A collection of statements and responses published by both trans and queer organizations and medical and health care professional organizations after the publication of the Trump administration’s HHS (Health and Human Services) report on Gender Affirming Care for Youth.
The Trump report came out on May 1st. Here’s how it’s being talked about.
Key takeaways:
- The report is biased and has a goal of taking away gender affirming care.
- It is not evidence-based, nor is it a scientific report. This report ignores and misstates science and lies about gender affirming care.
- It is anonymous – no authors are listed.
- It didn’t find any harms of gender affirming care.
- It promotes conversion therapy, which is harmful. The government’s goal is to deny gender affirming care and require harmful and dangerous conversion therapy.
Medical Organizations React to the Report
The American Academy of Pediatrics
“This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” Dr. Kressly said in a statement. “As we have seen with immunizations, bypassing medical expertise and scientific evidence has real consequences for the health of America’s children. AAP was not consulted in the development of this report, yet our policy and intentions behind our recommendations were cited throughout in inaccurate and misleading ways. The report prioritizes opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence.”
The American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Physicians, the American Osteopathic Association, and the American Psychiatric Association issued a joint statement.
Our organizations, representing nearly 600,000 physicians and medical students, firmly believe the trusted relationship between a physician and their patient should never be jeopardized by the actions of policymakers, that physicians should not be criminalized or penalized for providing care and that medical standards of care and physician training and education must remain evidence-based and free from political interference.
Our organizations have consistently opposed any legislation, regulation, or executive action that interferes in the confidential relationship between a patient and their physician or undermines the provision of evidence-based standards of patient care and physician training and education. Patients must be able to discuss health issues with their trusted physician to determine together what care is best for them.
We reiterate that all patients must have access to evidence-based, comprehensive medical care, and that physicians must be able to practice medicine that is informed by their education, training, and experience without threat of criminalization. Politics should not get in the way of evidence-based care and a strong patient-physician relationship. We support our members and will continue to advocate for access to the full spectrum of evidence-based health care and medical education.”
Professional Organizations
WPATH and USPATH
(World Professional Association For Transgender Health and the United States Professional Organization For Transgender Health)
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the US Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) are deeply concerned about the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report released yesterday. This report misrepresents existing research and disregards the expertise of professionals who have been working with transgender and gender-diverse youth for decades. Transgender young people deserve healthcare that is informed by science, compassion, and respect. Gender-affirming care is backed by rigorous research, expert consensus, and patient-centered values. Studies consistently show its positive impact, including improved mental health and overall quality of life. The HHS report fails to meet established scientific standards. Authored anonymously, it relies on discredited narratives and selectively compiles prior systematic reviews, omitting critical findings from recent studies that support treatment interventions for appropriately identified individuals. Instead of conducting a new systematic review, the report dismisses multiple international clinical guidelines and disregards the prevailing medical consensus on gender-affirming care.
A4TE (Advocates for Trans Equality)
oday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released its review of trans healthcare, Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria – a document echoing the discredited Florida Board of Medicine review and the internationally rejected Cass Review. In response, Sinead Murano-Kinney, Health Policy Analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality, issued the following statement:
“This report, initiated by the Trump administration’s January 28 Executive Order, is a deeply ideological and politically motivated distortion of scientific evidence. It lacks the substantial time, rigorous and objective assessments, and strong methodological tools that literature reviews require, and it fails to maintain even a thin veneer of intellectual rigor or objectivity. Public health policy should be achieved through evidence-based constructions of policy, not policy-based constructions of evidence. Although it has become nakedly clear that scientific integrity is not valued by this administration.“This review is yet another step in setting the political stage to move away from the current gold standard of affirmative response to gender-diversity, to establish gender-identity change efforts, more commonly known as “conversion therapy” as the new standard despite such practices having been denounced by nearly every reputable medical and behavioral health organization including American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric, the United Nations, American Psychiatric Association, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Psychiatric Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and many others.
Trans and Allied Journalism on the HHS Report
Taken as a whole, the document is more legible as an extended opinion column than a scientific review of evidence, and in places where evidence is discussed it cribs extensively from the U.K.’s Cass Review. It makes a now-familiar case, plucked from the opinion pages, that something has gone wrong with gender medicine, and psychotherapy alone should be the default, perhaps only, treatment for trans young people. Experts disagree
At more than 400 pages, the document is poised to draw a wave of fact-checks and scientific rebuttals. The American Academy of Pediatrics has already issued a sharp condemnation, calling it “inaccurate,” “misleading,” and a distortion of “the current medical consensus.” This fact check won’t capture every falsehood in the report—there are hundreds—but it will examine some of its most egregious and harmful pseudoscientific claims.
Before delving into the document’s most egregious factual distortions, it’s worth emphasizing that it has no listed author and bears none of the hallmarks of scientific rigor. There is no evidence of peer review.
Erin in The Morning also published Roundup: Experts Condemn Trump Pseudoscientific Anti-Trans “Report” on 5/8/25 (not unlike this roundup!)
The agency states in its executive summary of the report that the document is not meant to provide clinical practice guidelines or issue legislative or policy recommendations. However, the report does imply that health care providers should refuse to offer gender-affirming care to adolescents and young adults on the basis that such care comes with the potential for risk — despite little evidence for that risk actually being found in the report….
Even when analyzing research that the administration deemed low-bias, the HHS found “sparse” to no evidence of harm from gender-affirming care. What’s more, the report frequently found evidence demonstrating the benefits of gender-affirming care — though it ultimately downplays those findings as not significant.
Available research on puberty blockers found high satisfaction ratings and low rates of regret. A systematic review of hormone replacement therapy described improved gender dysphoria and body satisfaction. Another found that hormone treatment leads to improved mental health. Two before-and-after studies reported reduced treatment needs or lower levels of suicidality and self-harm after hormone treatment. When measuring safety outcomes of hormone treatment, side effects did not have a major impact on treatment and complications were limited.
Transgender Report – this article also links to several mainstream media responses to the HHS report.
The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released a report on transgender healthcare, which has been widely criticized for its lack of scientific rigor and reliance on pseudoscience.
The report, commissioned under Trump’s executive order, promotes conversion therapy for transgender youth and redefines social transition as medical treatment. It also suggests that transgender healthcare should be judged based on employment status and romantic relationships rather than patient well-being.
Medical experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have condemned the report as misleading and inaccurate. It ignores established research showing the benefits of gender-affirming care and instead pushes an ideological agenda. The report also falsely claims that European countries are pulling back on transgender healthcare, despite recent medical guidelines in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland supporting gender-affirming care.
Last week, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, now led by conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., released a 409-page document about transgender health care. The document, which HHS is calling a “report,” mischaracterizes the state of transgender health care, pushes debunked theories, cites retracted studies, and recommends what amounts to conversion therapy for transgender youth under the sanitized name of “exploratory therapy.”
The result is a document that doesn’t protect kids. It endangers them. It doesn’t promote ethical medicine. It undermines it. And it doesn’t reflect a neutral, evidence-based view. It reflects a political movement that has spent the past five years trying to make trans existence seem like a problem to be solved, rather than a life to be supported.
Mainstream Journalism on the HHS Report
However, all the major medical organizations in the U.S. say studies show gender-affirming care for transgender youth leads to better mental health outcomes, including lower odds of depression and suicidality in the short term. The new HHS report claims there’s no association between gender dysphoria and suicide.
The report sharply contradicts guidance from the American Medical Association, which has urged states not to ban gender-affirming care for minors, saying that “empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”
HHS said its report, however, is not clinical guidance and does not make any policy recommendations. The report is also limited to children and does not address treatment for adults.
The report promoted psychotherapy as a “noninvasive” alternative, drawing fierce pushback from LGBTQ+ advocates who said the proposal amounted to “conversion therapy.”
Dr. Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the group was “deeply alarmed” by the report and suggested that it relied on “select perspectives and a narrow set of data.”
“This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” Kressly said in a statement….
A joint statement from major medical associations said Thursday that “the trusted relationship between a physician and their patient should never be jeopardized by the actions of policymakers, that physicians should not be criminalized or penalized for providing care and that medical standards of care and physician education training and education must remain evidence-based and free from political interference.”
The US HHS/Trump report has been widely compared to the UK’s Cass Report, which has also been criticized for misrepresenting the data surrounding trans youth healthcare.
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