Hundreds of people gathered in New York City on Monday to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order protecting minors from mutilating sex change drugs and surgeries.
The protest kicked off after The New York Times reported that NYU Langone Health allegedly canceled the appointments of two 12-year-olds who were supposed to receive puberty blocker implants, according to AFP. Other hospital systems around the country halted sex changes for minors under 19-years-old in response to Trump’s order.
The crowd packed into Manhattan’s St. Vartan park, near NYU Langone Health, and protesters carried signs that read “Protect trans futures,” “don’t capitulate to hate,” and “break the silence,” according to the report.
Hundreds of people protested in New York February 3 against US President Donald Trump’s executive order signed January 28, 2025, to restrict gender transition procedures for people under the age of 19, and reports of a local hospital group cancelling appointments for young people in response. (CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
At least one protester was detained by police.
NYU Langone Health has not made any public announcements about its policy, however, parents told The Times that the city’s leading hospital system has begun canceling appointments for children receiving sex change drugs.
NYU Langone Health declined to comment to AFP.
On Jan. 28, Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which states that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not 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 also calls for the head of each executive department or agency that provides research or education grants to medical institutions to “immediately take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”
“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,” the order reads. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
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 impact on bone growth, bone density, and growth spurts, according to Mayo Clinic.
Many people who have undergone these sex change drugs and procedures as minors and later decided to reverse course, called detransitioners, have begun speaking out about the irreversible physical damage and mental torment they have experienced.
Trump’s order is part of his effort to role back the Biden administration’s radical embrace of gender ideology and promotion of sex changes for minors. 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.
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.
READ MORE: Biden Administration Promotes Transgender Sex-Change Surgery, Puberty Blockers for Minors
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 are notably reversing course over concerns about long-term impacts.
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.
While the push toward transgenderism is heavily ideological, a report released in December 2020 found that the U.S. 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 his first two weeks of his second term. Many of his cabinet selections have a history of supporting the biological reality of two sexes, and with control of the House and Senate, Republicans have expressed plans to do the same.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.