Reported FBI Probe Targets Trans-Affirming Care Providers—For Procedure They Don’t Do
Unconfirmed reports of an FBI probe in pediatric hospitals serving trans youth leaves parents, doctors and transgender youth in a suspended state of terror. That’s by design.
Right-wing media has been teeming with an eye-catching headline. As Fox News put it: “FBI launches probes into 3 children's hospitals for alleged genital mutilation of minors.”
The news comes from a single anonymous source; the FBI did not confirm or deny the investigation, and at least one of the three hospitals said it had not received any notification of such an investigation. This isn’t wholly abnormal for FBI investigations, one attorney told Erin in the Morning—the FBI often does not disclose the status of ongoing probes lest it poses a risk to the outcome.
But the weaponization of federal laws against female genital mutilation, also known in human rights spaces as FGM, has been on the horizon since at least the start of the second Trump Administration, when he issued an executive order directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to “prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation” and labeled all gender-affirming care “chemical and surgical mutilation.”
It is not immediately clear why these gender clinics—at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHC), and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH)—were targeted, but it is noteworthy that, until its recently-announced closure, the CHLA clinic was among the largest gender-affirming care providers in the country. Meanwhile, BCH hosts the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program ever established in the United States. On rare occasions, trans people under the age of 18 may receive a form of “bottom surgery,” but even before Trump’s renewed regime, many clinics didn’t offer it to that age group.
But that doesn’t really matter anyway. The purported investigations, presumably tied to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s April 2025 memo calling trans-affirming care “radical gender experimentation” as well Trump’s anti-trans EOs, are wholly bastardizing the term “female genital mutilation”—a very real phenomenon impacting women and girls worldwide with established, globally-recognized definitions.
Even the federal statute Trump seeks to wield clearly states that FGM is defined explicitly as a “non-medical procedure,” whereas trans-affirming health care is an evidence-based best practice—and the surgical maneuvers it entails are different than FGM procedures.
Even if such investigations lead to no convictions, however, they pose an active danger to health care providers and families of trans kids, stoking fear and threats of violence. Just last week, BCH evacuated due to a bomb threat, which would not be the first time this happened in relation to the facility’s offering of trans-affirming care.
Meanwhile, the GOP has wholly endorsed intersex genital mutilation, or IGM, which constitutes a wide range of non-consensual, irreversible and potentially sterilizing surgical interventions.
Such a probe may also be a preemptive strike. Earlier this month, the U.S. House tried to criminalize consensual gender-affirming care for transgender youth, courtesy of a bill introduced by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. “It disingenuously includes gender-affirming care alongside FGM under a new category of ‘genital or bodily mutilation,’ then stating that ‘it is not a violation’ if ‘genital or bodily mutilation’ is performed on a minor with an intersex variation, reads a press release from Advocates for Trans Equality. “The bill would also ban gender-affirming hormone therapy and puberty-pausing medication, which the bill misleadingly refers to as ‘chemical castration of a minor.’”
In that same statement, Sylvan Fraser Anthony—who serves as the Legal and Policy Director at interACT, an advocacy organization for the rights of intersex youth—denounced the blatant double standard.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather force a clitoral reduction on an intersex 6-month-old than allow a transgender adolescent to get a prescription for puberty-pausing medication,” they said. “This is cruel, outlandish, and unacceptable, but is entirely on-brand for far-right policymakers who have proven their main priority is coercing people into conformity with narrow and regressive ideas of how people are allowed to live their lives. From the reproductive healthcare context to the freedom of trans and intersex people to live authentically, their playbook is taking away people’s autonomy over their own bodies and medical decisions, not ‘protecting’ anyone.”
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Sylvan Fraser Anthony nails it: "conformity" is the administration's goal. MAGA wants a country whose citizenry is entirely white, patriarchal, heteronormative, Christian, and english-speaking.
The article cited for the statement about people under age 18 receiving genital surgery only rarely does not actually provide data to support that statement. The article used the age category 12-18 as the lowest grouping, meaning you can’t tell how many people under 18 are receiving this type of surgery. I didn’t think *anyone* under 18 was allowed to receive this type of surgery since that goes against WPATH guidelines.