DOJ Targets 'Doctors and Clinics' Involved with Affirming Care with Swarm of Subpoenas

NBC News reports that the Department of Justice targeted "more than 20... doctors and clinics" involved with gender affirmation care with a firehose of subpoenas in the latest attack on transgender health care access.

The action was announced in terms that framed such medical care as harmful and driven by "ideology". The report quoted Attorney General Pam Bondi as declaring, "Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice."

"The department's brief announcement Wednesday [July 9] did not name any of the 20 doctors or clinics or say where they were," NBC News noted. "It also did not specify what constituted 'transgender medical procedures' but said its investigations 'include healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.'"

An inkling of what the DOJ might consider a "false statement" could perhaps be gleaned from the fact that on the same day as the subpoenas were announced, "the Federal Trade Commission hosted an all-day workshop on the 'dangers of gender-affirming care'," with hand-picked speakers uniformly inveighing against gender affirming care and even claiming "that it is not possible for someone to be 'born in the wrong body' and that there is no evidence to support transition care as a treatment for gender dysphoria," NBC News detailed.

Among the speakers was a 20-year-old who claimed to have had gender transition care as a 15-year-old but to have "detransitioned" three years later. That individual, Claire Abernathy, said, "My doctors didn't tell me that hormones would cause permanent side effects. They hid those effects from me. They worked to silence me when I tried to complain about this abuse.

"We need to make sure no more kids are sold products they can't return," Abernathy continued.

FTC spokesperson Joe Simonson told NBC News, when he was questioned "about the majority of trans people, including youths, who say they do not regret receiving treatment," that "We're not talking about those people. We're talking about people who were abused and mutilated."

It is unclear, however, how trans people who say they are happy with the gender affirmation care they received and even say that such treatment was life-saving can be left out of the conversation when claims are made that there is no such thing as "being born in the wrong body" – a common way of describing the sense that one's inner sense of gender does not correspond with one's physiology.

Indeed, one recent study found that more people regret bariatric surgery (more than 19%) and plastic surgery such as breast enhancement (as much as 47%) than regret gender transition (less than 1%).

Moreover, as much as 7% of people with children regret that life decision.

NBC News noted that, according to Reuters, "Nearly 150 FTC employees signed a 'statement of concern' dated July 2 about Wednesday's workshop, writing that it 'would chart new territory for the Commission by prying into confidential doctor-patient consultations'," and declared, "this is not the FTC's lane."

Prominent among the signatories was former FTC Executive Director Eileen Harrington, a four-decade veteran of the Commission who condemned the all-day panel on the subject as "a kind of overreach that we haven't seen for over 50 years."