WASHINGTON (OSV News) ─ In a move welcomed by the US bishops' chair on family life, President Donald Trump Jan. 28 signed an executive order stating his administration would seek to prohibit certain types of medical or surgical gender reassignment procedures for minors who identify as transgender.
"I welcome the President's Executive Order prohibiting the promotion and federal funding of procedures that, based on a false understanding of human nature, attempt to change a child's sex," said Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, the chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, in a Jan. 29 statement praising the president's directive.
"Helping young people accept their bodies and their vocation as women and men is the true path of freedom and happiness," he added, referencing "Dignitas Infinita," a teaching document promulgated last April by the Vatican's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Trump's executive order directed that the government "will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called 'transition' of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures."
"Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions," the order stated. "This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation's history, and it must end."
At least 25 Republican-led states have adopted laws restricting or banning gender reassignment surgery or related hormonal treatments for minors, although not all of those bans are currently in effect amid legal challenges, according to data from the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ+ policy group .
A still-pending ruling by the US Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to one such law in Tennessee, could potentially have a significant impact on the future of those laws.
"So many young people who have been victims of this ideological crusade have profound regrets over its life-altering consequences, such as infertility and lifelong dependence on costly hormone therapies that have significant side effects," Bishop Barron said in his statement. "It is unacceptable that our children are encouraged to undergo destructive medical interventions instead of receiving access to authentic and bodily-unitive care."
Bishop Barron also applauded the order's aim "to identify and develop research-based therapies to aid young people struggling with gender dysphoria." Young people, he said, "deserve care that heals rather than harms."
Supporters of banning gender transition surgeries or hormonal treatments for minors who identify as transgender say such restrictions will prevent them from making irreversible decisions as children that they may later come to regret as adults. Critics of such bans argue that preventing those interventions could cause other harm to minors, such as mental health issues or increase the risk of physical self-harm.
A 2022 study by the UCLA Williams Institute found there are approximately 1.6 million people in the US who identify as transgender. Nearly half of that population is between the ages of 13 and 24.
A recent JAMA Pediatrics study found 926 US adolescents with commercial insurance and a gender-related diagnosis received puberty blockers from 2018 through 2022, and none of them were under the age of 12. The study did not include minors covered by Medicaid.
In guidance on health care policy and practices released in March 2023, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine stated the church's opposition to interventions that "involve the use of surgical or chemical techniques that aim to exchange the sex characteristics of a patient's body for those of the opposite sex or for simulations thereof."
"Any technological intervention that does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body, ultimately does not help but, rather, harms the human person," the document states .
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Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X @kgscanlon.
