The Republican Party has re-upped its promise that a second-term President Trump would ban hormones and puberty blockers for trans youth at the federal level, along with implementing additional discriminatory measures, such as barring teachers from using the proper names and pronouns for trans students. Trump would likely enact these prohibitions through executive order, theoretically allowing him to bypass congressional approval for such nationwide actions.
On Friday, Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee hosted a press call to discuss Vice President Kamala Harris’ supposed “radical gender ideology,” according to Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke.
Trump has long made clear his stance on gender-affirming care; in February 2023, he issued his plan to combat “left-wing gender insanity,” pledging to implement a variety of anti-trans measures, including a proposed bill that would make “male” and “female,” as assigned at birth, the only legally recognized sexes in the United States, effectively erasing transgender identity at a federal level. Some state-level Republican lawmakers have already introduced legislation to that effect, with bills that aim to narrowly redefine “sex” based on reproductive characteristics. As the figurehead for the party, Trump has reiterated and amplified anti-trans policy positions throughout both the Republican primary and the ongoing general election.
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On Friday’s press call, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (NY-21) and former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson spoke alongside Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist who campaigns against “gender ideology,” and GOP National Press Secretary Anna Kelly, according to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, which listened in on the call.
Per the Enterprise’s reporting, Kelly said that if Trump were to be re-elected president, hospitals and healthcare providers that provide gender-affirming care to minors “will no longer meet federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare,” adding that Trump would “use all available authorities to stop transgender medical procedures and sex change surgeries on minors.”
Gender-affirming surgeries for minors are vanishingly rare, especially the procedures anachronistically known as “sex changes” — a term that usually refers to imply genital surgeries. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an international body of experts that writes the standards of care that are generally regarded as best practices for gender-affirming care, states that patients must be of the age of majority in order to undergo bottom surgery.
The agenda outlined on Friday’s press call seems to draw directly from Trump’s Agenda47; specifically, a page on his campaign website that outlines his “Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” In addition to stripping Medicaid and Medicare funding from facilities that provide gender-affirming care to youth, the page promises that Trump would “ask Congress to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures.”
Although the emphasis of Trump’s “Plan” appears to be on healthcare for youth, some in the GOP are using the same tactics to target adults receiving transition-related treatments through more sweeping restrictions on Medicaid and Medicare. According to the Movement Advancement Project, 10 states now have Medicaid policies on that specifically exclude coverage of gender-affirming care for people of all ages.
On the call, Kelly additionally stated that states and school districts “will be faced with potential civil rights violations for sex discrimination and the elimination of federal funding” if they suggest that students “can be trapped in the wrong body,” per the Enterprise. Kelly also reportedly said that the Trump administration would promote traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Although Trump has attempted to publicly distance himself from Project 2025 in the face of stark disapproval numbers for the far-right agenda, the proposals outlined on Friday’s call line up neatly with a Christian nationalist blueprint for American life. Project 2025 similarly promotes strictly defined heterosexual nuclear family structures and promises to cut federal funding to facilities that provide gender-affirming care to trans minors.
The call took place ahead of Trump’s headline appearance at the Moms for Liberty annual summit, a national conservative group that has quickly become one of the leading players in the movement to ban LGBTQ+ books from schools and strip away protections from trans students. At the summit, which took place in Washington D.C., Trump said that trans women should be banned from women’s sports, and that access to gender-affirming care should be restricted, according to the Associated Press.
Additionally, Trump used his time with Moms for Liberty to platform conspiratorial lies about the availability of gender-affirming care for minors. The former president posed an imaginary scenario in which “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.”
“The school decides what’s going to happen with your child,” Trump said, adding that “many of these childs 15 years later say ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’”
There are no documented cases of minors ever receiving gender-affirming “operations” at school.
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