Trump Signs Order Restricting Gender-Affirming Treatments for Minors

President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday taking steps to end gender-affirming medical treatments for children and teenagers under 19, directing agencies to take a variety of steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other regimens.

The order continued to chip away at social protections for transgender and intersex people, coming one day after Mr. Trump directed the Pentagon to re-evaluate whether anyone who received gender-related medical treatments should be permitted to serve in the military.

The most recent order set as official policy that the federal government not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”

It directed the Department of Health and Human Services to review the terms of insurance coverage under Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to end some gender-affirming care. It also gave the department 90 days to release a new set of best practices, meant to revise guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which was written to set standards for transgender medical care, and which the order called “junk science.”

It tasked agencies providing federal research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, with ensuring that those institutions were not carrying out any gender-related procedures.

And it directed the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to exclude similar types of coverage starting in 2026.

Civil rights groups have issued increasingly dire statements criticizing the administration for a stance they say widely demonizes and marginalizes transgender people.

“Access to gender-affirming care enables trans youth to live authentically and is often life-saving,” Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “The Trump administration’s continued assault on the rights and dignity of trans people is deplorable.”

Demand for gender-affirming medications and hormone therapy among transgender youth has not been studied extensively, but only a small fraction of minors who identify as transgender currently receive gender-transition treatments, according to researchers at the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which conducts demographic studies about the L.G.B.T.Q. population.

The language from the White House surrounding gender-affirming medical treatments and their effects on the body has grown increasingly severe and disdainful since Mr. Trump took office.

On his first day, Mr. Trump signed an order describing transgender identity as an “ideology” from which women required institutional protection and restricted single-sex spaces.

The order directing the Pentagon to evaluate whether transgender troops could serve in the military cast aspersions on the mental and physical health of anyone who has experienced gender dysphoria or has had a gender-related medical procedure. On Tuesday, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging any ban on transgender service members as unconstitutional.

The order on care for minors, which referred to procedures as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” predicted that “countless children” who received gender-affirming procedures would soon regret the “horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”

Gender-affirming surgeries on minors are exceedingly rare in the United States, a Harvard Chan School of Public Health Study found last year. The study’s lead author, Dannie Dai, said legislation banning gender-affirming care among youth “is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma” and “seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”

More than two-dozen states have passed some form of restriction on gender-affirming medical procedures, according to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign. And many states already have laws on their books prohibiting public funds from covering gender-transition treatments for state employees and Medicaid recipients.

While Mr. Trump campaigned on promises to do away with some programs supporting transgender people, he tended to home in on specific cases, such as U.S. prisons offering gender-affirming care to prisoners — something many prisons did, as required by federal law, during Mr. Trump’s first term.

But in excluding transgender people from certain jobs and facilities, and officially recognizing only two genders — male and female — the Trump administration has gone much further in recent days by essentially placing the federal government in opposition to a wide variety of gender-related therapies and to anyone who seeks them. And it has justified those moves with progressively dark — and factually disputed — descriptions of what those procedures entail.

Amy Harmon contributed reporting.