A second major medical institution with centers worldwide has announced its doctors will stop performing transgender procedures on minors.
In a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Ohio’s renowned Cleveland Clinic will no longer provide transgender services like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to minors at its six medical centers for the next 20 years. In addition, the organization will pay $2 million toward de-transition care and $308,000 to resolve billing allegations.
Dr. Kurt Miceli, Chief Medical Officer for Do No Harm, a medical organization that seeks to counteract youth-focused gender ideology, told CBN News the agreement represents a “momentous victory.”
“The evidence just simply isn’t there in terms of pediatric medical transition,” he said. “There’s very low evidence of any benefit, and there’s significant harm, significant risks. And that includes infertility, cardiovascular effects, the impacts to bone health, and certainly the surgeries.”
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Recently, Texas Children’s Hospital reached a similar agreement, although neither hospital admitted any wrongdoing. The DOJ is investigating whether the hospitals submitted false bills to insurance companies, allegedly to hide transgender procedures they provided.
Dr. Ethan Haim, who first blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital while he was working there as a surgeon, told CBN News how it works.
“The insurance companies can still push back against paying for the hormones, blockers, and surgeries in certain people, in certain adults and children,” he said. “So it’s easier for the doctors to just fraudulently bill, like an endocrine disorder for hormones, pelvic pain for hysterectomy. I reviewed records from New York where a young girl got a double mastectomy, and the code was breast hypertrophy.”
Breast hypertrophy is a rare medical disorder where breasts grow excessively large and heavy, causing severe pain.
Experts say that, in addition to billing fraud allegations, the greater injustice is what’s been done to the children.
“We need to be honest with what we’re doing as medical providers, but more importantly, we ultimately need to just stop doing these procedures on kids,” Dr. Miceli said. “These are vulnerable kids. They are going through times of gender confusion, and we shouldn’t be medicalizing them. We should be giving them help in terms of trying to understand what’s going on to help them through tough times.”
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Both settlements could be just the beginning. Last year, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas for medical records from more than 20 children’s hospitals nationwide. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to “hold accountable those who prey on vulnerable children and their parents.”
A number of parents of transgender children have filed multiple lawsuits to quash the subpoenas, citing privacy violations and the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Some judges agreed and blocked the subpoenas, saying the true purpose is to intimidate hospitals into stopping trans procedures and that there is little evidence the Justice Department needs them, alleging overreach of its investigative authority. The Trump Administration says it will appeal those rulings.
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