The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it had sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics involved in “performing transgender medical procedures on children.”
The department’s brief announcement did not name any of the 20 doctors or clinics, or say where they were. It also did not specify what constituted “transgender medical procedures,” but said its investigations “include healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.”
“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
Also Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission hosted an all-day workshop on the “dangers of gender-affirming care.” In his opening remarks, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson suggested that such care is deceptive and requires greater scrutiny by the commission.
The workshop and the Justice Department’s announcement mark the latest escalation of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign to restrict transgender rights and access to transition-related medical care.
The FTC’s panel on Wednesday featured more than a dozen speakers who criticized transgender health care, including people who received such care as minors and now say they regret it; doctors and psychologists who disagree with the current standards for providing such care; and political scientists and lawyers who oppose access to transition care for minors.
Claire Abernathy said she had a double mastectomy by her 15th birthday and detransitioned, or stopped identifying as trans, at 18.
“My doctors didn’t tell me that hormones would cause permanent side effects,” Abernathy, now 20, said. “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.”
A common refrain from many of the panelists was that it is not possible for someone to be “born in the wrong body” and that there’s no evidence to support transition care as a treatment for gender dysphoria, or the medical term for the distress that results from the conflict between someone’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth.
Miriam Grossman, a child psychologist who has testified in favor of state legislation to ban access to transgender care for minors, said the idea that someone can know for sure that their gender identity is more authentic to them than their birth sex “is entirely unproven and unprovable.”
“There is no objective evidence of being born in the wrong body, and saying so misleads and takes advantage of consumers, and it impacts their medical decisions,” Grossman said.
Ferguson said the FTC’s statutory mandate is to “protect people from deceptive cures and health claims. He added that the FTC would post a public request for information next week based on what was learned at the workshop.
‘Not the FTC’s lane’
The workshop faced backlash from activists and also from some employees within the FTC, Reuters reported. Nearly 150 FTC employees signed a “statement of concern” dated July 2 regarding Wednesday’s workshop, writing that it “would chart new territory for the Commission by prying into confidential doctor-patient consultations.”
They added, “Simply put, in our judgment, this is not the FTC’s lane.”
On Thursday, three former FTC employees also opposed the workshop at an event held by Public Knowledge, a nonprofit that promotes free expression and an open internet.
Among them was Eileen Harrington, who worked for the FTC for nearly 40 years and served as its executive director from 2010 to 2012. She said that, through the workshop, the “FTC engaged in a kind of overreach that we haven’t seen for over 50 years.”
Harrington helped develop the FTC’s workshop process in 1992 when she served as director of the division of marketing practices there. Prior to a workshop, she said the FTC would issue a public statement about the topic to be explored, and then invite the public to submit comments. The FTC would also invite stakeholders with a variety of views to speak at the workshop.
“Yesterday’s event bears little resemblance to what we intended to create back in 1992 and to what the FTC has done over the years,” Harrington said, noting that the public was barred from attending in person and that the FTC handpicked people who were allowed to speak and who represented only one point of view.
Joe Simonson, a spokesperson for the FTC, criticized the Public Knowledge event in a phone interview with NBC News.
“I looked up who funds Public Knowledge, and I see it’s all big tech, and so it makes sense to me that a big tech-funded nonprofit, ostensibly devoted to copyright law, would be looking for any excuse to attack the Federal Trade Commission, even if it means standing against young men and women who say they were abused and mutilated by so-called medical professionals,” Simonson said.
He added that the reason the FTC workshop wasn’t open attendance was because the panelists received death threats.
Regarding criticism that the workshop only included one viewpoint, Simonson said, “Many of the panelists who appeared say they were victims of mutilation and abuse, and I don’t know who is on the other side of that.”
When asked about the majority of trans people, including youth, who say they don’t regret receiving treatment, Simonson said, “We’re not talking about those people. We’re talking about people who were abused and mutilated.”
Kellan Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at Whitman Walker Health, a medical clinic in Washington, D.C., said he helped create Thursday’s event to provide perspectives that were left out of the FTC’s workshop.
“We wanted to hear from the parents who are in the position of caring for their children and wanting what’s best for their children,” Baker said. “We also wanted to hear from experts in transgender health.”
All major medical associations in the United States, such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, support access to transition-related care for minors and oppose restrictions on it.
Recent restrictions on trans care
Some European countries have restricted access to such care, but only one, the United Kingdom, has indefinitely banned new prescriptions of puberty blockers to treat minors for gender dysphoria.
Twenty-five U.S. states restrict access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans minors, though courts have permanently blocked restrictions from taking effect in Montana and Arkansas, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. Arizona and New Hampshire ban surgeries for minors, which are only recommended in rare cases. Seventeen states and Washington, D.C., have measures that protect access to transgender health care. The care is legal in an additional seven states that have neither protections nor bans on it.
There is no federal law restricting access to transition-related care. However, the Trump administration has sought to curtail it through a combination of executive orders and actions from federal agencies. In January, Trump signed a sweeping executive order aiming to prohibit federal funds from going to hospitals or medical schools that provide gender-affirming care to minors, though multiple judges have blocked that portion of the order.
Then, in an April memo, Bondi directed U.S. attorneys to use laws against female genital mutilation to investigate doctors who “mutilate” children “under the guise of care” and to prosecute these “offenses to the fullest extent possible.”
