Citing pressure from the Trump administration, Kaiser Permanente is the latest health system to acquiesce to demands that it cease providing gender transition services to minors that includes chemical or surgical procedures.

Kaiser CEO Greg A. Adams announced the change in an email to executives, saying “there has been significant focus by the federal government on gender-affirming care” for minors since President Donald Trump assumed office.

“After significant deliberation and consultation with internal and external experts including our physicians, we’ve made the difficult decision to pause gender-affirming surgical treatment for patients under the age of 19 in our hospitals and surgical centers,” Adams said in the email.

While the pause begins Aug. 29, Kaiser does not operate any hospitals in Colorado — only out-patient clinics.

“All other gender-affirming care treatment remains available,” Adams said. “We continue to meet with regulators as well as our clinicians, patients, their families, and the community with the goal of identifying a responsible path forward.”

“Gender-affirming” care is an umbrella term that refers to a range of social, psychological or medical interventions for transgender individuals, including hormone therapy and surgical procedures. 

Supporters of affirming transgender identity have pointed to research showing efforts to “out” LGBTQ+ students, especially transgender students, make those students “feel less safe at school, have higher rates of suicide ideation, and are disproportionately represented among unhoused youth, at least partly due to rejection at home. Conversely, affirming transgender students can improve their mental health and academic outcomes.”

Meanwhile, critics of medically transitioning minors have said America is an outlier and many European countries, after embracing “gender affirming care,” now emphasize psychological care over the transition of young people. In particular, the National Health Service in England said it will no longer prescribe “puberty blockers” — drugs that suppress sex hormones during puberty — to children and other young people seeking gender transitions, saying there is “not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness.”

The latter is a controversial finding in the LGBTQ+ community — one Rev. Paula Stone Williams, a pastoral counselor with RLT Pathways in Lyons, recently acknowledged during a service at Denver Community Church, in which she was a guest speaker.

A “small subset” of transgender individuals can be treated successfully as teens, said Williams, who transitioned late in life as an adult.

But there is still much that society does not know, she said.

“With the majority of trans teens, we simply do not know enough,” said Williams, an internationally-recognized speaker on the subjects of gender and religion.

“And our responsibility is to follow the data. And the data just isn’t there,” Williams said. 

The Kaiser announcement follows a string of hospitals across the nation that have announced similar moves since Trump was sworn in. Both Denver Health and UCHealth — the two largest health systems in the Denver metro area — halted their gender transition services for minors in January.

In 2023, Denver Health — the city’s safety net system for the poor — received $792 million in Medicare and Medicaid funding, which accounted for more than half of the health system’s revenue that year.

Children’s Hospital Colorado also decided to discontinue gender transition services for minors to comply with an order from the Trump administration.

Three years ago, Adams, the Kaiser CEO, affirmed the health system’s commitment to transgender services amid a growing number of legislative proposals across the nation designed to limit hormonal or surgical access by minors.

“We remain fully committed to transgender care and maintaining all services and protections for our LGBTQIA+ members, and to being a strong ally in the fight for equal rights,” Adams wrote in 2022.

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Oakland, Calif., Kaiser Permanente is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health care providers, serving 12.6 million patients in eight states, including Colorado and Washington D.C.

The Trump administration has threatened to cut federal funding to providers offering chemical or surgical, gender-affirming care to minors.

“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.”

Denver Gazette reporter Deborah Grigsby Smith contributed to this report.