didn’t suddenly stop needing care. Doctors didn’t suddenly decide treatment was unsafe.
The only thing that changed was political pressure — and Mary Bridge decided vulnerable kids were expendable.
Every time a powerful institution folds like this, it tells trans young people: you are too controversial to deserve healthcare. It tells families: your child’s wellbeing comes second to our financial comfort.
That is cruelty, plain and simple.
Medical care should be guided by science, ethics, and patient need — not by fear of retaliation from politicians waging culture wars.
When hospitals start picking which children are worth defending, they stop being healthcare institutions and start being political actors.
Mary Bridge didn’t protect kids. It protected itself. And people will remember that.
Trans youth deserve care, dignity, and doctors who don’t disappear the moment things get politically uncomfortable.
When will these institutions, organizations, universities, and legal entities learn that the only way to stop this Bullshit is to stand up the this bully and say no more.
I hate to say it, but we will likely need to keep a body count of how many kids will suicide due to the hateful, fascist, and life-denying actions of the current U.S. regime. That, or how many will need to flee the U.S. for other countries who affirm life and the rights to bodily autonomy.
The blackmail tactics of the current U.S. regime to kill, abduct, deport, vilify, and track anyone who is not white, cis-male, patriarchal, evangelical, and hate-filled, will go down in history as the most abhorrent and hideous U.S. government in history (as long as there still is a United States). And yes, the U.S. is and always has been a despicable empire, inflicting its will upon the world and deposing governments working to help their people in favor of dictatorships. The difference now is that it is waging war on its own citizens, which is how empires in the past have all fallen.
As the care coordinator for this clinic I can tell you this is brutal. We were not even consulted regarding the medical impact of cutting off care so quickly, and now we have one week (through tomorrow) to try to reach everyone and provide options and 6-mo refills. Rest assured we have been fighting the execs as best we could this whole past year and our hearts are broken.
Aowen, thank you and the rest of the clinic staff for fighting for our kids and doing as much as you can for us through this horrendous, ridiculous, cruel situation.
This entire population of White Americans are as weak as WATER! And Yes, I’m Talking to You Fence Sitting DipShits that wouldn’t Vote for a Black Woman who was the right choice but you can’t bring yourself to put any Woman in the White House!! You would rather be enslaved by this Tyrannical Regime of Hate and live in Your White Privileged Bubble than feel uncomfortable with confronting the True Enemies of America…Donald Trump and his Corporate Oligarchs!! AMERICANS, We outnumber them by the MILLIONS!! They Are Our True Enemies! WAKE THE FUCK UP!! DENY,DEFUND AND DEPOSE The MAGA CULT!!! END THE TYRANTS RULE NOW!!!😈🔥😈🔥😈🔥
Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego made a similar decision a couple weeks ago. My friends and their trans son are scrambling for other options. I'm wondering when they're going to start coming after adult care too. I have a small stockpile of hormones but it ain't much. White liberals have really shown their asses in the past year and I'm over it. They don't want justice. They want order. And they don't care who they have to sacrifice to get it.
The Republican party has no policy platform except domination and subjugation. No one would vote for that, hence the twin shibboleths of immigrants and transgender people destroying America. They can't convince the brutal and the ignorant to permanently enslave themselves as technofeudal serfs without our blood; hence operationalized xenophobia and Trans eradication.
We might survive this but fewer than 8% of the Jews live in Europe today as compared to the populations in 1932...and that was after fifty years of pogroms and immigration had already reduced that population by 30%. I question what survival would look like in an equivalent 21st century context for we Trans and gender expansive queer folk in MAGAmerica today.
Hope is mission critical but we can't punish ourselves for finding hope to be an elusive and ethereal goal just now and at this very minute. I am angry but I reserve most of my anger not for the MAGANazi goosesteppers but for the majority in the middle sitting on their asses as this happens to us because sure as shit stinks, after we're gone they're all going to want to wear pink blue white ribbons on every November 20th and tearfully cry "Never again! We declare an end to genocide! No one will ever again be exterminated like those people {all, ALL the others before them for whom we all ALSO CRIED "NEVER AGAIN}!
They could stop this TODAY if they wanted but Schumer and Jeffries, mainstream and moderate Dems, and the Independents (closet Republicans sufficiently self aware to find it too distasteful to call themselves GOP these days with Bovino and Miller openly SS cosplaying) could be bothered to stand up for us queers but they god-damned won't do it until it's too late.
If then. Big "IF".
Hope is mission critical.
I'm still reaching for it and they can kill me but they can't break me.
If all these places keep cutting care I don’t see why trans folks can’t self fund collectively this care through a privately created clinic if we all threw in a few dollars a month we could probably fund the care for all of the trans kids in the US including even the medications. A few volunteers creating online clinics could probably make it work.
Just something I’ve been thinking about. If we create our own system they would have to go through more difficult means to stop our care
This is important to be precise about: no federal funding has actually been cut. What happened here is preemptive compliance, not enforcement.
For the Trump administration to legally do what they’re threatening, they would have to clear multiple hurdles they haven’t even started climbing yet: pass new law or issue a valid CMS rule through formal notice-and-comment, survive Administrative Procedure Act review, avoid unconstitutional coercion under the Spending Clause (you can’t threaten an entire hospital system’s funding over a narrow category of care), provide due process to each institution, and then win prolonged federal litigation against hospitals and states. That’s months or years, not a memo and a scare tactic.
None of that has happened. Not once. There is no precedent for CMS successfully pulling Medicare/Medicaid funding from a hospital for providing gender-affirming care.
Mary Bridge didn’t lose a legal fight — they chose not to have one. Understandable from a risk-averse executive perspective, maybe, but not neutral. Every institution that folds early teaches the federal government that intimidation works without courts, rules, or accountability.
That’s the danger here. If trans kids are acceptable collateral today, the list of “politically inconvenient” care that gets quietly dropped tomorrow only grows.
This literally makes me nauseous. I don’t understand how people can just turn their backs on the most vulnerable youth of this country.
Another institution turns chickenshit
Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital should be ashamed.
A children’s hospital — a place that exists to protect the most vulnerable — chose to abandon transgender kids because politicians threatened its funding.
That’s not “difficult decision-making.” That’s moral collapse.
Let’s call this what it is: a hospital caving to political blackmail and sacrificing a small, already marginalized group of children to protect its bottom line.
Trans youth didn’t suddenly stop needing care. Doctors didn’t suddenly decide treatment was unsafe.
The only thing that changed was political pressure — and Mary Bridge decided vulnerable kids were expendable.
Every time a powerful institution folds like this, it tells trans young people: you are too controversial to deserve healthcare. It tells families: your child’s wellbeing comes second to our financial comfort.
That is cruelty, plain and simple.
Medical care should be guided by science, ethics, and patient need — not by fear of retaliation from politicians waging culture wars.
When hospitals start picking which children are worth defending, they stop being healthcare institutions and start being political actors.
Mary Bridge didn’t protect kids. It protected itself. And people will remember that.
Trans youth deserve care, dignity, and doctors who don’t disappear the moment things get politically uncomfortable.
When will these institutions, organizations, universities, and legal entities learn that the only way to stop this Bullshit is to stand up the this bully and say no more.
“That’s absolutely false. No one is safe until everybody is.” Absolutely true. Thank you for the reporting, S Baum.
I hate to say it, but we will likely need to keep a body count of how many kids will suicide due to the hateful, fascist, and life-denying actions of the current U.S. regime. That, or how many will need to flee the U.S. for other countries who affirm life and the rights to bodily autonomy.
The blackmail tactics of the current U.S. regime to kill, abduct, deport, vilify, and track anyone who is not white, cis-male, patriarchal, evangelical, and hate-filled, will go down in history as the most abhorrent and hideous U.S. government in history (as long as there still is a United States). And yes, the U.S. is and always has been a despicable empire, inflicting its will upon the world and deposing governments working to help their people in favor of dictatorships. The difference now is that it is waging war on its own citizens, which is how empires in the past have all fallen.
As the care coordinator for this clinic I can tell you this is brutal. We were not even consulted regarding the medical impact of cutting off care so quickly, and now we have one week (through tomorrow) to try to reach everyone and provide options and 6-mo refills. Rest assured we have been fighting the execs as best we could this whole past year and our hearts are broken.
Aowen, thank you and the rest of the clinic staff for fighting for our kids and doing as much as you can for us through this horrendous, ridiculous, cruel situation.
This entire population of White Americans are as weak as WATER! And Yes, I’m Talking to You Fence Sitting DipShits that wouldn’t Vote for a Black Woman who was the right choice but you can’t bring yourself to put any Woman in the White House!! You would rather be enslaved by this Tyrannical Regime of Hate and live in Your White Privileged Bubble than feel uncomfortable with confronting the True Enemies of America…Donald Trump and his Corporate Oligarchs!! AMERICANS, We outnumber them by the MILLIONS!! They Are Our True Enemies! WAKE THE FUCK UP!! DENY,DEFUND AND DEPOSE The MAGA CULT!!! END THE TYRANTS RULE NOW!!!😈🔥😈🔥😈🔥
Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego made a similar decision a couple weeks ago. My friends and their trans son are scrambling for other options. I'm wondering when they're going to start coming after adult care too. I have a small stockpile of hormones but it ain't much. White liberals have really shown their asses in the past year and I'm over it. They don't want justice. They want order. And they don't care who they have to sacrifice to get it.
“We recognize how important this care is to our gender health clinic patients and have a sense of the impact this will have on you and your family,”
Empty words, if they actually cared about the impact they'd fight the administration as other institutions have successfully done.
The Republican party has no policy platform except domination and subjugation. No one would vote for that, hence the twin shibboleths of immigrants and transgender people destroying America. They can't convince the brutal and the ignorant to permanently enslave themselves as technofeudal serfs without our blood; hence operationalized xenophobia and Trans eradication.
We might survive this but fewer than 8% of the Jews live in Europe today as compared to the populations in 1932...and that was after fifty years of pogroms and immigration had already reduced that population by 30%. I question what survival would look like in an equivalent 21st century context for we Trans and gender expansive queer folk in MAGAmerica today.
Hope is mission critical but we can't punish ourselves for finding hope to be an elusive and ethereal goal just now and at this very minute. I am angry but I reserve most of my anger not for the MAGANazi goosesteppers but for the majority in the middle sitting on their asses as this happens to us because sure as shit stinks, after we're gone they're all going to want to wear pink blue white ribbons on every November 20th and tearfully cry "Never again! We declare an end to genocide! No one will ever again be exterminated like those people {all, ALL the others before them for whom we all ALSO CRIED "NEVER AGAIN}!
They could stop this TODAY if they wanted but Schumer and Jeffries, mainstream and moderate Dems, and the Independents (closet Republicans sufficiently self aware to find it too distasteful to call themselves GOP these days with Bovino and Miller openly SS cosplaying) could be bothered to stand up for us queers but they god-damned won't do it until it's too late.
If then. Big "IF".
Hope is mission critical.
I'm still reaching for it and they can kill me but they can't break me.
If all these places keep cutting care I don’t see why trans folks can’t self fund collectively this care through a privately created clinic if we all threw in a few dollars a month we could probably fund the care for all of the trans kids in the US including even the medications. A few volunteers creating online clinics could probably make it work.
Just something I’ve been thinking about. If we create our own system they would have to go through more difficult means to stop our care