Yet another major U.S. clinic offering transgender procedures has agreed to stop providing such treatments to minors and instead dedicate $2 million to reverse or mitigate the effects of those procedures.
Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ), confirmed it will not provide pediatric transgender procedures for two decades in its six medical centers. The settlement is part of an ongoing DOJ investigation into transgender procedures in health care, and Cleveland Clinic is the second major health system to comply. Cleveland Clinic has also agreed to pay $308,000 to resolve allegations of false billings. The false billings were submitted to obtain insurance coverage for pediatric transgender procedures.
According to the DOJ announcement, the clinic, regardless of whether a patient is able to pay or has insurance, must offer detransition services. A copy of the settlement shows that detransition services includes hormone balancing, reversal surgeries, reconstruction surgeries, fertility restoration, grief counseling and other psychological care.
The clinic is also required to publicize its detransition services on a dedicated website and must offer a dedicated phone number and care coordinator to the public.
Kurt Miceli, chief medical officer for Do No Harm, a medical group that is fighting against gender transitioning directed at youth, spoke with CBN News about the “momentous victory.”
“The evidence just simply isn’t there in terms of pediatric medical transition,” he said. “There’s very low evidence of any benefit, and there’s significant harm, significant risks. And that includes infertility, cardiovascular effects, the impacts to bone health, and certainly the surgeries.”
The announcement came less than a month after the DOJ confirmed that Texas Children’s Hospital—the nation’s largest pediatric hospital—had agreed to stop providing minors cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.
Brett Shumate, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Division, expressed his gratefulness for the clinics’ compliance.
“I am grateful that institutions like Cleveland Clinic and Texas Children’s have decided to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” said Shumate. “Cleveland Clinic’s commitment to providing millions of dollars towards care for detransitioners is emblematic of just that. I am grateful for this resolution with Cleveland Clinic, but our work is far from over, and our division will continue to work tirelessly to protect America’s children and hold accountable those that have preyed on vulnerable children, whether they be pharmaceutical companies or medical providers.”
Decision Magazine, founded by Billy Graham in 1960, works through its website and monthly magazine to communicate the Gospel, as well as inform and challenge readers about key cultural and Biblical issues. Decision is also a Contributing Publisher to Harbinger’s Daily.
Editor’s Desk: ‘The Greatest Medical Scandal In Generations’
For years, children have been in the crosshairs of an ideology so ferocious that its ultimate conclusion would leave young people mutilated, sterilized, and stripped of their God-given identity. This ideology was adopted by schools, the entertainment industry, progressive government leaders, and, worst of all, medical organizations—the very group whose oath is to “do no harm.”
Biological gender was stripped of its meaning, and children were fed a lie which insisted that gender was a “choice.” Parents were peddled another falsehood—that the drugs to start the process of gender bending were safe and reversible, and that failing to grant consent would undoubtedly result in their child’s suicide. “Would you rather have a living daughter, or a dead son?” parents were deceitfully asked.
Many parents saw through the tactic and sought to protect their child from going down this dark road. In their case, educators, school boards, and Democrat politicans worked tirelessly to suppress their rights as parents. Governments, apparently, knew what was best for children—and opposition from parents was tantamount to “child abuse.”
But who was really perpetrating child abuse? Recent developments, unsurprisingly, reveal that it was those advocating gender ideology, not those opposing it.
Immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration began shining a spotlight on the abusive nature of gender ideology, vowing to protect America’s children. In January of 2025, President Trump signed an executive order stating that the federal government will no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
The order further stated, “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
One by one, hospitals and health systems backed out of supplying the dangerous drugs and procedures.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a report in May of 2025, warning that gender-transition treatments on minors do “irreversible” damage, with consequences including “infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. further highlighted the “lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people,” adding, “That is not medicine—it’s malpractice.”
Then came a precedent-setting malpractice case, which sent chills down the spines of “gender affirming” medical organizations across the nation. On January 30th, Fox Varian won a landmark victory, being awarded by New York’s Supreme Court $2 million in damages for a gender transition that took place when she was 16, which left her “disfigured for life.”
In the days that followed, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons publicly began to reverse course on their previous recommendation of gender procedures for minors.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, however, was unwilling to applaud the medical groups, underscoring that their supposed “change of heart” was not born of compassion for children but of fear of accountability.
“Why the change now?” he questioned, pointing to their forceful efforts in the past to block laws protecting children. Perkins views it as unlikely that the change came from “research showing not only a lack of benefit, but demonstrable harm.” Instead, he highlighted Varian’s malpractice case.
“Suddenly, the cost of playing make-believe became real,” Perkins asserted. “It appears the prospect of accountability — not compassion — finally prompted the AMA’s concession. And if trial lawyers are now entering the conversation, perhaps the medical establishment has discovered what parents and lawmakers already knew: children deserve protection, not experimentation.”
After cruelly mutilating countless children, accountability is something that medical associations should rightfully fear—not only from governing authorities and courtrooms, but primarily from the ultimate Judge. God lovingly designed each of our bodies in His image, knowing each of our identities before the foundation of the world. Medical organizations, educators, influencers, and politicians targeted the most vulnerable among us and sought to tear away that God-given identity, carving them into symbols of rebellion.
Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom has called it “the greatest medical scandal in generations.”
What has taken place against children is nothing short of abuse. As President Trump’s executive order aptly stated, “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
