If someone offers you the chance to invest in a transgender hospital for kids, I’d think twice. Why? Because they are closing faster than mom and pop shops in California during COVID. Oh, and also because they are evil.

The Connecticut Children’s Medical Center just announced it will no longer provide transgender drugs or surgeries to those under 19, directly attributing the decision to President Donald Trump’s recent executive order banning the practice. Kaiser Permanente recently did the same. In fact, it’s part of a trend.

Take a look at this list of hospitals that have ended transgender “care” of this kind, all since Trump’s January order, aptly named, “PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM CHEMICAL AND SURGICAL MUTILATION.”

• Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
• Children’s National Hospital
• Denver Health
• Kaiser Permanente
• Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
• NYU Langone
• Phoenix Children’s Hospital
• Rush University Medical Center
• Stanford Medicine
• University of Chicago Medicine
• University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
• University of Virginia Health
• Virginia Commonwealth University Health

How could so many of our nation’s medical institutions be convinced to engage in such a barbaric practice in the first place?

Simple! Money.

Unfortunately, that is too often the answer. The root of all evil, I’ve heard once before.

I could focus on the harmful effects of these surgeries on kids, making them infertile and posing serious health risks. Or I could focus on how transitioners can grow up to regret their surgeries, but only after it’s too late.

While exposing these injustices is important, it’s also useful to understand the motives that drive them. The kids and parents themselves have a sad array of reasons, many predicated on poorly handled mental illness, but for the health care providers the motive is more obvious: greed.

We discussed the transing of kids — and the money that fuels it — on a recent episode of the “Outstanding” Podcast. Joshua Arnold, senior writer at The Washington Stand, pointed out on the podcast that not only do the surgeries cost tens of thousands of dollars, but also the drugs can cost even more because they are a lifelong pharmaceutical commitment.

Alleigh Marre of the American Parents Coalition echoed that sentiment.

“I think we need to poke those people in a nice way, to ask them to follow the money on this,” Marre said. “When you look at the insurance submissions for these hospitals, they are making a ton of money off of these children. And again, we’re today talking about pediatric. So this is sub-18 [years of age].”

“This is a multimillion-dollar medical industry,” she added.

The relevant drugs can cost up to nearly $4,000 per year out of pocket for transitioners, not to mention the funds paid by insurers. And check out this eye-popping sentence about the cost of genital surgeries from research posted on the National Institutes of Health website: “As vaginoplasty and phalloplasty were frequently multi-episode procedures, the total average cost of these procedures per person was $53,645 and $133,911, respectively.”Note that this is the cost paid by insurers — including the out-of-pocket costs to payees tacks on a few thousand more dollars.

For each transitioner who elects for one of these other common surgeries, health insurers are paying roughly:

• $14,538 for hysterectomies
• $12,680 for mastectomies
• $17,426 for mammoplasties
• $6,927 for testicular removal
• $33,516 for facial feminization surgery

And the percentage of kids who identify as trans has exploded in recent years, and it’s only growing. That means a future with hundreds of thousands of kids lining up for these procedures — which make them lifelong medical industry customers — is not beyond reason.

Thankfully, government policy in the U.S. and elsewhere has begun to tamp down on the industry, at least for now. But we are one election away from a Democrat or squishy Republican restarting the kid-mutilating money machine.

God forbid.

I have my own sins, a list too long to recount, but I don’t want to be standing too close to the child mutilators when Jesus returns. As the Coming King warned us: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).