Colorado Supreme Court orders ‘gender transitions’ to resume at children’s hospital

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring federal healthcare dollars to any medical institution involved in transitioning minors. But according to a Daily Caller report that March, CHC was one of more than thirty hospitals defying the order.

This past January, CHC finally suspended all such treatments following a review by the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) finding so-called “gender-affirming care” to be “neither safe nor effective,” prompting lawsuits from LGBT activists and like-minded state attorneys general.

But on Monday, Colorado’s highest court ruled in favor of four families of “transgender” children, finding it was “discriminatory” to deny cross-sex hormones for transition purposes while continuing to offer them for unrelated medical conditions.

Writing for the majority, Justice William Hood III argued that a “strict numerical comparison of affected individuals isn’t appropriate when the individuals seeking injunctive relief are part of a protected class and seeking an injunction because of discrimination based on that protected class. Were it otherwise, minority groups would always lose. But that is not the law.”

“Therefore, given all of the contingencies in play and the various opportunities CHC has to avoid exclusion, we conclude that the actual immediate and irreparable harm to petitioners outweighs the speculative harm CHC may face if the federal government further acts against it,” he concluded.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Brian Boatright noted that the “decision was made only after CHC was threatened with exclusion from federal health care programs, which again, would halt all federal reimbursements and threaten the hospital’s license, accreditation, and participation in commercial insurance plans. It was a decision driven by the direct threat to the viability of the entire hospital.”

“CHC has made it very clear that its decision to stop the provision of medical gender-affirming care to minors does not come from a place of animus, disdain, or disapproval of transgender individuals seeking these kinds of services. In fact, the very opposite is true,” he added.

Exactly when and if cross-sex hormone transitions will resume remains to be seen; CHC said it was still reviewing the ruling.

A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of [so-called] gender care for children,” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through gender transitions had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”

Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”