The Trump administration’s campaign against Children’s Hospital Colorado is not about protecting children. It is about power, politics and intimidation, threatening one of Aurora’s most vital institutions.
At issue is gender-affirming health care for transgender minors, care that Children’s Hospital has provided lawfully under Colorado law and consistent with mainstream medical practice.
Yet the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a sweeping subpoena demanding some of the most sensitive records a hospital possesses, including confidential patient files, personnel records, internal emails and billing data. Federal officials admit they have no evidence of wrongdoing. None, according to reporting in the Colorado Sun. That fact alone exposes this action for what it is, a punitive fishing expedition meant to bully doctors and frighten families.
Gender-affirming care is not a fringe experiment. It is recognized and sanctioned across mainstream American medicine. It is delivered by specialized providers, governed by professional standards and subject to rigorous informed-consent requirements.
Children’s Hospital Colorado has reported no adverse events related to such care, and federal judges in other states have already ruled that similar subpoenas were motivated by bad faith or were legally irrelevant.
All of this isn’t a coincidence. It’s a pattern.
What the Trump administration is peddling instead is quackery dressed up as concern. Its disdain for gender-affirming care is rooted not in science nor medicine but in pseudoscience, religious dogma and partisan politics.
The administration has gone so far as to issue declarations claiming these treatments “do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care,” a false claim being challenged by the attorneys general of 19 states, including Colorado. Those states are right to call out the lying. Declaring something untrue does not make it so, especially when the declaration runs headlong into established medical practice and clinical evidence.
Even more troubling is how the federal government is attempting to impose its ideology. Regulation of medical care has long been the purview of the states. Colorado has chosen to allow and support gender-affirming care. The Trump administration is now misusing federal power to override that decision, threatening to block hospitals from Medicare and Medicaid if they continue providing care it politically disfavors. That is not oversight. It’s extortion.
The financial consequences are no abstraction. Nearly half of Children’s Hospital Colorado’s patients are covered by Medicaid. Exclusion from federal programs would inflict catastrophic harm, not just on transgender patients but on every child who relies on the hospital for cancer treatment, trauma care, neonatal services and specialized pediatric medicine. This is an institution that saves thousands of lives each year and improves the health of tens of thousands more. To put its viability at risk over a crackpot ideological crusade is reckless beyond measure.
This administration has repeatedly shown disdain for vetted science and medicine, promoting backward and disproven ideas about vaccines and public health while undermining trust in medical professionals. The consequences of that approach have endangered lives nationwide. Now the same contempt for evidence is being weaponized against children’s hospitals and the families they serve.
Children’s Hospital Colorado is right to resist. Its decision to fight this subpoena is not defiance. Instead, it’s the defense of patients, of medical ethics, vetted science and of state authority.
Aurora and Colorado should stand firmly behind this hospital. So should anyone who understands that medicine must be guided by scientific evidence, not ideology, and that the federal government has no business threatening the survival of a children’s hospital to score political satisfaction.
This editorial has things reversed – something typical of “the left.” There is no scientific or biological basis for someone feeling like they are of the opposite sex of there physical anatomy. They have found no biological structure in the brain to support this. They are just feelings. And feelings are not science, they are ideology. Just because this ideology has taken root amongst many healthcare providers does not make it science. It just means they have adopted this ideology that these individuals belong to an “oppressed class” and must have their feelings affirmed. It is therefore reasonable and appropriate to give these individuals time to mature and become an adults before such irreversible procedures are done.
Recall just a couple years back some children started identifying as animals and the public schools were supporting that. Apparently it was too crazy for even the crazy adults and it was quietly shut down.
Yeah, Pity that story turned out to be a lie.
No, Kirk, MAGA nuts are the people who believe white people, particularly white men, are oppressed. To remedy this imagined oppression, MAGA has used religiosity, white nationalism, and any other idiology that will stick with their warped masses to bully any institution that their dear, fat, orange leader disagrees with. The Sentinel has it right. This is about hard-right witchcraft and has no basis in accepted science!
I thought I was referencing whether there was any scientific basis for intervening in a child’s natural gender development. Sounds like you have a real “axe to grind” with White guys and White culture. Now it makes more sense why you consistently support flooding our country with non-White illegal immigrants.
Again, Mikey, we know your side hates white people, you don’t need to keep confirming it.
“This is about hard-right witchcraft and has no basis in accepted science!”
Woof, the projection here can be seen from Pluto. If gender alchemy rather than basic biology is “accepted science,” then DNA must be “hard-right witchcraft.”
Perry repeating “gender-affirming care” over and over like he’s trying to cast a magic spell with the proper incantation doesn’t make it science.
“Basic biology” is not the point. Not that you have demonstrated any mastery of the topic.
I hate to break it to you, but there have always been gay people and transsexual people. The only change is that we’ve chosen not to kill them all for the way they are. Which they can’t help anyway.
Invoking Current Year incantations in this low-effort tapioca of a post is pathetic even by your low standards, Jeffy-poo. But I understand that your side will never abandon its double standards in service of your moronic political theology that’s failed at every opportunity in the last 100 years.
It’s futile to defend experimental surgeries and dangerous injections on confused children and then demand that others pay for it. Trump is correct, again.