Touted as an exclusive story on National Public Radio from health reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin, “Trump's HHS abandons threat to withhold Medicare and Medicaid funding over trans care” dutifully repeated the “gender-affirming care for youth” misnomer in the lead while providing only trans-supportive sources.
The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.
The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told NPR in a statement: "CMS does not comment on future rulemaking or speculate on potential actions. The Trump Administration rejects ideologically driven surgical interventions on vulnerable children."
(Surgery is very rare among transgender people under age 18, and the rule applied to all gender-affirming care, which is mainly therapy and medications for children.)
NPR is avoiding the issue. Given valid concerns that transgender surgery is irreversible and potentially harmful, the question over whether it’s “very rare” or not should be irrelevant.
Simmons-Duffin revved up the cavalcade of supportive voices.
The fact that the Trump administration is backing off from this action is "a victory for people who are defending the rights and interests of trans people," says Sam Bagenstos, a professor at Michigan Law who served as general counsel at HHS under the Biden administration….
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The proposed rule was unprecedented, Bagenstos says, because it instead would have prohibited certain kinds of treatments for a certain population. He says it seemed unlawful in a variety of ways. For one, "it violates the Medicare Act, which says that Medicare and Medicaid can't be used to control the practice of medicine within the state — states get to regulate the practice of medicine," Bagenstos says.
NPR appealed to dubious, ideologically captured authority:
The American Medical Association and the Children's Hospital Association both submitted comments urging the agency to rescind or withdraw the proposed rule. Major U.S. medical groups say that puberty blockers and sex hormones are safe and can be effective for transgender young people.
Left on the cutting room floor: Nations like the U.K, Finland, and Sweden, none of them right-wing theocracies, have either banned or restricted so-called gender-affirming surgery for minors after evidence of harm became too obvious to ignore.
While the Trump administration does not appear to be backing down from anti-transgender actions broadly, its decision not to finalize its most aggressive healthcare rule is significant, says Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at Georgetown University who also worked in the Biden administration. Those other efforts are not nearly as durable as a finalized rule that takes effect, she notes.
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Kellan Baker agrees. He's a senior adviser for health policy at the Movement Advancement Project think tank, which focuses on LGBTQ issues. "This administration may have checked itself in one of the most extreme expressions of its agenda and I think people should take solace in that," he says. "But at the same time, this administration is continuing to show that its ultimate goal is eliminating health care for trans people and that it is apparently prepared to use almost any means necessary to do so."
The broadcast version that aired on NPR's All Things Considered Monday added a “dangerous” adjective to the mix.
Simmons-Duffin: ….The American Medical Association and the Children's Hospital Association both urged the government to withdraw it. They said it violated several laws and set a dangerous precedent….
The reporter cited the same source (CHA) for that same "dangerous precedent" warning back in December 2025.
Simmons-Duffin, who sometimes pops up on the PBS News Hour to discuss her transgender reporting for NPR, does not bring professional journalistic skepticism to her coverage, only cheerleading. She has previously handed the (then-taxpayer-funded) NPR microphone to President Biden’s transgender HHS appointee Rachel Levine (biological man) in 2022.
