Children’s Hospital Colorado has ceased offering puberty blockers and hormonal treatment to transgender youth because of an executive order from President Donald Trump that threatened its federal funding.
A statement from the hospital on Wednesday morning said it could only offer behavioral health services and “supportive care” to transgender patients. Supportive care could include meeting with social workers, registered dieticians and therapists, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
The statement said the hospital would create an individualized care plan for patients already receiving medication, or who would otherwise be eligible to receive hormones or puberty blockers, but didn’t specify what that plan might include.
A Trump executive order said health care providers that offered gender-affirming medication or surgery to patients under 19 could lose federal funding, including payments for care to patients covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
In 2023, the most recent year with data, Medicaid accounted for about 27% of revenue at Children’s Aurora campus and 22% at its Colorado Springs hospital.
“We care deeply about our gender-diverse patients and their families, and we will carefully and responsibly support them as we evolve the model of care we offer,” the hospital’s statement said. “We empathize with the patients, families and team members who have shown unwavering dedication and commitment to supporting gender-diverse patients in embracing their true selves.”
Denver Health and UCHealth announced last week that they would raise the minimum age to receive gender-affirming care to 19, in compliance with the executive order. Denver Health said it was halting surgeries, but has not addressed the use of medications.
Hospitals around the country have announced similar steps as they sort what the executive order will mean.
Children’s Hospital Colorado stopped offering gender-affirming chest surgeries to young adult patients in 2023 and referred them to University of Colorado Hospital. Children’s never performed gender-affirming surgery on patients under 18.
Relatively few children receive gender-affirming medication. A recent study examining records of about 5 million patients between 8 and 17 found just over 900 kids with a gender-related diagnosis received puberty blockers at some point during a five-year period, and under 2,000 received hormones.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser released a statement saying that federal agencies won’t be able to cut funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care under a U.S. Department of Justice notice filed after a federal court ordered the administration to unfreeze grant funding last week. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget briefly ordered a halt to all federal grants, before courts forbade it from enforcing that.
The Justice Department notice said that federal agencies can’t pause or halt funding on basis of Trump’s executive order, Weiser’s statement said. It said that he would continue to enforce laws related to access to care, but didn’t specify if he would prosecute hospitals that paused gender-affirming services because of the executive order.
“This means that federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care continues to be available, irrespective of the recent executive order,” it said.
Weiser didn’t go as far New York’s attorney general, who said that denying medically necessary care to transgender people could constitute discrimination under state law.
A parent of a teenager receiving gender-affirming care at Children’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their child’s privacy, called the move to halt treatment with medications “devastating,” and said he would like to see state officials push back.
“It’s tragic that Children’s Hospital is sacrificing trans teens to the Trump administration’s bigotry,” he said.
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