Parents have been informed by doctors and nurses with RWJBarnabas that the health care system will no longer provide gender-affirming care for their children amid growing pressure from the Trump administration to end the practice, families told the New Jersey Monitor.
RWJBarnabas, one of the largest hospital and health care systems in New Jersey, insists this care is still available to minors who are existing patients. It opted to no longer accept new pediatric patients for hormone therapy or other gender-affirming care last fall.
But parents of trans youth who were existing RWJBarnabas patients said that in recent weeks they have received calls from various providers in the system who told them services for their child were now ending abruptly. Those who spoke with the New Jersey Monitor said they were provided no referrals or transition planning for their children, leaving them scrambling to find new treatment providers.
“You just can’t pull the plug on these kinds of things. There has to be some transition planning,” said Vidhi Goel, a Central Jersey mom with a trans son who was receiving hormone therapy in New Brunswick.
Goel said she is part of a text group of close to 100 parents who have received similar news.
“Physicians are supposed to do no harm and to curtail care in the middle of a treatment plan is not under the umbrella of ‘do no harm’,” she said.
RWJBarnabas spokesperson Carrie Cristello said Friday that the system’s policy has not changed and it remains committed to delivering “compassionate and comprehensive care” to all patients and their families. RWJBarnabas operates 12 hospitals statewide, multiple pediatric programs, and the Proud Center for LGBTQ+ patients, and the system includes nationally known gender-affirming surgeons.
“The federal government and congress continue to propose and impose restrictions on the provision of gender-affirming care for minors including proposing rules that will impact physicians, hospitals and healthcare systems. It is our goal to apprise our physicians and patients of anticipated changes in the law that, if enacted, could affect their current clinical care plans. RWJBarnabas Health continues to provide this care to our patients, pending further federal action,” Cristello said in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor.
Cristello did not address why some parents were told otherwise.
“As always, we continue to deliver the highest quality care and will continue to treat each patient with kindness, empathy, dignity and respect, as we remain in compliance with federal law,” she said in the statement.
Nationwide, families with trans children are finding that hospitals are limiting their access to certain types of care. In January, North Carolina’s largest providers halted gender-affirming care for minors, and two hospitals in California did so in early February. NYU Langone, in New York City, followed suit later last month.
Several major medical groups recently suggested that some gender-affirming care, like gender-related surgeries — which are extremely rare — should be delayed until patients are adults. In February the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, groups that have traditionally opposed efforts to restrict access to this care, backed limitations on certain procedures for minors. Other groups, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, have not changed their guidance and continue to support access to this care for all ages.
Jane Buchanan, whose 19-year-old son is trans, said the situation reminded her of what she and others went through last fall when Atlantic Health warned them it would end gender-affirming care for minors. Atlantic Health ended up continuing to provide care, Buchanan said, but by then her son was an adult.
“Parents were being told different things,” Buchanan told the New Jersey Monitor, adding that parents received unhelpful referrals, like to doctors in other states or those who didn’t take their insurance.
Buchanan also worried about the clinical impact on young patients.
“It’s extremely dangerous for the physical and mental health of these kids if this care is stopped abruptly,” she said.
Goel said her family was notified of a “change in care” through the online MyChart system used by RWJBarnabas and followed up with a phone call to her son’s doctor, who said he could no longer provide any gender-affirming care and declined to offer a referral to another provider.
“It was like, ‘care has been suspended, now you’re on your own’,” Goel said.
Goel said the notification was scary, but not necessarily a surprise to her or other parents given the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to dismantle gender-affirming care, particularly for minors. Her son has enough medication to last several months, she said, and they are making calls to find him another provider to continue treatment.
Goel said she feels lucky to have insurance coverage, a great support network of parents with trans kids, and to live in a “friendly” state that has supported trans youth.
“That makes it easier, so we don’t have to navigate this literally alone. That being said, it’s hard,” she said.
New Jersey is one of 21 states that sued the federal government after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr issued an order in December that said “sex-rejecting procedures,” including hormone therapy, are unsafe and ineffective for minors and therefore don’t meet professional care standards. The order said providers who continued to offer these services could be cut off from public funding programs like Medicaid and Medicare, essential revenue streams to most health systems.
On Thursday a federal judge in Oregon found Kennedy’s order to be unlawful, saying that he had overstepped his authority as a rule-maker and improperly tried to shape clinical standards of care, Politico reported.
Buchanan, who is part of the Trans Rights Coalition of New Jersey, said hospitals are failing trans kids if they give in to threats by the Trump administration.
“You have a duty to all patients on an equal basis,” she said.
Other efforts by the Trump administration to eliminate minors’ access to gender-affirming care continue nationwide. The federal government has threatened to eliminate research funding related to “gender ideology,” proposed a rule that would ban Medicaid from paying for gender-affirming care, and sent subpoenas to children’s hospitals that provide these services, according to a law firm that represented several of the hospitals and worked to block the requests, which are now under appeal.
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