Planned Parenthood dresses itself up in pink and calls itself an essential women’s health-care organization, but its business model tells a different story. Each year, Planned Parenthood clinics perform upwards of 330,000 abortions, making the group the most prolific abortion provider in the country.

But recently, Planned Parenthood has quietly begun expanding into a new arena: hormone therapy for individuals with gender dysphoria, a service the group calls “gender affirming care.”

Hormone therapy has become popular as a means of artificially suppressing the sex characteristics of those who feel misaligned with their biological sex. Biological men who identify as women take estrogen and women who identify as men take testosterone, hormones that mask or even permanently alter unwanted male or female sex characteristics — including, in many cases, their fertility.

Judging from its own documents, Planned Parenthood’s provision of hormone therapy has increased exponentially since the group first mentioned the word “transgender” in its 2014 annual report. That year, Planned Parenthood reported just 26 centers in ten states offering these services.

Planned Parenthood’s most recent report, from 2019, recorded more than 200 centers in 31 states that “provide hormone therapy for transgender patients.” According to the group’s website, that number is even larger now: close to 300 centers across 38 states.

It isn’t clear exactly how many instances of “gender affirming care” Planned Parenthood provides, but its reports give us a hint. Hormone therapy is grouped under the umbrella of “other services,” along with things like “adult preventive care” and “pediatric services.” Last year, Planned Parenthood reported about 18,000 “other services,” nearly double what the group had reported for the same category in 2018–2019.

Back in February, journalist Abigail Shrier reported that the website for Planned Parenthood’s Western and Central New York affiliate stated, “Nationally, Planned Parenthood is the second largest provider of Gender Affirming Hormone Care.” As of this writing, Planned Parenthood had removed that statement from the site and replaced it with a stock photo. (I verified on an Internet-archive site that Shrier’s description was accurate.)

In 2017, meanwhile, Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told the Daily Beast that about 65 Planned Parenthood locations offered transition-related procedures. “It’s possible they’re the largest provider of trans health in the country,” Keisling said at the time. “We don’t know for sure. But it’s certainly among the biggest, if not the biggest….”
The above comes from an Aug. 24 story in National Review.