MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WDNews) — Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is leading a coalition of 24 states urging the federal government to permanently halt Medicare and Medicaid funding for sex-change procedures for minors.
According to a news release issued Feb. 18, Marshall and the coalition filed a letter with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asking the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to stop federal funding of what the release calls “sex-change procedures on children.”
The letter was sent to Secretary Kennedy and addresses two proposed rules that would restrict federal funding from continuing to subsidize procedures for minors under Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
“Medicaid and Medicare should never have been allowed to use taxpayer dollars to fund radical and dangerous sex-change procedures for children. We support the Trump administration’s proposal to reverse course,” stated Attorney General Marshall. “We know the dangers of these procedures firsthand. Through years of litigation defending Alabama’s law, we uncovered a political and medical scandal involving the leading medical guidelines that recommend using sterilizing hormones and surgeries to ‘treat’ children suffering from gender dysphoria. The guidelines were built on ideology and politics, not science, and have led to untold harm to children and their parents. Children deserve better, and the first step in helping them is to stop funding the harm.”
The release states the coalition’s letter discusses evidence uncovered in litigation regarding the “Standards of Care 8” (SOC-8) published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). According to the release, the letter claims WPATH used SOC-8 to advance political and legal goals, changed its treatment recommendations based on politics, departed from well-accepted best practices for creating medical guidelines, hindered the publication of systematic evidence reviews appraising the safety and efficacy of procedures for minors, and “even went so far as deeming castration ‘medically necessary’ for males who self-identify as ‘eunuchs.’”
Marshall is joined on the letter by attorneys general from Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The full letter is available through the Alabama Attorney General’s Office.
