The Blue-State Hospitals Carrying Out Trump's Anti-Trans Agenda

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://newrepublic.com/article/198890/blue-state-hospitals-trump-anti-trans-agenda

Gender-affirming care is not against the law in Pennsylvania. So why have staff at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center been told they could go to jail for providing it? As of June 30, at UPMC, one of the state’s largest hospital systems, young trans people can no longer be prescribed hormone therapy and puberty blockers, nor are they able to access gender-affirming surgeries. The health care workers who serve trans adolescents across UPMC are angry and heartbroken, two behavioral health therapists at a UPMC center told me this week. If providers continued medical transition care for anyone under 19, Katherine Anderson and Kailey Andrew explained, management said they could be charged with a felony, lose their medical licenses, and serve 10 years in prison. Even if therapists were to refer their clients to providers outside UPMC for gender-affirming care, Anderson said, management claimed that “we could be charged with aiding and abetting a felony.” Hospital workers were also told that if they were prosecuted, UPMC would not defend them, according to the two staffers. But when they repeatedly asked management what law they would be breaking, Anderson said, they were given “really vague answers.”

Some weeks later, on July 25, the White House issued a strange and stomach-churning press release, taking credit for ending what the memo called “child mutilation” in the United States. “For years, politicians have promised to end the barbaric, pseudoscientific practice,” it proclaimed, “but President Trump is the only one who has actually delivered.” Thanks to Trump, the press release said, gender-affirming surgeries for youth were no longer offered at six hospitals and health centers. Trump also took credit for ending gender-affirming care entirely at 15 hospitals and health centers.

By then, nearly 500 hundred UPMC staff had signed an open letter to hospital leadership, enraged that they were being asked to abandon their young trans patients and demanding that the hospital reverse its ban. The UPMC staff letter argued that “directives” such as Trump’s January 28 executive order, “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” as well as the attorney general’s follow-up memo in April, are “aimed at terrorizing medical institutions and providers, but they do not change any existing laws.” Hospital higher-ups may say they are only trying to work within “the law,” but, as the staff letter emphasized, “Gender affirming care is legal in Pennsylvania!”

The same is true of the other states where Trump has claimed credit for ending gender-affirming care at specialized adolescent programs: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia. The decisions of hospitals in these states to deny care were not in response to any action by Congress, nor were they required by the recent Supreme Court decision on gender-affirming care, which will make it easier for states with bans to survive future legal challenges, while leaving the door open to further discrimination in health care.

[Solly Mack]

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