Last year, Sutter Health in Sacdramento proudly advertised receiving the Human Rights Campaign’s LGBTQ+ Healthcare Equality Award, a badge of ideological conformity publicized across their platforms. Yet today, Sutter is sending a very different message. After years of promoting puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as unquestionable medical dogma, Sutter Health has announced it will no longer provide these interventions to minors experiencing gender confusion.
This dramatic reversal comes just days after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released its peer-reviewed federal report thoroughly discrediting the scientific basis for pediatric sex-rejecting procedures.
The first public hint of Sutter’s policy shift did not come through a press release or media announcement, but from quiet emails sent to parents. As reported by KQED’s investigative team in their coverage, parents learned that Sutter would soon end all “gender-affirming care” for patients under age 19. That secrecy angered pro-trans-activist group Rainbow Families Action, which published an open letter expressing that it was “profoundly shocked” by the decision and calling it “unconscionably cruel” and even “illegal.” Their full letter to Sutter can be read here.
Yet what activists describe as cruelty, many parents, detransitioners, faith-based organizations, and medical ethicists recognize as overdue protection for vulnerable children.
In response to growing institutional hesitation, Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a press release aimed at signaling that California law supposedly protects access to such interventions.
Yet, attorney and president of Our Duty-USA Erin Friday disputes the Attorney General’s assertion. “Bonta cannot legally require medical providers to poison children with hormones or require surgeons to remove healthy sexual organs of children,” she said. “His threats are purely illusory, and Bonta seems to have forgotten that the highest court in the land clearly sides with protecting children’s natural bodies.”
Sutter Health is only the latest major medical system to reverse course. Earlier this year, institutions long considered champions of gender medicine began quietly walking back their services for minors:
In February, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles confirmed it was ending initiation of hormonal therapy for patients under 19, as reported by the Los Angeles Times in its story, “Children’s Hospital to Stop Initiating Hormonal Therapy for Trans Patients Under 19”.
Last July, Kaiser Permanente placed significant limitations on its youth gender services—an issue CFC examined in our article, “Kaiser Hits Pause, Media Hits Mute: The Unspoken Scandal of Teen Trans Surgeries”.
Stanford Medicine announced similar changes last summer.
These developments follow major federal actions, including President Trump’s executive order, Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, and multiple HHS scientific reviews, including the newly released report Discrediting Pediatric Sex-Rejecting Procedures and additional documentation of risk factors summarized by KFF here.
“Sutter Health’s retreat is a long-overdue admission that California’s experiment on vulnerable children was driven by gender ideology, not evidence,” said California Family Council Vice President Greg Burt….
The sign in this photo should read: Trans Healthcare Ruins Kids Lives. Nay to gay medicine.
Transition is the decision.
Reply to I can use rhymes too: Transition is the wrong decision.
There is no such thing as transgenderism. There is such thing as mental illness.
They promote this as increasing mental health. Of course, it has the opposite effect. Suicides after these surgeries/meds go up not down. It would be great if these destructive “mental health” therapists faded from the scene as rapidly as their more ghoulish practices.
At least for the moment, sanity has returned to the scene, and that thanks to Trump et al. For that alone he should receive a congressional medal of honor, if such a thing exists. Bonta needs a lesson in elementary bio-ethics from a (genuinely) Catholic institution.