Sarah Toce
President Donald J. Trump issued a broad ban on health care for transgender youth Tuesday, including denying coverage to children of federal employees, postal employees, and military service members.
The ban also threatens to cease federal funding for any health care institution providing this necessary medical care for transgender youth.
“The Trump administration’s disdain and animosity towards transgender people and other minorities appears to know no bounds. With today’s announcement the Trump administration seeks to target and discriminate towards some of the most vulnerable: transgender youth,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Senior Counsel and Health Care Strategist for Lambda Legal.
“In seeking to deny transgender youth the medically sound and well-established health care that they need, this administration could put thousands of vulnerable young lives at risk. It is an outrageous overreach of government power that reveals its cruel absolutism,” Gonzalez-Pagan added. Continuing, “This policy by the Trump administration is morally reprehensible and patently unlawful. The federal government – particularly, this administration – has no right to insert itself into conversations and decision-making that rightly belongs only to parents, their adolescent children, and their medical providers.”
Gonzalez-Pagan issued a stark warning for what’s to come.
“This broadside condemns transgender youth to extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering, and their parents to agonized futility in caring for their child — all while denying them access to the same medically recommended health care that is readily available to their cisgender peers,” Gonzalez-Pagan said. “And make no mistake: this administration will not stop with attacks on transgender youth. With its just proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military, we know this administration has all transgender people in its sights.”
Read about Lambda Legal’s earlier lawsuit, County of Santa Clara v. HHS, here.
