The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that it had sent more than 20 citations to doctors and clinics involved in “carrying out transgender medical procedures in children.”
The brief announcement of the department did not appoint any of the 20 doctors or clinics, or said where they were. Nor did he specify what he constituted “transgender medical procedures”, but said that his research “includes health fraud, false and more statements.”
“Professionals and medical organizations that mutilated children at the service of a deformed ideology will be responsible for this Department of Justice,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement.
Also on Wednesday, the Federal Commerce Commission organized a workshop of all day on the “dangers of the attention affirmed by gender.” In his opening comments, the president of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, suggested that such care is misleading and requires greater scrutiny by the commission.
The workshop and the announcement of the Department of Justice mark the last escalation of the ongoing campaign of the Trump administration to restrict transgender rights and access to medical care related to the transition.
The FTC panel on Wednesday presented more than a dozen speakers who criticized transgender medical care, including people who received care as minors and now say they regret; doctors and psychologists who do not agree with current standards to provide such care; and political scientists and lawyers who oppose access to transition care for minors.
Claire Abernathy said she had a double mastectomy on her 15th birthday and stopped, or stopped identifying as trans, at age 18.
“My doctors did not tell me that hormones would cause permanent side effects,” Abernathy said, now 20 years old. “They did those effects of me. They worked to silence me when I tried to complain about this abuse. We need to make sure that no more children are sold products that cannot return.”
A common chorus of many of the panelists was that it is not possible for someone to be “born in the wrong body” and that there is no evidence to support transition care as a treatment for gender dysphoria, or the medical term for anguish that results from the conflict between gender identity and sex assigned to birth.
Miriam Grossman, a child psychologist who has testified in favor of state legislation to prohibit access to transgender attention for minors, the idea that someone can know with certainty that their gender identity is more authentic for them than birth sex “is not probable and not improvisable.”
“There is no objective evidence of being born in the wrong body, and saying it cheats and taking advantage of consumers, and affects their medical decisions,” said Grossman.
Ferguson said that the legal mandate of the FTC is “to protect people from deceptive priests and health statements. He added that the FTC would publish a public request for information next week based on what was learned in the workshop.
‘It’s not the FTC lane’
The workshop faced a violent reaction of activists and also some employees within the FTC, Reuters reported. Almost 150 FTC employees signed a “declaration of concern” of July 2 with respect to Wednesday’s workshop, writing that “would draw a new territory for the commission by looking for confidential consultations for the doctor-patient.”
They added: “In a nutshell, in our opinion, this is not the FTC lane.”
On Thursday, three FTC employees also opposed the workshop in an event carried out by public knowledge, a non -profit organization that promotes free expression and an open internet.
Among them was Eileen Harrington, who worked for the FTC for almost 40 years and served as Executive Director from 2010 to 2012. She said that, through the workshop, the “FTC participated in a kind of extralimitation that we have not seen for more than 50 years.”
Harrington helped develop the FTC workshop process in 1992 when she worked as director of the Marketing Practices Division there. Before a workshop, he said that the FTC would issue a public statement on the issue that will be explored, and then invite the public to send comments. The FTC would also invite interested parties with a variety of points of view to talk in the workshop.
“Yesterday’s event has little similarity with what we intended to create in 1992 and with what the FTC has done over the years,” said Harrington, and pointed out that the public was forbidden to attend in person and that the FTC selected the people who were allowed to speak and only represented one point of view.
Joe Simonson, spokesman for the FTC, criticized the public knowledge event in a telephone interview with NBC News.
“I looked for who finances public knowledge, and I see that everything is a great technology, so it makes sense for me that a great non -profit organization financed by technology, apparently dedicated to the copyright law, would be looking for any excuse to attack the Federal Commerce Commission, even if it means that it will face young men and women who said and mutilated by medical professionals called,” Simonson said.
He added that the reason why the FTC workshop was not open assistance was because panelists received death threats.
Regarding the criticism that the workshop only included a point of view, Simonson said: “Many of the panelists who seemed say they were victims of mutilation and abuse, and I don’t know who is on the other side of that.”
When asked about most trans people, including young women, who say they don’t regret having received treatment, Simonson said: “We are not talking about those people. We are talking about people who were abused and mutilated.”
Kellan Baker, Executive Director of the Institute for Research and Health Policy of Whitman Walker Health, a medical clinic in Washington, DC, said he helped create Thursday’s event to provide perspectives that were left out of the FTC workshop.
“We wanted to know about parents who are in the position of caring for their children and wanting the best for their children,” Baker said. “We also wanted to listen to transgender health experts.”
All the main medical associations in the United States, such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychology Association, support access to care related to the transition for minors and oppose restrictions.
Recent restrictions on Trans Attention
Some European countries have restricted access to such care, but only one, the United Kingdom, has indefinitely prohibited new puberty blockers recipes to treat minors for gender dysphoria.
Twenty -five US states restrict access to puberty blockers and hormonal therapy for trans minors, although the courts have permanently blocked restrictions to enter into force in Montana and Arkansas, according to the movement’s progress project, a group of LGBTQ experts. Arizona and New Hampshire prohibition surgeries for minors, which are only recommended in rare cases. Seventeen states and Washington, DC, have measures that protect access to transgender medical care. Attention is legal in seven additional states that have no protections or prohibitions.
There is no federal law that restricts access to transition -related care. However, the Trump administration has tried to reduce it through a combination of executive orders and federal agencies. In January, Trump signed a broad executive order in order to prohibit federal funds from hospitals or medical schools that provide attention to children who affirm the genre, although multiple judges have blocked that part of the order.
Then, in an April memorandum, Bondi ordered lawyers to use the laws against female genital mutilation to investigate doctors who “mutilate” children “under the appearance of attention” and process these “crimes as much as possible.”
