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Denouncing the Trump Administration’s Attack on Gender Affirming Care for Youth.
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WHEREAS, transgender, non-binary, and Two Spirit youth and adults are valued and celebrated residents of the City of Saint Paul, and
WHEREAS, the Trump administration is engaged in a campaign of undermining the rights of transgender, non-binary, and Two Spirit individuals; including targeting medical care providers who offer legal, appropriate, and protected services in the state of Minnesota, and
WHEREAS, Trump signed an executive order on January 28, 2025, directing Health and Human Services to ban hospitals from performing gender affirming care and has engaged in numerous steps to end this care nationwide through unilateral authority and to withhold federal funding in an attempt to end safe, legal, and appropriate care, and
WHEREAS, Attorney General Keith Ellison, along with 18 states and Washington DC sued HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his declaration falsely claiming gender affirming care as unsafe and ineffective and threatening critical federal funding, and
WHEREAS, Children’s Minnesota is a prominent provider of essential health care services for youth, including gender affirming care, in Minnesota, and has announced it will pause prescribing puberty-suppressing medications and pubertal hormones- which included a notice sharing suicide hotline resources to the children and families currently receiving care, and
WHEREAS, Children’s Minnesota will temporarily pause providing prescribed medications to youth on February 27, 2026, due to the threat of the administration including the pursuit investigations of providers that specifically named Children’s, threats of cuts to Medicaid funding, and the ongoing reality of targeted harassment and threats towards medical providers from individual actors, and
WHEREAS, Minnesota established itself as a trans refuge state in 2023, and with that made a promise that Minnesota will protect families, patients, and providers pursuing essential health care in this state, and these actions are already having significant and widespread impacts on current patients and will limit the availability of gender affirming care for all Minnesotans, and
WHEREAS, The attack from the federal government threatens health care providers’ and their ability to provide legal, appropriate, medically-necessary, and life-saving health care in partnership with families, and
WHEREAS, Gender affirming care takes many forms, is evidence-based, and supported by peer-reviewed science and the lived experiences of trans and gender expansive people, and where other youth receive identical treatments for hormone care for precocious puberties, thyroid issues, family planning, and other conditions without barrier, and
WHEREAS, gender-affirming health care has been proven to be evidence-based, medically necessary, and lifesaving by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and many more institutions, and
WHEREAS, actions to limit access to care, legal recognition, and civil protections are part of a systemic and colonial eradication of transgender, non-binary, and Two Spirit youth and adults from public life, and
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the Saint Paul City Council denounces the attack on gender affirming care for youth and celebrates and supports the right of all our residents to access the health care they need and make these personal choices for themselves and their families free from political interference.