A recent article in The Texas Tribune carried a message to all concerned about sexual transitions generally, and to America’s children, in particular.
Sanity Returns to a Great Hospital
“Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston has to create a detransition clinic for transgender patients later this year and keep a list of ‘potential’ gender affirming care patients.” The new clinic will provide endocrinology, surgery, fertility counseling, psychotherapy, obstetrics and gynecological services to adults who have undergone procedures to change their sex and now wish to reassume their natural identity.
Texas Children’s (TCH) is the largest pediatric institution in the United States. Its website proudly proclaims, “Find world class care in Texas.” U.S. News and World Report awarded it as a top children’s hospital for 2025-2026, including first places in cardiology, heart surgery, neurology, neurosurgery and pulmonology.
According to NBC News, TCH stopped offering transition procedures in 2023, when Texas forbade them for minors. The article featured the anguished cries of opponents. Houston’s PBS station added a meaningless statistic. “A 2024 study of private insurance by Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that less than 1% of minors are transgender and received puberty blockers or hormone treatments.”
Encouraging Statistics
This last sentence comforts leftists trying to dodge responsibility. However, this issue has never been focused on statistics. Only the advocates of these procedures tried to overstate the numbers. Even so, it is important to realize that “less than 1%” is a large number, as the U.S. Census Bureau reports 72.3 million persons under age eighteen live in the United States. The Baltimore television station Fox 45 noted that the medical organization, Do No Harm, “says it identified nearly 14,000 minors who underwent gender transition procedures between 2019 and 2023, including more than 5,700 surgeries.” That is, of course, far less than one percent, but a matter of life and death to those affected.
Texas Children’s Hospital is not alone in abandoning such programs. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an “LGBT” advocate organization, conducts an annual “Healthcare Equality Index” that rates hospitals nationwide on their offerings of programs HRC supports. The trend is not in its favor. The Daily Signal recently compared the numbers in HRC’s 2024 and 2025 surveys.
“In 2024, 1,056 health care facilities across the country took part in the HRC survey, and 384 of them received a 100% perfect score (called ‘leaders’), while 462 received a score between 80% and 95% (called ‘high performers’). This year, only 741 took part in the survey, 323 scored 100%, and 343 achieved the status of ‘high performers.’ This represents about a 30% drop in participation, a 15% drop in ‘leaders,’ and a 26% drop in ‘high performers.’”
The Science Speaks
Texas Children’s Hospital and the others are also on very solid scientific ground. In November, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” The report challenged many assumptions that had hitherto governed such treatments.
The first highlights careless procedures.
“The ‘gender-affirming’ model of care…is characterized by a child-led process in which comprehensive mental health assessments are often minimized or omitted, and the patient’s ‘embodiment goals’ serve as the primary guide for treatment decisions. In some of the nation’s leading pediatric gender clinics, assessments are conducted in a single session lasting two hours.”
These treatments are also dangerous.
“The risks of pediatric medical transition include infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret.”
They contradict a common falsehood given to reluctant parents about the necessity of the procedures.
“No independent association between gender dysphoria and suicidality has been found, and there is no evidence that pediatric medical transition reduces the incidence of suicide, which remains, fortunately, very low.”
The conclusion is devastating for so-called gender-affirming care advocates.
“The evidence for benefit of pediatric medical transition is very uncertain, while the evidence for harm is less uncertain. When medical interventions pose unnecessary, disproportionate risks of harm, healthcare providers should refuse to offer them even when they are preferred, requested, or demanded by patients.”
Political Bias?
Certainly, advocates could argue that the HHS report is motivated by political bias, but that position is growing more difficult—and more expensive—to maintain.
The expense became apparent in January 2026, when a Westchester County, New York court awarded twenty-two-year-old Varian Fox two million dollars. The suit requested compensation from the psychiatrist who persuaded her that she needed medical treatment and the surgeon who performed a double mastectomy on her at the age of sixteen.
According to a January 31, 2026, article in the New York Post, twenty-eight similar cases were moving through other U. S. courts. Given that the malpractice insurance companies partially govern many medical practices, such outcomes have to be, at the very least, sobering.
Shifting Support
Covering the same event, The New York Times cited two other limiting factors. The first is a loss of institutional support within the profession. In a nine-page statement, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) shifted its position. It “concludes there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents. ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.” (Emphasis in the original.)
The Times also notes that state legislative resistance is becoming more effective. “Last summer,” the paper pointed out, “the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits some medical treatments for transgender youth, rejecting arguments that the measure violated the Constitution and preserving similar laws in more than 20 other states.”
The case in question is United States v. Skrmetti (2025). Arguing in the closing months of the Biden administration, the Justice Department stated that Tennessee’s law illegally discriminated against transgender children’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Sunsetting Liberal Dreams
After examining the arguments, the Supreme Court concluded that, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field…. Our role is not ‘to judge the wisdom, fairness, or logic’ of the law before us,… but only to ensure that it does not violate the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. Having concluded it does not, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”
Despite what “LGBT” partisans may say, the transsexual experiment is losing ground socially, politically, scientifically and legally. Leftist-dominated states like California, New York, Massachusetts and Colorado will continue to fight, hoping to breathe new life into a dying ideology. However, such moves can only improve their political prospects and, perhaps, their social standing. However, the legal and scientific ground the “LGBT” movement has lost will be far more difficult—perhaps impossible—to regain.
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