MAIA POET: Trump’s executive orders cannot permanently end gender ideology, but we can


On January 28, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order which bans federal funding from being used to promote or to perform “gender affirming care” for young people under the age of 19.  The Order also aims to consult with Congress about extending the statute of limitations for child transitioners who were harmed by these practices. Additionally, the Order requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publish a review of the evidence “on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”

Though this Executive Order was a major win in our fight against transgender ideology, many people have prematurely declared that the practice of performing child sex changes has been officially banned in the United States. This assertion is incorrect.

Most insured Americans are insured through private companies, not through the state. This means that only young people under 19 who are insured through state programs like Medicaid will face restrictions in accessing “sex change” treatments. The majority of American kids are just as vulnerable to becoming lifelong medical patients as they were before Trump’s Executive Order placed these restrictions. Private hospitals that do not receive federal funding are able to continue the practice unimpeded.

We must also remember that young people aged 19-25 are uniquely vulnerable to the transgender medical industry. Due to their undeveloped frontal lobes, young adults are incapable of truly understanding the concept of “permanence.” However, since they are legal adults, no safeguards prevent them from walking into a gender clinic and leaving the 45 minute appointment with a prescription for cross-sex hormones which will permanently alter and damage their healthy bodies.

These young adults who find themselves seeking “sex changes” are cognitively immature, and they often have many underlying mental health issues which doctors are not clinically required to treat before signing off on permanently altering the bodies of healthy, young patients. Adults of any age who are not of sound mind are no more capable of giving informed consent to experimental interventions which are being advertised as “medically necessary, life saving and ‘settled’ science” than kids are. Let us not forget that poor outcomes for the experiment of transitioning adult males, is precisely the reason why Dutch clinicians decided to transition children. Adult transition and pediatric transition are inextricably intertwined phenomena.

Though the restrictions placed by Trump’s Executive Order are hardly a ‘ban’ on pediatric transition, and certainly don’t address the unethical behavior of clinicians who treat vulnerable adults, the Executive Order is a hopeful step in the right direction.

As policymakers continue to tackle the issue of pediatric transition, we must account for the fact that a generation of young people have been radicalized into believing that if they are denied “sex changes,” that they will kill themselves. Now, at least some of these kids will be denied medical transition and will be left without any adequate mental healthcare which is capable of deradicalizing them. If we do not address the underlying mental health issues of this cohort of young people, both the mental health issues which predated their trans identification and those which resulted from it, we will be unlikely to achieve any long lasting progress on this issue.

We know that both trans identification and suicide are socially contagious phenomena. If kids are able to be easily persuaded that they are “born in the wrong bodies,” they will also be persuaded by the narrative that non-affirmation of their trans identities doom them to suicidality. As a trans identified 12 year old, I certainly was. I was neither depressed, nor suicidal until the same trans activists who convinced me that I was “born in the wrong body” also convinced me that my parents’ non-affirmation of my transgender identity doomed me to suicide.

The moment that a kid who is prevented from accessing these treatments succumbs to the toxic messaging of trans activists, there will likely be a cascade of young people ending their own lives. These tragedies can only be prevented by making the deradicalization of young people from gender ideology, with an emphasis on proper mental healthcare, an equal priority to banning the child “sex change” industry.

If we fail to address the underlying mental health issues of these kids, trans activists will use the tragedy they created, to argue that child castration is suicide prevention. Without having widespread protections permanently legally codified, we will find ourselves fighting the same battle in another four years.

Ultimately, ending a medical scandal which carries consequences for all of society, which has gained legitimacy through widespread and systematic institutional capture, will never be achieved solely in the courts. No amount of Executive Orders will meaningfully change the culture enough to release the death grip of gender ideology from our society. Until schools, youth centers and online trans activists stop coaching kids on how to damage their breasts through binding, and their genitals through tucking (and how to hide the evidence from their parents), we will still have a generation of psychologically and physically damaged young adults showing up to gender clinics. Instead of being provided with proper psychotherapy to help them cope with the damage they have already sustained, these young adults will be promised further damage as a remedy.

Now that we have an administration which will fight with us, as opposed to against us, it is our job to continue our fight against the gender ideology on the ground. We must de-radicalize these children. We must go after not only the doctors, but after the ideologues who use their power to indoctrinate kids in school and who teach them how to ‘affirm their genders’ by dangerously binding their breasts and tucking their genitals. We must make the social transition of a child absolutely unthinkable, rather than to downplay the intense psychosocial damage of non-medical transition interventions.

Now is not the time for us to put all of our hopes into politicians to solve the problems caused by a medical experiment which over the last century has morphed into an ideological labyrinth that has captured our institutions and upended our society. We will be unable to win the battle against gender ideology by relying entirely on the courts; we must also win this battle in the culture of young people. Our fight to end this ideology is nowhere near finished. We must now fight to end this scandal both in the halls of hospitals, and from within our culture.

This Story originally came from humanevents.com