Trump's week in review: Pentagon worship service, year-end address to the nation

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Saturday, December 20, 2025

4. HHS announces intention to withhold funding from hospitals that perform gender transition surgeries

At a White House event Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that his agency had submitted proposed rules that would prohibit hospitals that receive federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid from performing gender transition procedures on minors. The proposed rules are subject to a 60-day comment period before they can officially take effect. 

“Sex-rejecting procedures are neither safe nor effective treatment for children with gender dysphoria,” he proclaimed. Warning that the procedures referred to by supporters as “gender-affirming care” have inflicted “lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people, Kennedy identified some of the side effects of the life-altering procedures as infertility, impaired sexual function, bone density loss and altered brain development. 

Kennedy described gender transition procedures as “not medicine” but rather an example of “malpractice.” Thursday’s press conference also featured remarks from Chloe Cole, a prominent detransitioner who once identified as a member of the opposite sex but has seen her gender dysphoria subside as she got older. 

Cole, who detailed how she had her breasts removed when she was 15 years old and underwent hormone treatment that resulted in the irreversible deepening of her voice, denounced the performance of gender transition procedures on minors as “unscientific medical abuse that violates every tenet of medical ethics.” She noted her regret for undergoing the life-altering treatments: “There’s grief, every single day, I carry with me silently.”