President Donald Trump’s U.S. Department of Education hosted a listening session with detransitioners on Wednesday in honor of Detrans Awareness Day to hear their experiences with sex-mutilating drugs and procedures, often called “gender-affirming care” by the political left.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon specifically met with a group of six detransitioners — young men and women who previously believed they were transgender, but have reversed their social and medical “gender transitions” — and heard their personal stories and hardships they experienced while endeavoring to transform into another sex. The session included parental rights advocates, mental health, medical, and education professionals fighting to protect America’s youth.
A representative from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was also in attendance, and the session doubly served as a forum for officials to discuss how they are implementing President Trump’s executive orders protecting young people from gender ideology and the harms that come from it.
“We were honored yesterday to welcome this group to the Department of Education. I commend the young people in attendance for bravely sharing their experiences—and the medical and mental health professionals and parents for their tireless advocacy,” McMahon said in a statement.
“No teacher should attempt to persuade or coerce a student to undergo a gender transition,” she added. “No parent should be lied to or prevented from knowing what is going on with their child’s mental or physical health. We stand firmly alongside parents, professionals, advocates, and especially detransitioners, who understand firsthand the damage caused by indoctrinating kids to believe that they can ever be ‘born in the wrong body.’”
The session comes after President Trump honored a mom during a joint session of Congress who sued her daughter’s middle school for trying to socially transition her daughter’s “gender” identity in secret. During the Biden administration and as states passed laws protecting “gender identity,” many similar stories have arisen of schools facilitating “gender” transitions without parental knowledge or consent.
An advocacy group called Parents Defending Education (PDE) notably found in 2023 that more than 1,000 school districts across the United States have policies openly stating that district personnel can or should keep students’ transgender status hidden from their parents. That figure includes 18,335 schools and 10,712,558 students.
The Biden administration radically embraced gender ideology and even promoted sex-mutilating drugs and procedures for minors. Documents from Biden’s Department of Education show how the administration encouraged schools to embrace and affirm gender ideology and preferred pronouns.
The top-down push for minors to obtain sex-mutilating drugs and surgeries under the misleading moniker “gender-affirming care” is also promulgated in academia and by large hospitals and major medical organizations.
At the root, these actors, along with the proliferation of gender ideology on social media, ultimately promote the false idea that human beings can be a different sex than what they were born as. Even further, the gender ideology complex claims these individuals should take sex-change drugs and get sex-change procedures to align their outward appearance with how they feel on the inside.
The side effects for sex change drugs and procedures can be severe, including irreversible mutilation and infertility. Some of these so-called treatments include double mastectomies (the removal of healthy breasts), female and male genital mutilation and removal, facial feminization and masculinization, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers that can cause chemical sterilization. Puberty blockers can also have long-term impacts on bone growth, bone density, and growth spurts, according to Mayo Clinic.
Transgender activists frequently claim that such sex-mutilating drugs and procedures for confused minors reduce suicides and improve mental health — dubious claims which increasingly appear untrue as more studies and data come to light.
Other research has indicated that a majority of children who are confused about their sex grow out of that feeling by the time they become adults. European countries that pushed sex change drugs and surgeries for minors before the United States did are notably reversing course over concerns about long-term impacts.
Many detransitioners who have undergone these sex change drugs and procedures as minors and later decided to reverse course have begun speaking out about the irreversible physical damage and mental torment they have experienced.
While the push toward transgenderism is heavily ideological, a report released in December 2020 found that the United States sex reassignment surgery market size was valued at $267 million in 2019 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 14.4 percent from 2020 to 2027.
Trump repeatedly vowed during his presidential campaign to reverse course on the Biden administration’s embrace of gender ideology, to protect women’s sports and spaces, and to protect children from mutilating sex-change drugs and procedures — all actions which he took within the first two weeks of his second term. Trump also signed an executive order declaring that it is the policy of the United States “to recognize two sexes, male and female.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
