Nemours Children’s Hospital in Delaware will not carry out gender transition procedures on new minor patients, although it will continue to provide them to existing patients, local news outletsreported. The hospital’s decision was based on pressure from the Trump administration, but that decision has generated pushback from the state’s progressive state officials.

Soon after taking office for a second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” Although parts of that order were blocked by left-wing judges, the order has still set the tone of administration policy, as all agencies under the Trump administration 2.0 work to strongly oppose the corrupting influence of transgender ideology.

For example, both the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have warned health care providers that their federal funding may be at risk if they continue to carry out gender transition procedures on minors, despite the growing evidence that these procedures harm minors and provide no proven benefits.

HHS has also launched investigations into at least 20 medical centers and doctors over their practice of carrying out gender transition procedures on minors, including Boston Children’s Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital.

Notably, this pressure from the federal government extends even into progressive states with permissive attitudes towards transgender ideology. Although more than half of U.S. state legislatures have enacted restrictions against gender transition procedures for minors, a handful of states have chosen to protect doctors who carry out the procedures on minors.

Delaware falls into the latter category. Delaware Governor Matt Meyer (D) first issued an executive order to protect the providers of gender transition procedures to minors, which the legislature then codified into law last month. A pro-LGBT Delaware news outlet highlighted how some well-to-do families whose children identified as transgender had moved to Delaware from other states like Missouri and South Carolina, in order to access gender transition procedures.

Yet even Delaware’s state-level protections could not persuade Nemours to continue offering gender transition procedures, at the risk of their federal funding. Nemours is not the only hospital in progressive jurisdictions to make this calculation. Both Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. will pause gender transition procedures for minors later this week.

In so doing, these hospitals unintentionally participate in an international trend of health care providers backing away from gender transition procedures for minors. Over the past five years, numerous European countries have concluded, based on comprehensive evidence from their universal health care databases, that gender transition procedures are more likely to harm minors than previously thought, and many countries have pulled away from the procedures.

In the case of Nemours and other U.S. hospitals, however, the decision to pause these treatments is solely due on the legal and financial liability now attached to them.

It was this fact that Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings (D) chose to criticize. “Your hospital system has previously held … that any government intermingling, no matter how benign, in hospital operations would threaten a doctor’s advice to their patients,” she wrote in an August 8 letter to Nemours. “It was thus with considerable surprise that I learned of your executives’ decision, unburdened by any scientific or medical basis, to preemptively comply with President Trump’s cruel scapegoating of transgender kids … by withholding this medically necessary care from your patients.”

Jennings argued that Trump’s order regarding gender transition procedures for minors was both “immoral” and “illegal” because “the President does not have the power to unilaterally change the law to ban GAC [“gender-affirming care,” an ideological euphemism for gender transition procedures] or redefine the concept of gender identity.”

What seemed to infuriate Jennings most was that Nemours chose to discontinue gender transition procedures to minors, despite the state’s best efforts to insulate them from the policies of the federal government or other states. She boasted of “the Governor and General Assembly's efforts to protect not only those patients, but your providers, from the increasingly brash and erratic efforts of extremist politicians to threaten and even criminalize medically necessary care. Our state has spent years, and gone to great lengths, to defend medical freedom and the privacy, dignity, and safety of your patients and our constituents, including transgender, intersex, and nonbinary Delawareans seeking necessary care.”

“History is replete with physicians and scientists who risked life and liberty to uphold patient care, to resist

political repression, and to preserve the refuge promised in the Hippocratic Oath,” Jennings concluded, implying that Nemours’s latest decision provided a negative contrast to these examples. “It is likewise replete with lessons that appeasement to lawless and unethical decrees only begets further overreach.”

“While I recognize that you may worry about being placed in a precarious business position,” she granted, “I worry that your decision makes our state less caring, less healthy, and less safe. For the sake of your patients, and of my constituents, I urge you to reconsider.”

This letter reveals the ideological straightjacket into which some uber-progressive silos of the country have imprisoned themselves. Just because state legislators reason that children must reach the age of majority to consent to permanent alterations to their body does not make that state “less caring, less healthy, and less safe” — quite the opposite, in fact.

Moreover, just because a transgender fad demands that children have access to gender transition procedures does not make it the attorney general’s job to politely ask health care businesses to offer such procedures, against their better business judgment. The attorney general’s letter cited no laws, made no threats of prosecution, and in fact had nothing to do with the role of attorney general at all.

This demonstrates the ongoing opposition that protectors of children will face from progressive ideologues. It does not matter what the evidence shows. It does not matter what their jobs require. It does not matter what pressure other governments can bring to bear. They will still fight to press children into a lifetime of medication, mental illness, and/or regret because of irreversible changes made to their minor bodies. This demonstrates that the fight is not over now, nor will it ever be.