NYU Langone Ends Gender Medical Care for Transgender Youth
NYU cites the “current regulatory environment” in making the decision, which comes in the wake of Trump’s threats to pull funding from facilities that provide gender-affirming care.
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On Tuesday night, Feb. 17, NYU Langone Health announced that it would discontinue its program that provides treatments for transgender minors. The decision comes two months after threats from the government to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide pediatric gender affirming care, including hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgical procedures.
In an issued statement, NYU Langone Health said: “Given the recent departure of our medical director, coupled with the current regulatory environment, we made the difficult decision to discontinue our Transgender Youth Health Program.”
Last year, NYU Langone stopped taking on new patients, following Trump’s Jan. 28, 2025 issuance of an Executive Order, entitled, “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” Despite the impact this fantastical battle cry has had on the political landscape, as GO has previously reported, the frequency of pediatric genital surgery ranges from extremely rare, to non-existent.
The title of one study by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2024) speaks to the findings: “Gender-Affirming Surgeries Rarely Performed on Transgender Youth.” Harvard researchers “found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) minors in the U.S. The study also found that cisgender minors and adults had substantially higher utilization of analogous gender-affirming surgeries than their TGD counterparts.”
Related: AMA and ASPS Recommend Restricting Gender-Affirming Surgeries For Minors
It should also be noted: while two influential medical organizations – American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) – recently got in line with the EO, making a public recommendation that gender-related surgeries be delayed until age 19, the announcement was widely viewed as a nothing-burger: not only are AMA and ASPS positions not clinical guidelines or enforcable mandates, but the medical organizations cited material produced by HHS under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has both trolled the trans community with mean-spirited pranks, and demonstrated profound ignorance around gender and chromosomal variability. It’s a scientific fact that such variations can lead to differences of sex development (DSDs) or “intersex” conditions, which renders the concept of immutable binary biological truth bogus.
Related: HHS Changes Name Of Dr. Rachel Levine On Official Portrait
How medical institutions address such variability, and the prevalence of surgeries to “correct” genders that fall somewhere in the middle seem not to be as much a topic of public discourse. But the question remains and is on the minds of many in the LGBTQ+ community:
Will the institutions that discontinue care for minors who have expressed a surety of gender, continue to perform ‘normalizing’ surgeries on intersex children who cannot yet consent to the procedures being done to their bodies?
GO reached out to Steve Ritea with NYU Langone to inquire about whether the hospital performs, or would continue to perform, procedures on youth who have ‘intersex’ variations, such as “Surgery for Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia” which is still noted on their website. It is advertised as a procedure “to change the appearance of the genitals.” Ritea declined to comment, and directed all questions to his press release.
