When the Los Angeles children’s hospital told thousands of patients for the first time he closed his pediatric genre clinic last month, Jesse Thorn was upset but confident that he could quickly find a new team of local care for his children.
But when the Center for Transyouth Health and Development officially closed its doors on Tuesday, the father of three children planned to flee the country.
“They are targeting who they can,” said Thorn. “”[I’m afraid] The police will show up at my door because I took my child to see his doctor. »»
Until this week, Children’s was among the largest and oldest pediatric gender clinics in the United States – and one of the few providing puberty blockers, hormones and surgical procedures for young trans insurance.
The renowned program closes indicates a wider detangling in the availability of care across the country, experts said. This includes former security shelters such as California, New York and Illinois, where the laws of states protecting trans-specific health care collapsed under legal pressure and the torsion of bureaucratic arms by the Trump administration.
Last week, medicine at the University of Chicago and National children In DC, they announced that they will end or make a scale considerably for the return services for young Trans, following similar measures by Stanford Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Children’s Hospital of Orange.
“There is a rapid collapse in the provision of this care in the Blue States,” said Alejandra Carabalo, lawyer for civil rights and legal instructor at Harvard. “At the end of 2025, most care will be effectively prohibited.”
Some parents of Los Angeles say they fear that the Ministry of Justice uses private medical data assigned to appear in the largest pediatric safety hospital to take their children to take away.
“It is absolutely terrifying,” said Maxine, the mother of a patient in the children’s hospital, who refused to give him his family name for fear of attacks against his son.
“I am very afraid that the DoJ and this acting attorney come after parents and use the female law of genital mutilation … to continue parents and separate myself from my child,” she said.
On July 9, Atty. General Pam Bondi announced that the Ministry of Justice made the assignment of the medical records of patients of more than 20 doctors and clinics, the last in a cavalcade of legal and technical maneuvers against suppliers who care about young trans.
“Health professionals and organizations that have mutilated children at the service of a distorted ideology will be held responsible by this Ministry of Justice,” Bondi said in a press release announcing this decision.
Children would not say if he had been assigned to appear or he had submitted sensitive files to the government’s request.
The Ministry of Justice was already investigating pediatric specialists for a litany of alleged crimes, deceptive trade practices for the invoicing of fraud. Federal health agencies are committed to retaining funding from institutions that continue to provide affirmative care.
“These threats are no longer theoretical,” wrote the managers of the children’s hospital to the staff of an internal email announcing the closure on June 12. “”[They are] threatening our ability to serve the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on the CHLA for living care. »»
Defenders say that sexist affirmative care is also wild. They indicate statistics – challenged by the federal government and certain experts – showing high suicide rates among young people.
In June, the decision to close the clinic was largely convicted. The defenders said that the children’s hospital had “thrown it on the bus on the bus” in defiance of the law of the state.
Can be saying that now.
“You can see children with leukemia cut off from their chemotherapy unless these hospitals are constantly providing care for trans persons,” said Caraballo. “If one of the largest children’s hospitals in the country could not bear this burden, I don’t see many others to do it.”
Others have accepted.
“No matter what California or any other state has done to say:” We want to protect these children “, unless they can write checks equal to the amount of lost money, [programs close]”Said Dara E. Purvis, law professor at Temple University.
So far, the Trump administration has painted parents as victims of “radical gender ideology”.
Some experts have warned that the government is tightening the screws of doctors and hospitals, Trans adolescents and their families are likely to look for hormones outside the medical system, including through gray market channels.
“We saw it with abortion,” said Caraballo. “People will get there the way they can.”
There are fears that families can face prosecution for continuing to seek medication, similar to the accusations deposited against mothers who have obtained abortion pills for their adolescents.
“We are working with the Congress on existing criminal laws linked to female genital mutilation to protect children more solidly,” said chief of staff to the Ministry of Justice, Chad Mizelle, during a workshop in the Federal Trade Commission entitled “The dangers of” care affirming the sexes “for minors”.
“We use all the tools of the Ministry of Justice to resolve this problem,” said Mizelle.
For the moment, dozens of hospitals from California are still providing affirmative care, including hormone therapy and surgical procedures.
But the list changes almost day by day.
“Even the programs that may have operated a month ago are not working now,” said Terra Russell-Slavin, head of the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “There are a lot of concerns at the very idea of being public about the supply of care because these agencies become targets.”
With the medical care on which their children have under threat and few promised state protections, some families do not know what the coming months will bring.
For a father of the County of Orange, who asked not to be appointed for fear of reprisals against his trans son, future travel plans are suddenly in danger.
He said that around half of his son’s identity documents correspond to his sex, and they were warned not to try to change the others.
“He will not be able to leave the country because he cannot get a matching passport,” said the father.
For Maxine, Los Angeles’ mother, balanced the trivial with existential is a daily tension.
“My child lives just their lives. They want to go to concerts, they want to go back to school – they don’t know all of this happens,” said the mother. “You have to feel this intense fear while maintaining a normal spare for everyone.”
