Hospitals Must Stand Up to Trump’s Tirade Against Gender Affirming Care

Author’s Hot Take:

If care is only prohibited for people under 19, that is still over 2 million people who are put in harm’s way because they can’t receive the correct treatment. 

At 18 years old, Americans in all 50 states can join the military, but cannot receive life-saving medical care if they are transgender. 

Since 2020, transgender youth have been facing a substantial uptick in restrictions to gender affirming care as part of the Republican Party’s descent into senility. Republican controlled states have significantly restricted access to gender affirming care for transgender youth, preventing even young people who have the consent of their parents and their doctor from receiving the care they need. 

All of this is being done under the guise of “protecting” young people from making a “big mistake,” but in reality, their conduct is not only putting transgender kids in danger by restricting their medical options.

 It is also starting to affect everyone else receiving medical care. 

The Republican controlled federal government has made it their mission to prevent hospitals in Democrat controlled states from providing gender affirming care to its patients, even if that means extorting medical institutions by threatening to withhold their federal funds. Many have caved into Trump’s demands and are now refusing to provide medically sanctioned care to minors. The ones that haven’t caved yet risk losing the ability to care for any of their patients.

It’s outrageous that hospitals are being put in this position to begin with. Everyone from janitors to doctors to nurses and aids work tirelessly to provide a healing and comforting experience for the sick and injured. A loss of federal funding would almost certainly result in a collapse of our healthcare system. Mass firings, delays in medical research, a shortage of operating equipment, longer hospital wait times, and a higher mortality rate would follow. With those points in mind, it makes sense why many hospitals are choosing to cut off a hand to save their body, so to speak. They want to ensure the care continues. 

At the same time though, the hospitals are making the wrong choice. 

Doctors begin their medical careers by taking the Hippocratic oath, which is a promise to uphold ethical standards and best practice in medicine. This is done to maintain medical integrity, an important element of any successful patient-physician relationship. 

Patients must be sure they are being given the best care possible.

Likewise, doctors must be confident in their medical knowledge and treatments they provide. 

The underlying danger to integrity is dishonesty, exactly what we [the people] are getting from the Trump administration on the subject of gender affirming care. Whether it be false studies, fear mongering, or plain transphobia, the Trump administration’s increasing rhetoric against healthcare is damaging the integrity of medicine. Transgender youth and their families are unsure whether or not they are receiving the best care possible, and doctors are afraid to provide the best care out of fear of government retaliation. So long as medical dishonesty is considered the law of the land, medical integrity will remain damaged. 

By making the choice to concede to Trump’s demands and restrict legitimate, lifesaving care, hospitals are damaging the integrity of medicine. Not only are they failing transgender youth by causing irreversible harm through the withholding of medical care. They are failing everyone else by caving to dishonest medicine. None of the individuals who wrote bills prohibiting transgender medical care are doctors, and no legitimate medical research was consulted during the process. What this demonstrates to people is that, so long as the people in power threaten medicine; the institutions that provide it will cave. That is not how medical integrity works.

This isn’t just about medical integrity, it is also about the marginalization of an entire group of people for – what? There is only one word that can describe these actions. Wrong. It is wrong to prohibit a class of people from their constitutional guarantees to life and liberty. It is especially wrong to knowingly restrict medicine from people who need it and are attempting to access it. 

What hospitals need to do is take a stand against Trump by defending medical integrity and reinstating medical care to transgender youth. Their collective response should be inclusive of other groups whose medical autonomy has been stripped, such as members of the POC community, pregnant persons, and homeless individuals. The degradation of medical integrity has significantly affected them as well. 

As for the threats to withhold federal funding from hospitals, let’s play the FAFO card. If Trump wants to indiscriminately take away healthcare from the majority of the US population over dishonest medicine, let him. He’ll find out pretty quickly that people don’t like having their healthcare messed with.