Transgender Teens

Susan Estrich on Dec 20, 2025

According to data from the CDC analyzed by the Williams Institute at UCLA, some 3.3% of American high school students ages 13-17 self-identify as transgender. Earlier studies, sometimes asking the question differently, have reported a range from 1.2% to 2.7%.

Who should decide how to best raise these children -- what medical care will help them most? Doctors? Patients? Some combination of the people who will put the teen's well-being first?

Don't struggle with the question. All those obvious and appropriate answers are wrong.

Politicians are the right answer. Specifically, President Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr.

That's the answer that came out of a press conference this week with a whole array of new plans to turn these young people's health care into a weighted political football.

On Thursday, our know-nothing Health and Human Services Secretary announced new rules that would shut down any hospital that provides gender-affirming care of any kind to teens. That's because little Bobby and his friend Mehmet Oz are threatening to pull all Medicare and Medicaid funding -- which is Oz's domain -- from hospitals that don't comply. No hospital in America can survive without those federal funds because Medicare and Medicaid account for nearly 45% of spending on hospital care.

The new rules come one day after the House of Representatives, in a divided vote, approved legislation that would criminalize gender transition treatments for minors and would subject providers to up to 10 years in federal prison. And on the same day that the new rules were announced, the House passed a second measure that would bar Medicaid payments for gender-related treatments for minors. The two bills have little chance of passing in the Senate, but they underscore the game the administration is playing.

And on the same day the new rules were announced, the Food and Drug Administration issued warning letters to twelve manufacturers of breast binders, tight garments used to flatten breasts under clothing, for "illegal marketing" of the products to children as a treatment for gender dysphoria.

This is politics, plain and simple. Don't get me wrong, it's still the economy, stupid. But for a small subset of voters who decided in the closing days of this campaign, the ad the Trump campaign ran attacking Harris for supporting treatment of transgender prisoners (she stands for "they/them," Trump stands for you) worked. It sent the anti-woke message that Trump loves to send, and it brought some swing voters to his side, if you credit the post-game analysis.

And the Trump people surely have. They've been playing politics with transgender rights ever since, literally denying these folks' right to exist. "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female," the president wrote in his Executive Order, one of the first he issued. At the news conference this week, Jim O'Neill, the deputy secretary of the health department, could not have been clearer: "Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. At the root of the evils we face, is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived."

And we will address that evil by forcing teens to go through puberty, notwithstanding what they, their parents or their doctors think?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned the proposed rules for intruding on what should be medical decisions. "Allowing the government to determine which patient groups deserve care sets a dangerous precedent, and children and families will bear the consequences," Dr. Susan Kressly, the president of the A.A.P., told reporters.

The United States Supreme Court, in a misguided majority opinion upholding the Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for youth, itself pointed to the debate as to what medical treatment, if any, is best for transgender youth as a reason to leave the issue to the democratic process.

The proposed rules will be subject to public comment before they are finalized. Then they will be subject to a court challenge. In the meantime, their proposal sends a cruel message to the most vulnerable group of teens and attempts to tie the hands of their parents and doctors who are trying to do what is best for them, not for the polls.

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