Dive Brief:
- The Federal Trade Commission is seeking information about “false or unsupported claims” made by medical professionals about gender-affirming care for minors, including whether providers fail to adequately disclose risks of services. The agency said it could use the comments to bring enforcement actions against medical professionals.
- The FTC is the latest agency to increase pressure on providers of youth gender-affirming care, after the Trump administration issued an executive order in January seeking to end federal funding for the services. The Justice Department, HHS and CMS have likewise been deployed to scrutinize services and crack down on treatments.
- Consumers will have until Sept. 26 to submit testimony to the FTC about how they have been exposed to “false or unsupported claims” about gender-affirming care, including advertisements and empirical research.
Dive Insight:
Since taking office, President Trump has been steadily ramping up pressure on providers of gender-affirming care for minors, claiming that the care is akin to genital mutilation. This stance is in opposition to every major medical association, who endorse the treatment, according to an analysis by GLAAD, an LGBTQ rights organization.
Trump issued an executive order in January instructing federal agencies to take all appropriate action to limit gender-affirming medical treatments for minors. Since then, the administration has tasked the DOJ with investigating parties that enable gender-affirming care for minors, set up a website for concerned parties to act as whistleblowers, cut hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal grants for transgender youth services and rolled back previously established treatment guidance in favor of an approach experts say resembles conversion therapy.
The Trump administration has also deployed multiple federal agencies in its review of gender-affirming care, including the CMS, the Justice Department, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health.
This month, the FTC got involved, hosting a public workshop to “gauge the harms consumers may be experiencing” under gender-affirming care and assess whether medical professionals omitted warnings about risks posed by the treatments, or inflated claims about their efficacy. The agency heard from doctors, medical ethicists, whistleblowers, detransitioners and parents of detransitioners about their experiences with treatment.
DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle also provided an update about the Justice Department’s parallel enforcement measures. Mizelle said the department has issued “nearly 20 subpoenas” against clinics that he says have engaged in transition-related fraud.
“We're investigating violations such as healthcare fraud, false statements, all of this which could result in either civil or criminal liability for these clinics. We have also investigations into hospitals and other providers related to fraudulent billing, false claims under Medicaid fraud and the False Claims Act,” Mizelle said, adding investigations also targeted nonprofits and medical associations.
The federal scrutiny has had a chilling effect on gender-affirming care for minors.
Several prominent children’s hospitals have altered their gender-affirming care policies in light of the scrutiny from the Trump administration, including Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Stanford Medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Penn State Health, UPMC and Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
