Jo Yurcaba

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would begin to take steps aimed at ending transition-related care — or what the Department of Health and Human Services has termed “sex-rejecting procedures” — for minors nationwide.  The proposals — which, if enacted, would pull federal funding from hospitals that offer transgender care to minors — are the latest effort by the administration to restrict access to certain transgender care. Doctors across the country “provide needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic Oath, endangering the very lives that they are sworn to safeguard,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. […]

Roughly 2.8 million Americans who are 13 or older identify as transgender, according to a new study. The figure represents 1% of the U.S. population in that age group, according to the report published by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, which has been estimating the transgender population size since 2011. According to the study’s findings, transgender individuals tend to be younger than the overall U.S. population.  More than 75% of transgender people ages 13 and older are under 35, compared with 34% of the entire U.S. population in the same age group. Jody Herman, the report’s lead author and […]

Ace’s Place, which opened in Queens this week, will offer 150 beds, services like counseling and a work-study program.Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images New York City opened the country’s first city-funded shelter for transgender and gender-nonconforming people experiencing homelessness. Ace’s Place, which opened this week in Queens and will offer 150 beds, is a collaboration between the NYC Department of Social Services and Destination Tomorrow, an LGBTQ nonprofit in the Bronx. Ace’s Place will provide transitional housing as well as other services including individual and group counseling, planning and assistance for permanent housing, referrals to medical and mental health services, […]

Officials in 16 states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit Friday to block the Trump administration’s investigations into hospitals and doctors who provide transition-related care to minors. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the administration, by threatening to prosecute providers, is trying to institute a national ban on puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for transgender minors even though Congress has enacted no such federal ban. “The federal government is running a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, […]

Nineteen states have laws that prohibit trans people from using the bathrooms that align with their gender identities in K-12 schools.Tilde Oyster / NBC News Nearly a decade after North Carolina passed its controversial “bathroom ban,” sparking nationwide backlash and corporate boycotts of the state, transgender bathroom restrictions have made a resurgence. Nineteen states have laws that prohibit trans people from using the bathrooms that align with their gender identities in K-12 schools, and in many of those states the restrictions apply to other government-owned buildings as well. As a result, more than 1 in 4 trans people live in states with […]

The Justice Department announced that it had sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics involved in “performing transgender medical procedures on children.”  The department’s brief announcement Wednesday did not name any of the 20 doctors or clinics or say where they were. It also did not specify what constituted “transgender medical procedures” but said its investigations “include healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” “Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.  Also Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission […]