Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) is expected to introduce a bill Friday that would reauthorize a program providing taxpayer funding for children’s hospitals with a catch: No hospital that provides transgender treatments to minors will be eligible.
The Texas Republican plans to bring a bill to the House that reauthorizes the Children’s Hospital Graduate Medical Education Payment Program. The bill would extend the program, which started in 1999, for five more years through 2028 at $325 million a year.
“‘Gender affirming care’ for minors is indistinguishable from child abuse, and it is quickly becoming the human rights issue of our time. There is no other human rights atrocity in America that is so quickly gaining momentum and validation within the very institutions that should know better,” Crenshaw said in a statement to The Daily Wire.
“One of these institutions is children’s hospitals. In a place where ‘do no harm’ is the ultimate guiding principle, there is no excuse to ever perform treatments that permanently alter a child’s physiology,” he continued. “From now on, we will not allow a dime of taxpayer funding to go toward children’s hospitals that cater to the harmful pseudoscience that is ‘gender affirming care.’”
The program provides funding for children’s hospital graduate medical education departments to offset the added cost of training resident physicians and dentists. Crenshaw’s bill would amend the program to make ineligible any children’s hospital that performs transgender surgeries or hormone treatments for the purposes of transitioning children.
“No payment may be made under this section to a children’s hospital for a fiscal year (beginning with fiscal year 2024) if, at any point during the preceding fiscal year, such hospital furnished gender-affirming care … to an individual under 18 years of age,” the bill says, according to a draft of the legislation obtained by The Daily Wire.
The legislation defines “gender-affirming care” as “performing any surgery for the purpose of changing the body of such individual to correspond to a sex that differs from their biological sex.”
The bill carries exceptions for special cases, such as a patient with “both ovarian and testicular tissue” or a patient who, through testing, has been determined to “not have normal sex chromosome structure, sex steroid hormone production, or sex steroid hormone action.” Also exempted are treatments for patients suffering from complications from prior transgender treatments or surgeries.
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The bill has an additional carve-out allowing hospitals to treat patients who are “suffering from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the individual in imminent danger of death or impairment of a major bodily function unless the procedure is performed.”
The legislation would not preclude hospitals from offering “mental or behavioral health services” to children with gender dysphoria, as long as those services are not aimed at transitioning the child.
Transgender ideology and treatments, especially as they relate to children, have moved to the forefront of American politics in recent years. An increasing number of states are passing legislation to ban explicit transgender materials from schools and the treatments and procedures from hospitals.
A recent undercover investigation by Daily Wire host Matt Walsh’s team revealed that transgender health care providers are green-lighting patients to receive transgender treatments even when these patients do not meet criteria for approved surgery according to standards set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The providers purportedly provide letters to patients upon request that argue such procedures should be covered by insurance companies.
The investigation has sparked outrage among Republican officials. Several state attorneys general have taken notice of the investigation’s findings and suggested that their own offices may follow up with medical fraud investigations into transgender health care providers.